Good Morning!
Man, imagine being Andy Jassy. You’re (by all accounts) a decent, stand-up guy. One day you’re the CEO of AWS, a business unit whose customers all by-and-large love what you’re selling them. And then you get promoted into a job where you’re running a company where you have to parcel out little pieces of your soul, bit by bit as you try to solve for constraints unknown to virtually everyone, leaving you twisting in the wind. Last week’s was "we’re turning off our unprofitable philanthropic program" and you’re now giving no money to a bunch of small nonprofits to whom it was material. And drip… drip… drip… you deny it, mostly to yourself, but in your darker moments you’d swear you can feel key parts of your humanity eking away to nothing. "For what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?"
From the Community
So… how do you truly solve the challenges of today’s ever-growing big data analytics needs? To help answer that, I, Corey Quinn, am incredibly excited to share ChaosSearch’s newly-launched video series focused on the seven deadly (ie. costly & complex) challenges of big data analytics! Check it out: The Data Journey – 7 Challenges of Big Data Analytics. During this 7 episode series, ChaosSearch’s CTO & Founder, Thomas Hazel, delves deep into the technical challenges (and solutions) around: Data Pipelining, Prep, Destination, Governance, Platforms, Analytics and Lifecycle! Each episode is about 10 minutes long, easy to consume, and designed specifically to help you supercharge your insights from your data! And now, without further ado, grab some popcorn, tell them that the esteemed Corey Quinn sent you, and enjoy the show!
A community-run survey is open at Answers for AWS; please fill it out. I’m eager to hear the results of this one.
This analysis of AWS Aurora Global Clusters Explained is glorious in that it shines a light on just how awful they can be in some circumstances. If you work on this product at AWS and this perspective upsets you, don’t worry; just like when you named your "Serverless" offering, you can pretend that these words don’t mean anything either.
In the intro of this newsletter there was a quote that I found out comes from the Bible (as a Jew, I’ve never been much for the New Testament). Since balance is a key part of all things, let’s offset that with this yaml document from hell that will ensure that you lose any and all faith in a just and loving god.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: Four Announcements of the Boring Apocalypse
Last Week In AWS: Wait Did You Say Root API Keys?
Screaming in the Cloud: Becoming a Rural Remote Worker with Chris Vermilion
Screaming in the Cloud: Defining and Nurturing a Self-Supporting Community with Alyss Noland
Choice Cuts
The LAN was a magical place to learn about computers. You could do things that would be unthinkable on today’s internet: permission-less file sharing, experimental servers with no security, shared software where one machine could easily bring down the network, and surly network admins who somehow didn’t get ejected from companies due to their toxic attitudes. Can we have a 90’s LAN-like experience again, along with the best parts of the 21st-century internet? Tailscale thinks we can, and I’m inclined to agree with them. Try now – it’s free forever for personal use with up to 20 devices. I’ve been using it for over a year personally, and am moderately annoyed that they haven’t attempted to charge me for what’s become an essential-to-my-workflow service.
Amazon CloudFront now supports the request header order and header count headers – "Wait, there are headers that themselves contain the word ‘header?’ WE MUST SUPPORT THIS IMMEDIATELY." — Someone at AWS who’s responsible for naming services.
Amazon ECS announces the new default console experience – It’s apparently called "Kubernetes."
Amazon EFS Supports 1,000 Access Points per File System – I really hope this is referred to internally as "1000 Access Points of Light," a play on a phrase from George H.W. Bush’s presidential campaign in 1988. EFS is of course AWS’s implementation of NFS, a filesharing protocol that also comes from the 1980s, where it should have stayed.
AWS Nitro Enclaves announces support for multiple enclaves – AWS’s confidential computing offering becomes confidentialer.
Can you remove AWS security bottlenecks for just a buck? Shhh… it’s a secret. But now you can. For a limited time, shift your cybersecurity up and secure up to 1,000 assets for just $1. Get in on the action with the Uptycs Secret Dollar Menu: UptycsSecretMenu.com
AWS Network Optimization Tips – I find myself liking this. It checks all the boxes, highlights some stuff I wasn’t aware of, and doesn’t promote outright lunacy. More like this please.
Introducing multi-function packager, allowing more than one function per event trigger on Amazon CloudFront – If functions are good, more of them must be better, right?
Winning the Cat-and-Mouse Race: Staying One Step Ahead of Streaming Free-Riders with GeoGuard and AWS – It wasn’t even a year ago that AWS published a GeoGuard blog post that they took down that basically called their customers filthy thieves. And now they’re back again with barely softened language that effectively comes across as "if you’re trying to save money by originating from a different country, you’re a dishonest piece of shit." I cannot for the life of me understand how this passed whatever reviews AWS clearly has before being published, given that it violates more Leadership Principles than not. The cherry on top is that this blog post is tagged on the AWS Partner Network blog as "thought leadership." No, James Clark, General Manager of Media & Entertainment at GeoComply; you’re not a "thought leader;" you’re just a contemptuous dick.
Tools
Does tackling DevX sound daunting? OpsLevel helps you build an internal developer portal in minutes, not months. Instantly create your software catalog, incorporate tech docs, and give your team self-serve access to everything they need to level up their service ownership game.
I’ve been using Finch a fair bit lately as a drop-in replacement for Docker on Mac. My big issue has been fixed in a pending Pull Request; curious to know what others think. Somewhat surprisingly, this project came out of AWS itself.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
