Good Morning!
The annual community Answers for AWS survey is running; take a few minutes to fill it out. To my understanding, it’s not affiliated in any way with AWS themselves. I know, a survey that AWS didn’t run? They’re usually so good about carpet-bombing the universe with them…
And AWS missed its quarterly earnings estimate by all of $20 million since one of you apparently turned off a single Managed NAT Gateway.
From the Community
A fascinating post on moving away from CDK that touches on some of my problems with it historically. I do like it, but I also keep wishing there were something more agnostic / less persnickety.
There’s a fascinating deep dive into a breach where the actions of the attacker are laid out over months. It’s worth the read, and remember to kill AdministratorAccess IAM keys with prejudice.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: Armageddon! IPv6, and starting this week, blood
Screaming in the Cloud: Empowering Economic Growth Through Tech Innovations with Angie Jones
Screaming in the Cloud: Mastering Tech Transitions with Ceora Ford
Choice Cuts
Amazon EC2 added new price protection for attribute based instance selection – Another day, another confusing mess of just how Spot pricing works, and how to use it so you don’t either get financially hosed, or else have your instance fleets collapse out from underneath you and render your entire production job moot.
AWS announces a new Local Zone in Chicago, Illinois – AWS has launched a new Local Zone in Chicago, perfect for latency-sensitive applications that need some extra Deep Dish processing power. Now to add it to my AWS Network Map. Seriously, check it out; I think you’ll like it.
AWS Free Tier now includes 750 hours of free Public IPv4 addresses, as charges for Public IPv4 begin – Remember that we’re now all paying per IP address. This means that you can still have one free VM for twelve months that speaks IPv4, I suppose.
Optimize costs by automating AWS Compute Optimizer recommendations – This came out during re:Invent and is well worth looking at. Compute Optimizer is widely distrusted, because at launch it was wildly off-base. That’s been fixed, and it’s really something to witness these days.
A new and improved AWS CDK construct for Amazon DynamoDB tables – Is it new, or is it improved? Very hard for anything to be both now, isn’t it? That said, the v2 construct is pretty great if for no other reason than it automatically makes tables global so you don’t have to do a conversion later.
Announcing Generative AI CDK Constructs – AWS has released Generative AI CDK Constructs, because just naming it "Buzzword Bonanza" wasn’t cutting it. It’s pretty clear that bonuses are riding on including "Gen AI" in everything you work on. I kid, I kid; nobody seriously believes that anyone at the PIP factory gets paid a bonus for anything.
AWS Marketplace now available in the AWS Secret Region – I will never stop boggling every time AWS talks publicly about the Secret Region. "YOU ARE BAD AT KEEPING SECRETS!"
Building your machine learning skills from zero – I’m not even slightly kidding: I dipped my toes in the Machine Learning® world a while back and found an impressively great tool for it: Google Colab. Unlike SageMaker it never once slapped me with a surprise bill, and I’ve never found it to be predatory or try to lock me into Google’s ecosystem. That’s frankly better than anything I’ve seen from AWS in this space.
RHEL Pricing – Amazon Web Services – IBM Hat has in its infinite wisdom changed their pricing structure rather significantly for RHEL on AWS. This is a terrific time to evaluate whether you’re getting value for the RHEL premium in 2024–and whether you want to have to do the additional license math on top of the raw AWS cost. Dear reader, I assure you that I do not want to do that.
Incorrect RI / SP Purchase Warnings – A quiet feature release that I’ve been wanting for ages: now the console warns you if you’re about to make a bad RI / SP purchase–say, for too much money, or in the wrong region, or for instance types you’re not running.
Tools
Finch Container Development Tool: Now for Windows – I like Finch and was using it for a while–and then one day it exploded on my Mac and neither I nor the helpful folks in the CNCF Slack channel nor the gods of any pantheon can seem to get it working again. Remember, computers are our friends until one day we realize that the entire stack of cards is deeply, deeply cursed.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
