Welcome to issue number 102 of Last Week in AWS.
I’ll be at the AWS Summit in Santa Clara this week. If you’re around, let me know–I’d love to meet some of you, while assiduously avoiding others of you. Little birds tell me that there may be some service launches to look forward to, as well as an “AMI has Three Syllables” protest I can get in on…
This issue is sponsored in part by Site24x7, Zoho’s cloud services monitoring solution. This week they’re introducing Site24x7 CloudSpend, a cost analytics platform that gives you more visibility into your AWS spend without charging a terrifyingly high percentage of your bill. Free for small accounts, reasonably priced for larger ones. Give it a spin! My thanks to Site24x7 for sponsoring this newsletter.
Community Contributions
If you enjoyed watching me tear the RightScale State of the Cloud report to pieces, help make it harder for me to tear apart DORA’s Accelerate State of DevOps Report by providing useful data. This is the exact opposite of the RightScale version–it’s well researched, designed by professionals, and doesn’t say that 24% of respondents are using an AWS service that hasn’t been released yet.
A whitepaper commissioned by Canonical (a vendor who’s in a tough spot if the world goes all-in on single providers) demonstrates that financial services are embracing multi-cloud. I haven’t yet figured out who’s wrong here–the whitepaper, or the people responding to the survey. Either way, “multi-cloud for a single workload” is almost certainly a crap idea, with perhaps five exceptions.
NVIDIA T4 GPUs Coming to Amazon Web Services | NVIDIA Blog – Looking forward to incredibly expensive instances that are best used for either cryptocurrency scams or else incredibly complex AI/ML services that’s still struggling to articulate business value? I know I sure am!
A one-hour demo of building a scalable voting website that can withstand load without collapsing. Ahem.
Some benchmark results for Lambda’s new custom runtime for .NET Core
Perl-based Lambda functions sound like the worst thing in the world to me in 2019, but 2003 me would have loved them.
A fascinating tale of how to handle thousands of image uploads per second to S3.
A discussion of how to warm Lambda functions, ideally by the heat of your burning infrastructure.
Excellent sleuthing around how AWS achieves reasonable Windows EC2 instance boot times. I suspect the author is dead on the money.
Someone asked me what the best way to time CloudFront distribution updates was; I turned my answer into a tweet thread.
So much smart, so little savvy. If you’re looking to advance law enforcement usage of facial recognition tools, maybe use it to apprehend murderers instead of $12 shoplifters. It’d raise fewer questions about “has technology gone too far.”
In a great example of “why isn’t this a native offering,” this post talks about using custom email verification templates with AWS Cognito.
Last year a recruiting company called Jefferson Frank published a guide to AWS careers and salaries. They mentioned this newsletter in that guide. I was curious how that happened, so I spoke with Principal Consultant Kate Powers in Screaming in the Cloud Episode 52, AWS as a Career: Finding Clarity in the Ever-changing Job Market of the Cloud.
I like my snarky headlines, but The Register is in another league entirely: My AWS Lamba Custom Runtimes bring all the .NET Core to the yard, and they’re like… where is this headline going?
There are many good reasons to enable MFA for your AWS account, ranging from “protecting you if you log in from a compromised computer” to “your coworker steals your credentials and destroys your employer’s business in your name.”
Jobs
Would you like to work on my favorite database? Well, you can’t–the CSV standard has been solidified for ages and there’s no company behind it. Instead, consider working on Amazon DynamoDB. With 43 open roles in the US and Ireland, you can help finish what Werner and Swami started–or join the dark side and begin work to sabotage DynamoDB from the inside so that Secrets Manager can rise to take its rightful place in the universe! The choice is yours…
Truss is a distributed-first, software consultancy that cares about communication, inclusivity and modern software development practices. They push the envelope on building efficient technology that improves people’s lives. Currently, they are seeking stellar Infrastructure engineers to help them with commercial and government contracts.
Choice Cuts From the AWS Blog
This issue is sponsored in part by N2WS. Frustrated at how long your favorite website is taking to load, only to find out it’s because it’s been down for hours? Outages are a fact of life; there’s no getting away from them. It’s what clouds do–they break, even the big ones. You can make your next cloud breakage a little (or a lot!) less painful with N2WS’s AWS Protection Guide. Check it out, for 8 tips on protecting data on AWS. My thanks to N2WS for their continuing support.
Amazon ElastiCache for Redis 5.0.3 enhances I/O handling to boost performance – This feels a bit like “threading for Redis, tying together the patchwork quilt that is your infrastructure.” Trouble is, mainline Redis doesn’t support threading–so what’s going on under the hood, I wonder?
Amazon Rekognition Launches Enhanced Face Analysis – Rekognition is now reportedly better at identifying people beyond just “white men” and “other, whiter men.”
AWS Glue now supports resource tagging – It’s probably easier to tag all of the wolves in a given forest than it is to tag all of the AWS services we want to see tagged…
File Gateway Supports Amazon S3 Object Lock – Amazon Web Services – This is exciting for those who have WORM requirements in their regulated workloads, and dreadfully boring for the rest of us.
Introducing Amazon Chime Business Calling – This is exciting until you remember that if you’re trying to reach someone and you use Amazon Chime, you likely have no Business Calling them in the first place.
Introducing Amazon Chime Voice Connector – Announced at Enterprise Connect, this upset a whole mess of grumpy old men who work in telco who fear Amazon is going to drive them out of business and into the sea. Good! I remember the Olden Days of Ma Bell, you clowns.
Introducing Live Streaming with Automated Multi-Language Subtitling – It’s great that realtime subtitling is now a thing, but this sentence subtitled as “it grates that mealtime subtweeting is now exiting” so it’s still got a ways to go.
Setting permissions to enable accounts for upcoming AWS Regions | AWS Security Blog – Having to explicitly enable new regions is great news for security, and terrible news for bitcoin “enthusiasts” who try to mine cryptocurrency in someone else’s account.
Tools
This week’s issue is sponsored by DigitalOcean – the cloud platform that hits on simplicity and predictability. CRN recently chatted with their new Chief Customer Officer Jeff Giannetti, hailing from NetApp, which sheds light not only on his new role but also on just how big in scope their channel efforts are shaping up to be. From agencies looking to earn reseller margin to MSPs running hyper-scale workloads it sounds like this will be a major factor in their growth trajectory among alternative clouds. Thanks again to DigitalOcean for their ongoing support of Last Week in AWS.
A Kubernetes controller for managing API Gateways.
If you want to see how various FaaS providers stack up performance-wise, Serverless Benchmark is handy. That said, if your sole determining factor as to which FaaS solution you choose comes down to “performance on benchmarks,” you may wish to seek advice from someone less… simple-minded.
Hold on to your hats, something useful hit the Serverless Application Repository. It consumes Twilio messages and converts them to SNS messages instead.
…and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
