Good Morning!
Welcome to issue 163 of Last Week in AWS. It’s Memorial Day here in the US, so the country is shut down even more than it has been for the past couple of months. The AWS release machine continues to churn, as does my snark engine.
From the Community
About 80% of software teams that do not yet practice observability plan to reach an advanced level within the next 2 years. We asked your peers to tell us how they’re doing.
Advanced observability teams are 3X more likely to work in an organization that understands the breadth and impact of their tech debt. A whopping 92% are confident they proactively notice and catch bugs after code is deployed to production.
Most teams have just begun their observability journey. See how you compare and let Honeycomb.io help you advance your practice. Sponsored
Not only am I cited in this article, but it shows how 8×8 is moving workloads off of AWS and onto Oracle Cloud. From a purely economic perspective? I’d probably tell them to do the same. There’s just no contest when it comes to the public price discrepancy.
“Wow, maybe Corey’s right when he refers to Kubernetes as overly complicated nonsense” isn’t what I expected to read when I clicked this link, but y’know what? I’ll take it.
An actual use case for Amazon Kendra–this is a better story than any of the formal official examples. Of course it’s written by an AWS employee; this use case would never make economic sense otherwise.
The joys of Serverless: how AWS Lambda team made my two year old talk completely irrelevant resonates. Now imagine you hadn’t been keeping up, and were unknowingly still doing all of those things. Many folks are!
An older post but new to me– AWS CLI with jq and Bash is well worth your time.
My favorite database Route 53 apparently took some downtime last week. Thoughts and prayers.
This article on 4 things we did to reduce our AWS bill is great, but the closing of “why didn’t we do all of these other things? Because Kubernetes is a cloud optimization trash fire” is just absolutely so spot on that it takes my breath away.
Jobs
If you’ve got an interesting job for this newsletter’s eminently employable subscribers, get in touch!
“At Stedi, they’re working in one of the biggest markets on the planet – EDI, the technological backbone of the physical product economy. They’re building a next-generation platform: a ubiquitous commercial trading network to automate the trillions of dollars in B2B transactions exchanged by nearly every company on Earth. If you’re interested in what they’re building and how they’re building it, they’d love to hear from you.
No one likes managing EC2 instances, so you might like managing the team that replaces them with containers. That’s right, the Fargate team is hiring three Software Development Managers. People-focused servant-leaders are encouraged to apply. Help bring about an end to the Serverless vs. Containers war that doesn’t need to be fought in the first place. One last point: every team at AWS has internal principles that embody their culture, but this team publishes theirs on GitHub. I wonder how they’d take pull requests?
Choice Cuts
Mistakes happen in the cloud. Just ask anyone who’s accidentally left expensive workloads running, put sensitive data in a public bucket, or agreed to deploy an Oracle product. The folks at cloudtamer.io believe that a well-governed cloud means never having to say you’re sorry–and not because Finance doesn’t know where to find you. cloudtamer.io unifies access and identity management, budget enforcement, and compliance automation into a single solution that works across both AWS and Azure. If your cloud ops team or developers apologized recently, check them out. If they refused to apologize, several notable tech companies are currently hiring. Sponsored
Amazon Chime SDK adds Data Messages for Real-time Signaling – Well this certainly buries the lede. “Out of band signaling” for the Chime SDK (the good part of Chime) is huge in terms of what it potentially unlocks as far as capabilities go for integrations with other things.
Amazon Chime SDK Meetings support up to 250 attendees – That’s right; with the SDK you can now trick up to 250 people into using Chime at the same time!
Amazon DynamoDB local adds support for empty values for non-key String and Binary attributes and 25-item transactions – The fact that this was released three days after the actual DynamoDB service supported it highlights my entire beef with locally mocking cloud services: you’re always developing against an imperfect copy. Stick with either using real cloud services, or reading this newsletter so I can mock cloud services for you.
