Good Morning!
I leave this week for a vacation, so if you’re an AWS service team trying to sneak some nonsense past me, the next two weeks are the time. If I’m slow to respond, find someone more reliable with whom to correspond.
And somehow you now need explicit IAM permissions to… see the AWS console’s color. I can only imagine how much each RGB color costs individually.
From the Community
Another week, another console experience ruined in the name of progress.
Levi McCormick writes in about the nightmare of shrinking VPCs.
OVH’s counsel opines on just how hollow Microsoft’s sovereignty admission is is.
I make comments about appendable objects, and people take that ball and run with it.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: Aurora Spends 10 Years Perfecting the Art of “What the Hell?”
Choice Cuts
How Ancestry optimizes a 100-billion-row Iceberg table – If I worked there this title would be "How Corey optimized a 100-billion-row Iceberg table by deleting it, which is why he got fired and this post is now about disaster recovery."
Mastering Amazon Q Developer with Rules – AWS has graciously published a guide on how to "master" their AI coding assistant by teaching it rules. This is AWS-speak for having to meticulously explain to your $20 a month robot with a bad name that it shouldn’t suggest storing passwords in plaintext, or deploying directly to production. The fact that Amazon felt compelled to write an entire blog post about constraining their supposedly intelligent developer tool reads less like "mastering" and more like "desperately trying to prevent Q from suggesting architectural patterns that would make a first-year CS student weep."
Bob’s Used Books: Build a .NET Serverless Application on AWS – Part 2: Architecture – We’re back with part 2 in the saga of Bob’s Used Books, a fake company that exists for demonstration purposes because no real company would build a serverless .NET application except under duress.
How Amazon Finance built an AI assistant using Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Kendra to support analysts for data discovery and business insights – This may be the How, but the Why is “because AI was shoved down every team’s throat like feed into a foie gras goose, which is surely a sign of it being awesome.”
Building Your Open Source Commercial Strategy with AWS – Yeah, when companies talk "commercial strategy for open source" in the context of "AWS" they… aren’t coming at it from a collaboration angle. They’re scared to death of you people.
How to optimize Amazon RDS and Amazon Aurora database costs/performance with AWS Compute Optimizer – I maintain this should be “how Aurora works,” and I already found a minor bug in the feature (it’s getting fixed; instance type names aren’t reflected quite right), but I’ll take it.
Gracefully handle failed AWS Lambda events from Amazon DynamoDB Streams – My personal approach of handling failures is about as far from "graceful" as it’s possible to get, so don’t be me.
Announcing the AWS Billing and Cost Management MCP server – I’m old enough to remember when hallucinating about your AWS bill generally involved folks going to Burning Man.
AWS joins the DocumentDB project to build interoperable, open source document database technology – Good god. There’s an Amazon DocumentDB which is not the DocumentDB project this is talking about, because THAT’s something Microsoft launched after Amazon DocumentDB while Amazon Legal did… what, exactly? This is a naming mess.
Count Tokens API supported for Anthropic’s Claude models now in Amazon Bedrock – At AWS they’re serious about innovation. That’s why, instead of doing what everyone else is doing (letting you see your per-request costs in realtime), they do the bare minimum to let you build the functionality out your damn self, preferably using Lambda functions.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
