Good Morning!
Every once in a while I like to help specific people find new jobs via this newsletter. In this issue I’d like to suggest that someone, anyone, please hire away the AWS designer responsible for their latest "what’s new" redesign travesty so I don’t have to deal with their nonsense anymore. They also have once again broken historical links while they were at it, so please: if you have a job opening that involves threshing wheat or raising goats or anything that doesn’t involve user experience, please find them and offer them the job.
From the Community
Sometimes when I stumble across an interesting link I want to check into when I’m better situated to think about it, I toss it into the newsletter queue so I deal with it when it’s time to write this travesty of an email newsletter. So if you see me, please remind me to look into testing out this Salt Crusted New York Steak Recipe.
No matter how much I shoot off my mouth about their work, I take comfort in the fact that no Amazon employee will ever hate me as much as Atlassian hates its customers.
SemiAnalysis has an interesting dive into the AWS relationship with Anthropic, Trainium’s only apparent customer.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: Elemenental Innovation Isn’t, Resource Explorer Doesn’t
Choice Cuts
Enforcing organization-wide Amazon S3 bucket-tagging policies – This is great except for a) the part where it’s an AWS Solution instead of a native feature, and b) it silently updates a bucket to block object uploads, causing folks’ applications to break with remarkably little clue as to why. If you’re in central IT and debating deploying something like this, you’re about to discover what your colleagues think of your hamfisted approach to policy compliance.
ECS Exec is now available in the AWS Management Console – ECS Exec is also, in all likelihood, available on the open market as AWS folks at all levels are leaving the company in droves. It’s almost like treating people poorly has downstream effects on morale, which in turn impacts retention. Ah well, I’m sure AWS leadership knows best.
AWS Control Tower now supports Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) – This will be a terrible financial blow to the Managed NAT Gateway team’s margins if this becomes widely adopted, as egress-only IPv6 gateways are blessedly free.
Introducing AWS CDK Refactor (Preview) – This is a great feature, which doesn’t appear to be using GenAI; this increases my confidence that this’ll actually work instead of being a random crapshoot.
Accelerate serverless testing with LocalStack integration in VS Code IDE – My opinion on this feature can be summed up with a handy disclaimer: I’m an early angel investor in LocalStack, because I believe very strongly in what they’re building.
AWS WAF now includes free WAF Vended Logs based on request volume – If there’s one thing customers LOVE, it’s free things metered by their consumption of a different dimension. That’s like giving AWS employees free coffees based upon the number of vowels in their "What’s New" posts. I’m kidding, I’m kidding, everyone knows that Amazonians get exactly one free fancy coffee a day AND NO MORE BECAUSE THEY ARE FRUGAL.
AWS recognized as a Leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) with Amazon Connect – I do not understand why Amazon posts these things. I have customers using Connect, but until Amazon posted this I didn’t realize that both Genesys and NiCE are options that are apparently kicking the crap out of Connect. I’m serious! I’ve always said nice things about Connect to customers, but now I have two other options I can present to them without having to go scrounging for it.
Introducing universal installers for AWS CLI v2 on macOS – There has been an open GitHub issue upon which I have commented for at least three years. Thank you to whatever single part-time AWS engineer fixed this as their passion project when they got a spare half-day to work on it, because I’d long since given up on this.
Tools
it is a good day to annoy your coworkers in interesting ways. Still think RTO is a good idea?
I’ve found a bunch of useful one-shot tools at Simon Willison’s tools archive.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
