This week I was at Anthropic’s Claude conference, wherein they announced both "Claude 4 Sonnet" and "Claude Sonnet 4," so it’s now called "Claude 4 Sonnet 4" because I have no patience for this.
Next week I’ll be in San Diego for FinOps X. If you’re there, come by and say hello. It’s a great conference.
From the Community
Only a few folks will care, but they’re really gonna care: LetsEncrypt is ending TLS client auth next year, because of Google. That’s right, not content to merely deprecate their own stuff, they’re breaking things across the web via Chrome changes.
I was surprisingly happy last week, so I penned AWS Announces Some Service Deprecations: Great!
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: Transform Away, as AWS Reverses Course
Choice Cuts
Amazon Aurora reduces cross-Region Global Database Switchover time to typically under 30 seconds – "Typically," "usually," "most of the time," etc. are not phrases you want to see in your DR plan.
Amazon MSK adds support for Apache Kafka version 4.0 – Ooh. Pay attention, Kafka shops.
AWS Control Tower releases Enabled controls view for centralized visibility – AWS – Y’know, I’m gonna start talking about these situations more, because I think it casts AWS in a very favorable light. I talked to the Control Tower owner ("…how did you get into my office?") about my frustrations with the product, and this solves one of the biggest complaints I had. Thanks!
AWS Cost Anomaly Detection enables advanced alerting through AWS User Notifications – I want to be very clear: I’ve seen some cost anomalies that would justify the expense of waking up an AWS VP, corralling them onto a private jet, and flying them to your location to interrupt your conversation just to tell you about a runaway charge in progress.
AWS service changes – They’re killing 12 services and features–which are the same thing at AWS, defined only by the ambition of the product manager.
DynamoDB local is now accessible on AWS CloudShell – What the hell is this for, exactly? DynamoDB local exists for local development against a DynamoDB-alike before LocalStack existed; if you’re in an AWS environment with CloudShell I’ve got a great solution for you: it’s called DynamoDB.
Join Us at FinOps X 2025: Your Guide to All Things AWS – Ignore all of this and come talk to me there instead, because I’m not only amazing, I’m humble too.
Introducing the AWS Product Lifecycle page and AWS service availability updates – A first party AWS equivalent of the Google Graveyard. I like it!
Join AWS Cloud Infrastructure Day to learn cutting-edge innovations building global cloud infrastructure – Okay, I saw it this time. I usually only hear about these well after the fact.
How to secure your instances with multi-factor authentication – Don’t like the push for Google Authenticator here. It’s 2025; there are better options, many of which are even open source. I also kinda hate MFA for typical EC2 instances–it makes things annoying in some circumstances. I’ll accept it on a hardened bastion host, but I do wonder what the value here is over mandating keypair or certificate authentication?
Cost Optimization for Healthcare on AWS – There is nothing here that’s unique to Healthcare, except the headline. This is, contrary to what many may believe, excellent marketing. People need to believe that they’re the target audience for your message. More like this please.
CORS configuration through Amazon CloudFront – If I wrote a post with this title, it would be 40,000 words of incoherent screaming.
Introducing Strands Agents, an Open Source AI Agents SDK | AWS Open Source Blog – Not to be confused with AWS’s Agent Squad, which is functionally the same thing and also open source.
Andy Jassy’s leadership lesson he practices at work and at home – "How I put my wife on a PIP and lived to tell the tale" is a book that’s begging to be written, but I’m nowhere near brave enough to try it with my spouse…
Tools
Someone told me about ripgrep at Anthropic’s Claude conference last week, and I’m marveling.
There’ve been some updates to lights-off-aws. Yes, you still need an open source project to turn things off within AWS; they’re not Google.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
