Good Morning!
A short week this week due to Labor Day. A bit closer to home, Sunday marked my twelfth wedding anniversary; I still don’t know why Bethany puts up with me and at this point I’m far too scared to ask. If you see her around, be sure to thank her for me. ❤️
From the Community
Observability Leader Honeycomb Releases O’Reilly Book on Observability
Honeycomb helps you sift through billions of events to see your application’s hidden problems so you can quickly debug before users notice. Get your FREE copy of our new O’Reilly book and register for our Authors’ Cut Series to discuss key concepts
AWS VP, Distinguished Engineer, and S-Team member James Hamilton relates a Short History of AWS Silicon Innovation.
I love the fact that my description of "your Amazon and AWS accounts are tied to the same email address" as The Underpants Problem has caught on.
This article that reinforces my point that cloud UX probably matters more than you give it credit for really resonated with me.
The Economist has an article talking about how the cloud computing companies are desperately trying to move up the stack to protect their margins (paywall?).
My post about How Google Cloud and AWS Approach Customer Carbon Emissions definitely got it right. Unfortunately.
The Information reports via paywalled article that AWS might be prepping some kind of bastar–sorry, bastion cloud service for advertisers.
Jobs
DevCycle is the solution for product engineering teams that want to deploy code faster, reduce release complexity, and maximize impact. With a feature management suite like DevCycle in place, any bugs that make it into production can be resolved quickly and easily. DevCycle is hiring feature flag developers to help fix software innovation and support modern engineering teams that are shifting to continuous deployment. DevCycle can shorten release timelines from 1-2 months to deploying code to production multiple times per day.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: How Google Cloud and AWS Approach Customer Carbon Emissions
Last Week In AWS: The Root Beer Conference
Last Week In AWS: The Spiritual Alignment of Cloud Economics
Screaming in the Cloud: The New Cloud War with Martin Casado
Screaming in the Cloud: Third Wave Security with Alex Marshall of Twingate
Choice Cuts
Push your code when it’s ready, launch it when you are ready, and most importantly: log off you’re ready and not worry about your coworkers calling you at 3AM and screaming you the songs of their people, specifically "Rage in D Minor." Take control of your launches with AWS AppConfig Feature Flags, and stop causing problems for other people on purpose.
A new sign-in experience is now generally available for Amazon QuickSight – The old-sign in approach I take of "not using QuickSight" remains operational.
Announcing support for Crawler history in AWS Glue – Now the memory of that time you really screwed up writing a crawler can live on for future generations of screw-up.
Announcing VMware Cloud on AWS integration with Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP – A few people are really excited about this; the rest of us genuinely do not understand what the fuss is about. This would have been huge a decade ago; today it’s very much solving for a problem that’s been routed around in myriad ways.
Introducing AWS Application Discovery Service Agentless Collector, a new discovery tool for AWS Application Discovery Service – This is absolutely free to use, because the one thing that beats AWS’s desire to charge you for every API call is Amazon’s desire to hoover up information about exactly what you’re running on-prem.
AWS announces open-sourced credentials-fetcher to simplify Microsoft AD access from Linux containers – Nope; don’t like this. It threatens my usual answer to "how do we join this Linux thing to Active Directory," which is "you don’t."
Announcing Workload Consolidation for Karpenter – Bin Packing as an open source service.
Automate AWS Control Tower guardrail management through APIs – I’m getting mighty tired of managing Control Tower via clickops, so this is a welcome release.
Enterprise On-Ramp Support is now supported with AWS Outposts – Their "Enterprise Lite" support offering is now sufficient. So technically for an Outpost you need both an On-Ramp and a Loading Dock.
Estimate the cost for your architecture solution with AWS Pricing Calculator – Having used this for a comparison last week, I can report that it’s still finicky and annoying. It doesn’t really take into account the mindset of a person using this to solve an actual question. Put yourself in that position, try to get an answer out of this thing, and its shortcomings become obvious.
Now Open–AWS Region in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) – With this launch, AWS now spans 87 Availability Zones within 26.5 geographic Regions around the world. Wait, what’s half of a region? This one. At launch it’s missing a whole mess of key stuff, almost as if someone was rushing to get this launched before the end of August so they could get their bonus. v2 API Gateways, Graviton Lambdas, and AMIs that aren’t "Windows" or "an old version of Amazon Linux 2" were missing at launch day from my quick exploration. Gotta say, the customer experience on this one kinda sucked.
Deploying AWS Lambda functions using AWS Controllers for Kubernetes (ACK) – No, this isn’t The Way. What I’d do instead if I wanted to cross these streams and worked at AWS is to build in native support for running Lambda Functions as pods. It’s not ENTIRELY as ridiculous as it sounds…
Addressing IPv4 address exhaustion in Amazon EKS clusters using private NAT gateways – If your workload doesn’t support IPv6 you will absolutely pay through the bloody nose for it.
Amazon WorkSpaces Application Manager (Amazon WAM) is retiring – Holy crap, AWS is googling something! Sure, it’s a little used service that’s long been replaced by better options, but still it’s rare to see.
Find the most evaluated AWS Config rules using AWS CloudTrail Lake – Having just had to do something similar to this, I’m annoyed that they’re avoiding the real answer of "make it extremely obvious which rule or rules is driving the cost of Config sky high all of a sudden."
Scaling AI and Machine Learning Workloads with Ray on AWS – "Sorry, Ray; I know you’re new here but you just got the absolute crappiest work assignment as a human autoscaler."
Earn new badges by building your cloud storage knowledge – Ooh, fascinating. Here, I’ve made you your first badge!
Tools
If your company has built an application on AWS, chances are you’re using S3 as a datastore. But is that data protected from cyberattacks, leaks, and accidents? Protecting petabytes of data and billions of objects in S3 can seem like a daunting task, but one you need to prioritize. If you’re looking a solution that can set up data protection for your entire AWS estate in a matter of minutes, check out Clumio!
actionlint is a static checker for GitHub Actions workflow files. It’ll save you time and energy.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
