Good Morning!
I’m in New York, a city you may have heard of, for the AWS New York Summit. If you’re in town, come hang out with me at 6PM tomorrow (Tuesday) night at Vol de Nuit and let me buy you a beer or soda pop or fizzy water or a "The Billing Surprise" cocktail (served in a broken glass, garnished with a mystery line item and a single, burning question: "Why is this $14,000?"). Tell your friends. Tell your boss. Tell the bartender it’s on my tab.
In other news, AWS launched Kiro (its Cursor competitor) about 90 minutes ago, and I’ll admit to being wrong about this one. I’ve been kicking the tires on it for the last week during its preview and given AWS’s track record with developer tooling, my expectations were… grim. While most AI code editors are just Claude in a trench coat with different context windows, Kiro does something genuinely novel: it brings structure to chaos, like a veritable adult in the room. Instead of requiring you to already know how to architect your prompts like some kind of AI whisperer, it walks you through a proper development process—problem definition, solution design, test planning—like a patient senior engineer who doesn’t judge you for still using print statements to debug. It’s AWS operational excellence without the cultural hazing, turning “I’ll know it when I see it” coding into something approaching actual engineering discipline. If you’ve ever stared at a blank prompt wondering how to explain your problem to an AI that thinks a race condition is something that causes the worst people in the world to start attacking DEI, Kiro might just be the adult supervision your code needs.
Yes, you can do this yourself with any of the AI assistants, but I’ve yet to see that actually play out in practice.
From the Community
This report of a Lambda silent crash is damning if true, specifically for the reported AWS response.
I couldn’t take the bad takes anymore: Figma’s $300k Daily AWS Bill Isn’t the Scandal You Think It Is.
My article The AWS Survival Guide for 2025: A Field Manual for the Brave and the Bankrupt apparently caught some folks off-guard; it’s not exactly what you’d expect from the title…
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: I’ll Bring the Snark, AWS Brings the Chaos, You Bring Yourself to the Bar
Screaming in the Cloud: Reliable Software by Default with Jeremy Edberg
Choice Cuts
AWS Direct Connect Layer 1 Explained: From Data Centers to Cloud Connectivity – This comes complete with charming diagrams that look like they were drawn by someone who just discovered PowerPoint’s shape tool collection, and then took a job as AWS’s head of graphic design. It’s fascinating how they manage to simultaneously oversimplify ("it’s just light bouncing through glass!") and overcomplicate ("here’s a detailed analysis of wavelength-division multiplexing") the process of getting your data center to talk to AWS without going through the internet’s series of tubes. The most hilarious part is how they present cross-connects and meet-me rooms as if they’re straightforward concepts, completely glossing over the reality where you’re actually paying someone $500 an hour to crawl through a raised floor while muttering obscenities because cable #47293 wasn’t actually labeled correctly, and your "dedicated" fiber line is sharing space with a bundle of cables that looks like it was organized by a caffeinated octopus.
Oracle Database@AWS announces general availability, expands networking capabilities – Well, well, well… after decades of Larry Ellison treating AWS like that one relative who posts MLM schemes on Facebook, we’ve reached the "if you can’t beat ’em, reluctantly join ’em while still trash-talking them at every Oracle OpenWorld" phase of cloud adoption. I’m particularly amused by how the announcement carefully tiptoes around the fact that this is essentially Oracle admitting that AWS’s gravity well has become so massive that even their crown jewels had to be dragged kicking and screaming into Andy Jassy’s cloud empire. The real question is whether Oracle’s licensing team got the memo that they’re supposed to be playing nice now, or if they’re still gleefully calculating core counts like a loan shark tallying up interest.
Amazon Bedrock introduces API keys for streamlined development – Now I’m not sure how to position Bedrock vs. calling Anthropic directly. Until now I’ve simply said "it’s the same price and the same results, it just depends upon whether or not you want the authentication flow to be twenty times harder."
Announcing AWS Builder Center – Another valiant attempt by AWS to build the developer community they’ve always dreamed of, this time with a dash more polish and presumably several dozen new acronyms. The Builder Center actually shows promise – like watching your awkward teenage cousin finally figure out how to talk to people at parties without bringing up their extensive knowledge of medieval siege weapons. I’ll give credit where it’s due: the team clearly put serious thought into making this more than just another corporate message board with Amazon branding slapped on top. That said, I’m setting a calendar reminder for 2026 to check whether this becomes yet another entry in the "AWS Historical Reenactment Society of Deprecated Community Platforms" or if it actually sticks around long enough to see meaningful adoption. Hope springs eternal, even in the cloud.
Amazon P6e-GB200 UltraServers now available for the highest GPU performance in EC2 – What would I do with a $781 an hour instance with 13TB of RAM? That’s easy: two Slacks at the same time.
Quantifying the Impact of Developer Experience: Amazon’s 15.9% Breakthrough – I could spin up ten thousand OpenSearch clusters at fabulous expense, and still not be able to find where Amazon got the audacity for this post. This is Amazon publishing a treatise on developer experience, while their own documentation remains a labyrinthine maze. Y’know, the place where search results from 2014 outrank current information, and half their services have names that sound like they were generated by a markov chain fed nothing but enterprise buzzwords? That Amazon? The article’s central thesis about Amazon’s internal 15.9% productivity improvement through better tooling is fascinating, but it’s a bit like Godzilla publishing a whitepaper on urban planning: sure, you’ve had a lot of experience with cities, but perhaps not in the way that’s most helpful to others. The most unintentionally hilarious part is how they present this as some revolutionary insight, as if thousands of developers haven’t been screaming into the void about the importance of good tooling while simultaneously fighting with the AWS CLI’s inconsistent output formats and trying to decipher CloudFormation errors that might as well be written in ancient Sumerian.
Establishing a European trust service provider for the AWS European Sovereign Cloud – Oh, how absolutely precious that AWS thinks wrapping their European Sovereign Cloud in a shiny new "European-owned" Trust Service Provider will somehow make the US government’s grabby hands disappear. Sure, Zscaler Germany GmbH will technically be the TSP, operating under EU law and oversight, but last time I checked, Zscaler’s parent headquarters was still in San Jose, California – you know, that well-known European city nestled in the heart of Silicon Valley. It’s like trying to claim your German Shepherd is a European purebred while it’s wearing a stars-and-stripes collar, stocking up on guns and Big Macs, and answering to "Uncle Sam." No matter how many layers of European sovereignty you wrap this in, at the end of the day, the US CLOUD Act still exists, and American parent companies still have to play ball with US authorities when they come knocking. But hey, at least the PowerPoint slides will look great with all those EU compliance checkboxes ticked!
Use K8sGPT and Amazon Bedrock for simplified Kubernetes cluster maintenance – I have done some experiments with using GenAI to troubleshoot Kubernetes issues. I have seen nothing before or since that burns through LLM tokens this quickly.
Evolve your Amazon DynamoDB table’s data model – What? I was historically told, at great length, to use DynamoDB only when you understood your query patterns SUPER well, otherwise I should move the hell on to something else.
Introducing: Guidance for a media lake on AWS – Ah yes, another "guidance" document from AWS about building a media lake, which is apparently different from a regular data lake because it costs even more money to store large video files due to… I dunno, solar flares. But hey, at least they included some lovely diagrams showing how all these services connect together, which will look great pinned to your wall next to the payment notices.
Tools
s3grep seems interesting to me. I’m going to keep an eye on it for sure; it’s super hard to search logs and unstructured content in Amazon S3 buckets.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
