Good Morning!Welcome to issue number 111 of Last Week in AWS.Last week I was at KubeCon EU in Barcelona. I got to chat on live video with a bunch of folks, including AWS’s own Abby Fuller. This week is more sedate, but I’ll be at the NYC and Public Sector AWS summits, as well as re:Inforce. It’s going to be a travel-heavy summer…KubernetesTheEasyWay.com is a site I spun up last week just to taunt people at KubeCon. I stand by it.Lastly, I’m doing a Reddit AMA tomorrow at 11am Pacific; let’s chat! AWS billing, snark, the newsletter, the podcast; if you’ve got questions, I’ve got answers! 
 
 This week’s issue is sponsored in part by NetApp. Yes, NetApp! Not everyone’s environment is a born-in-the-cloud startup that sprang fully formed into the world a year ago. Some of us have on-premises data centers, which give rise to hybrid cloud environments. How do you monitor those? Consider NetApp’s Cloud Insights to grant insight into all of your infrastructure—not just the parts that live in a public cloud somewhere. Thanks to NetApp for their support of this newsletter. Learn More 
    From the Community 
I wrote an article on why right sizing your instances is nonsense.I was quickly countered with a response post as to why right sizing your instances is not nonsense. Excellent!A guide to using spot instances as Kubernetes worker nodes.Registration has opened for Amazon re:Invent 2019, which is only six short months away. I’ll be there; will you?Combining AWS and a Raspberry Pi to map nearby aircraft sounds like a fun rainy afternoon project.This week’s Public ElasticSearch Trophy, or PEST, goes to Game Golf, in this article with a truly obnoxious number of golf puns. I love it.If you’re going to be at the Chicago AWS summit, check out CloudForecast’s list of things to do, eat and see. They’re local; I’d trust their recommendations over most.Apparently AWS is one of the factors behind Cary’s decision to sell themselves to HPE.  
 
 This week’s issue is sponsored in part by DigitalOcean. With flat pricing across all global regions for compute, object storage, and databases – plus a free managed Kubernetes service – DigitalOcean makes it easy to scale up your infrastructure without guessing what your cloud bill will be every month. Plus their documentation and tutorials are some of the best in the industry, so there’s no need to go to cloud school to use their services. Thanks again to DigitalOcean for their ongoing support. Learn More 
    Jobs 
If you’ve got an interesting job for this newsletter’s emminently employable subscribers, get in touch!Don’t you know who I am?! If you do, you should consider talking with the folks on the AWS Identity team, as they could use the help. Unlike several AWS service teams I could name, Identity is well named–it’s very clear what they do. IAM, Cognito, Organizations, Directory Services… their work controls who can access what, when. Their impact is huge, their scale incredible, their customers “everyone.” Go chat with AWS Identity if you’re looking for a meaningful role on an important team.  
 
 This week’s issue is sponsored in part by GitPrime. 20 Patterns to Watch for in Engineering Teams. GitPrime’s new book draws together some of the most common software team dynamics, observed in working with hundreds of enterprise engineering organizations. Actionable insights to help you debut your development process with data. Get Your CopyLearn More 
    Choice Cuts 
Amazon Connect Decreases US Telephony Pricing by 26% in the US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon) regions – True story, “Telephony” was a character from Greek Mythology, who assisted “Kubernetes” in his never-ending quest to spend more money on cloud services.Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is now SOC 1, 2, and 3 compliant – Yet it’s not fully compatible with MongoDB because it doesn’t recklessly lose your production data. Fight me.Amazon DynamoDB adaptive capacity is now instant – This is such a transformative change that I don’t know how they could top it; this might be a database feature release that has no sequel.Amazon Elasticsearch Service Is Now SOC Compliant – Finding a matching pair of socks in the morning is an elastic search, but I didn’t go and write a blog post about–oh, they’re talking about something else.Announcing General Availability of AWS Ground Station – Ground Station is one of my favorite services to tell people about, if for no other reason than the look of “I think you’re messing with me but I don’t want to call you out on it in case you’re not” look of consternation on their faces.AWS Backup Now Supports AWS CloudFormation – “Who in the world would want to automate their backups” was apparently AWS Backup’s position at launch. I’m glad to see that cooler, smarter heads have prevailed. Eventually.AWS Budgets now Supports Variable Budget Targets for Monthly and Quarterly Cost and Usage Budgets – Humor finance’s ridiculous models with AWS Budgets.AWS Marketplace enables long term contracts for AMI products – “We’ll offer you long-term contracts!””Will you pronounce AMI properly?””…hrnnnggnnn…. we’ll get back to you.”AWS RoboMaker now supports over-the-air deployment job cancellation – Missiles. You’ve built surface-to-air intercept missiles.Introducing Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights for Amazon EKS and Kubernetes – Now in Preview – While a fascinating new service, I can’t help but feel that whoever named “Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights for Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS) and Kubernetes” gets paid by the syllable.CloudWatch Logs adds support for percentiles in metric filters – This is likely to be 28% more useful than 11% of you expect.You can now encrypt new EBS volumes in your account in a region with a single setting – Press button, receive all new EBS volumes encrypted by default. Next they’ll make this the default setting and eke another “feature release” out of it for their end of year stats…Automated Refactoring of a New York Times Mainframe to AWS with Modern Systems | AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog – Any time there’s a mainframe announcement, I eagerly scan the article to see if they’ve released an AWS/400. Every time, I’m disappointed.New – Updated Pay-Per-Use Pricing Model for AWS Config Rules | AWS News Blog – A better pricing model is awesome! Waiting until August 1 for it to take effect is strange, coming as the announcement does in May…Updates to Amazon EKS Version Lifecycle – Amazon formalizes a deprecation policy around Kubernetes. This is notable just for its novelty; they hate turning things off historically.Join us at AWS re:Inforce for the Builders Fair! | AWS Security Blog – re:Inforce is a month away; their builder’s fair is looking interesting. I’ll see some of you in Boston…  
 
    Tools 
A community repository of secure AWS configuration items available for your use. This is super handy!A per-region colorizing browser extension. Never make the wrong move in the wrong region again!Want Amazon Connect support in CloudFormation? Former podcast guest and current code terrorist Ian McKay has you covered. This glorious tooldoes what it must the only way it can–by running headless Chrome in a Lambda function to configure Connect properly. This is almost as good as his console-to-CloudFormation tooling; if it doesn’t embarrass AWS, it really should.  
 
 … and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS
Newsletter Footer

Sign up for Last Week in AWS

Stay up to date on the latest AWS news, opinions, and tools, all lovingly sprinkled with a bit of snark.

"*" indicates required fields

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.
Sponsor Icon Footer

Sponsor a Newsletter Issue

Reach over 30,000 discerning engineers, managers, and enthusiasts who actually care about the state of Amazon’s cloud ecosystems.