Infinidash: AWS’s New Observability Play Has Great Bones and a Terrible Bedside Manner

Corey: Hi, Jerry. Thanks for joining me. So you’re better known these days as AWSgeek. A few months ago you starting putting up these fascinating drawings about various AWS services. So, who are you, and how did you get started with this? Jerry: By day, I’m a Solutions Architect at Rackspace. As part of this […]

LastWeekinAWS.com exists [Editor’s note: It did exist this way at the time it was written. This is no longer true.] as a series of programmatically generated static pages that end up in an S3 bucket. (The generation process, while fascinating, is going to be the subject of a different blog post at some point and […]

I got an email last week from AWS telling me that since my Last Week in AWS account is now a year old, its qualification for the 12-month free tier is expiring. All good things must end, and I was expecting this. “If you want to estimate your monthly bill,” ends the email, “you can […]

Historically, one big item in AWS cost reports that wasn’t able to be assigned various costing tags has been EBS snapshots. The reasoning behind this was presumably tied to their differential nature– it’s presumably non-trivial to allocate thousands of very small amounts of data to a cost tag, nor was it a particularly high priority. […]

Once upon a time, Amazon offered four tiers of object storage: Standard S3 (this is S3 as commonly discussed) Infrequent Access S3 (costs less, but you pay to access it more frequently) Reduced Redundancy S3 (similar to standard S3, but offers 4 9’s of durability instead of Standard S3’s 11 9’s) Glacier (long term storage […]

Today Amazon announced Reserved Instance coverage reports in an effort to simultaneously help you control your costs while feeling bad about your infrastructure. At an implementation level this makes a lot of sense; define a percentage threshold for instance hours you want covered by reservations (a common number for initial baseline reservations is 70%), and […]

Yesterday evening Amazon announced a change to how reserved instances work. You can now modify your environment on the fly while still taking advantage of RIs. For example, you have an m4.xlarge reserved instance. You can now apply that reservation to four m4.medium instances instead– or vice versa. In the inverse (you have an m4.medium […]