Good Morning!
It’s RSA week; expect to hear more about security + AI this week.
From the Community
Apparently if you have an S3 bucket, you’re charged for even denied requests. AWS by way of Jeff Barr has committed to fixing this.
Andy Jassy’s annual shareholder letter is of course chock full of the usual drivel about AI that the company has been spouting for the past year.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: Workdocs, Abusive Non-Compete Agreements Both Get Googled
Screaming in the Cloud: AWS, Venture Capital, & Global Entrepreneurship with Nancy Wang
Screaming in the Cloud: Firewalls, Zombies, and Cloud Permissions Security with Sandy Bird
Choice Cuts
Amazon DynamoDB now supports an AWS FIS action to pause global table replication – The wizards at AWS have done it again! They’ve ingeniously added a "Pause" function to Amazon DynamoDB’s Global Table Replication–and charge you 10¢ a minute every time you press it.
Amazon Q launches subscription management with AWS IAM Identity Center integration – Yes, yes, Amazon Q went GA despite being nowhere near good enough–which Amazon PR and basically nobody else is very excited about. AWS PR can go on its annual team-building exercise to Mexico where they all drink the blood from the goats or whatever—for the rest of us, this is the interesting part. Identity Center is gaining the ability to manage subscriptions per user. This hints at something at AWS becoming aware of users as systemic things rather than completely new entities in different regions / accounts.
AWS CodeArtifact now supports RubyGems – I wanted AWS to give me a place to store my Ruby gems when I worked in a Ruby shop back in 2011. Thirteen years later I don’t work there anymore, but I bet someone in AWS support emailed that long-dead email address to tell me my wish was granted.
AWS Config simplifies usage analysis with Amazon CloudWatch metrics – "Starting today, the Amazon CloudWatch metrics for monitoring AWS Config data usage will display only billable usage." Thank you; that’s the only reason customers care. "Why am I using the cloud dynamically, as you sold me on doing, and finding a significant portion of my bill has become Config charges" is the only time people REALLY care what Config is doing under the hood.
Announcing the general availability of AWS Local Zones in Honolulu, Hawaii – Scott Piper rightly points out that it’s more than a little absurd for a "local zone" in Hawaii to have a parent region of us-west-2 in Oregon. I’d have expected them to buy a cruise ship or something…
Announcing the general availability of Amazon Q Business and Amazon Q Apps (Preview) – In a move that’s sure to have Microsoft reaching for the antacids and clutching their pearls, Amazon just launched their Q Business Apps for general availability. Brace yourselves for a slew of shouty partners telling you just how transformative taking your spreadsheets and shoving them into the AI cloud can truly be. This is not to be confused with Amazon Q Developer which is a separate thing, and is I think also separate from the Amazon Q annoying chatbot in the console that never goes away or answers a question correctly. It’s also not part of Amazon Q Supply Chain, Amazon Q for Connect, or Amazon Q for QuickSight. Someone in Seattle has gone insane and now only responds when you address them as Amazon’s Simple Q’ing Service.
AWS supports dynamically removing and adding auto assigned public IPv4 address – This is kinda mandatory, given that they now cost non-trivial amounts of money at scale.
Introducing file commit history in Amazon CodeCatalyst – "We built and launched a thing a couple years ago on top of git, and only now got around to letting it show you file history."
Amazon EC2 now protects your AMIs from accidental deregistration – This is like an EC2 instance’s Termination Protection: you must disable it before you can delete the thing, and hit the peak time of being the most useful to the most users roughly fifteen years ago.
Amazon EC2 simplifies visibility into your active AMIs – People have been asking for this for ages; what finally changed that allowed this to see the light of day? If you know, hit reply and tell me, because I’m desperately curious.
Amazon EFS increases maximum per-client throughput to 1.5 GiB/s – Ooh. This still wouldn’t help my old performance problem where "hitting the disk 1500 times every time I instantiate a new shell when my home directory lives on NFS can be kinda slow," but to be fair that’s very much a "me" problem because my .zshrc is ancient and not one the service can solve.
Amazon Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall now supports Domain Redirection – This is a hell of a lot easier than relying on undocumented behaviors in the RFCs to do the right thing when you CNAME one domain to another–and sure enough, the blog post on this feature makes that same observation.
Blockchain node deployment on AWS: A comprehensive guide – This is a stain on the previously good name of the AWS Database Blog. Haven’t they heard that everyone pivoted to hyping AI now? Don’t worry, it’s all still the same group of people: NVIDIA’s street team.
How to Send MMS Using Amazon Pinpoint – Okay, something’s going on this week. AMI protection changes, labeling of those AMIs, I don’t have to CNAME domains to one another anymore, RubyGems support in CodeArtifact, a Blockchain post: listen to me very closely please, Amazon–I have an important question for you. What year do you believe it currently is?
Flowpipe: A Cloud Scripting Engine for DevOps Workflows – This is just weird. It’s a GNU licensed project, but it requires a CLA to be agreed to that assigns all copyright to Turbot (a fine company, but still, no; I won’t be doing that). The post makes no mention of Turbot–but their Chief Revenue Officer is one of the co-authors, and AWS generally doesn’t do blog posts with third parties like this without there being a commercial arrangement in place somewhere–and never that I can recall on the Open Source blog. It’s damned strange.
JPMorgan Chase and AWS study the prospects for quantum speedups with near-term Rydberg atom arrays – JPMorgan Chase and AWS teamed up on this abomination of a blog post and it shows something fierce. It features: 12 different authors, a bibliography with multiple divergent formats for journal and article citation, and finishes with a disclaimer that this "is not intended as legal, tax, financial, investment, accounting or regulatory advice," and then a different disclaimer that despite 4 of the 12 authors being Amazon employees "the content and opinions in this blog are those of the third-party author and AWS is not responsible for the content or its accuracy." Still, despite being written in math, this blog post remains more clear to someone like me with an eighth grade education than a significant portion of AWS’s own documentation, so there’s that.
Technology that teaches empathy? How mpathic uses AI to help us listen to each other – The first draft of this headline at AWS replaced the second sentence with "What the hell is empathy?" It is, to be blunt, not their corporate strong suit.
AWS: Amazon engineer helps stop cyberattacks, inspires cat culture – AWS VP and Distinguished Engineer Tom Scholl has both a very hard job and also five cats. It’s very important to him that we know about the cats; it seems that even moreso than most people at that absurdly lofty role at Amazon, he’s remarkably self-effacing and doesn’t appear to care nearly as much whether we know about his professional work. And it is behind the scenes, don’t get me wrong. I get that most people don’t have a background in network peering, anti-abuse, and the other places where Tom’s spent his career, but even for those of us just who brush up against it every now and then, he’s a freaking legend. He’s been doing this a long time–which likely explains that despite many faster cabling options being available, he’s apparently stuck with… cat(s) 5.
Tools
Well that was fast; this handy script already handles deletion of unused AMIs using the above-mentioned feature that came out a day beforehand.
Scott Piper (that’s two references in one newsletter issue; good lord) points out this amazingly useful SCP that prevents long-term financial agreements. Yes please! In fact, how about making that a default for independent learner accounts so people don’t hurt themselves more than you want them to?
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