Amazon DynamoDB now supports empty values for non-key String and Binary attributes in DynamoDB tables – Well this would have been super handy five years ago. Today? No, I’m not going out and removing all of my handling logic that got around this monstrosity.
Amazon Neptune refreshes the console to simplify database creation – This is a big win for Neptune; the old console looked more like Uranus.
Amazon Transcribe now supports vocabulary filtering for real-time transcription – Among other things, this lets you “automatically remove profane words from the transcription results for content moderation or generating family-friendly captions,” so you’re going to have some trouble using it for reInvent talks about the Snowball Edge.
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) now supports Bring Your Own IPv6 Addresses (BYOIPv6) – Well this one is highly relevant to some folks who won’t stop whining about IPv6. If you don’t know what this is about, excellent; move on and remain happy.
AWS Backup supports new options for customizing backup selections – Good, now you can set policies like “never back up RDS” because you are a dangerous fool who flirts with disaster so much that it thinks you’re about to propose.
AWS CloudFormation now supports blue/green deployments for Amazon ECS – “Implementing blue/green deployments via CloudFormation” sounds like a project you’d give to an intern right before you were severely reprimanded for violating your employer’s hazing policy.
AWS CodeBuild Test Reporting is now Generally Available – The ridiculous system that powers this newsletter is deployed via CodeBuild; I’m pleased that I can finally get information about when that build process fails. Which is often. Because my code is garbage.
AWS Global Accelerator is Now Available in Two Additional Regions – Maybe I’m asking too much, but it seems to me that “availability is region-by-region” and “the word ‘Global’ is in the name” shouldn’t coexist within the same product.
AWS Marketplace launches rapid data delivery for Sellers and Consulting Partners – A lost opportunity to offer a physical media option and win the headline award for “Introducing AWS SnowCannon!”
Easily backup and restore your SAP HANA database to and from Amazon S3 with AWS Backint Agent – I have no idea if this is a solution that got its own landing page, a quiet launch of a first-party service that’s branded with another company’s product, or something else altogether. Help?
Introducing the Amazon EKS Best Practices Guide for Security – Anyone who isn’t on board the Kubernetes hype train will read this document and realize that the ACTUAL best practices for security are to not use EKS and to pick ECS instead.
Introducing the Game Analytics Pipeline – When I see a post from AWS about “analytics pipeline,” I know even before I click that the architecture diagram is going to be hilariously complex. I wasn’t disappointed; this one features 26 nodes on the diagram.
Introducing Live Streaming on AWS with MediaStore – I have no idea whether this is trying to work with Twitch, replace Twitch, or just make me twitch.
Lumberyard Beta 1.24 now available – This thing has been in beta for over four years.
Now Query for AWS Availability Zones and Local Zones using AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store – Route 53 is my database, DynamoDB is my calculator, and now Systems Manager Parameter Store is my regional service availlability database except somehow that last one isn’t an egregious misuse but rather an actual feature.
Reducing the Cost of Managing Multiple AWS Accounts Using AWS Control Tower | AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog – …by spending 6 months of engineering time getting this stuff to work with your existing accounts and processes. I’ve been using Control Tower since it went GA. It’s better than what went before, but it’s nowhere near its final form yet.
Building a CI/CD pipeline for multi-region deployment with AWS CodePipeline | AWS DevOps Blog – This is great, now do one for a CI/CD toolset that customers use!
AWS Artifact service launches new user interface | AWS Security Blog – I’ll always highlight releases from AWS Artifact, just because people don’t know it exists. If you care about compliance, for god’s sake read about what Artifact does. It will save you MONTHS of pain.
Tools
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One of the best things about Bottlerocket is the name of its updater.
An idiomatic Python interface for DynamoDB. If you misread that as “idiotic Python interface” you’d instead be thinking it was my Route 53 bridge.
I was super excited until I realized that VPC Design Studio wasn’t in fact talking about a new Visual Studio Code plugin. It’s still nifty though.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
