Good Morning!
Happy Tuesday! Wow, it’s weird to send this out on a not-Monday.
I will be speaking in public for the first time in what feels like ages next week at Monitorama in Portland, Oregon. It will be livestreamed as well, for your amusement. If you’re in Fake Portland (I grew up in Maine, dammit) next week, Mike Julian and I will be hosting a drinkup on Wednesday evening; be sure to stop by and grab a drink on his dime. Details to come in next Monday’s issue…
Watch this space; Periodic sponsor of this newsletter and Duckbill Group reference client Honeycomb finds itself in the good part of the Gartner Magic Quadrant. I did a small Twitter thread about this; congratulations to them and I’m very entertained by the whole thing.
From the Community
Are you struggling to determine what analytics workloads can perform well in the data lake, and which ones should be pushed to the data warehouse for peak performance? According to Gartner, you’re not alone. But thankfully, a category of technologies that Gartner calls “analytics query accelerators” are here to help. get the free Gartner report, courtesy of ChaosSearch, today! Learn how analytics query accelerators provide SQL or SQL-like query support on a broad range of data sources to deliver BI dashboards, interactive query capabilities, and support for data modeling. Help your data lake deliver faster time to value – get the free Gartner report, courtesy of ChaosSearch, today!
AWS jokes aside, naming things is hard. propername is a collection of ways to avoid common name-related mistakes when building product or services. To be clear, I’m not talking about the service names themselves, but the humans who engage with those things.
This post about how the AWS Health Dashboard can’t be trusted resonates with me. I get why small outages don’t get reported, but when customers are down they expect to have their pain at least acknowledged. It’s a thorny problem with no great solution.
Failing to fix the AWS Surprise Bill problem leads to $100K nightmares and customers leaving for greener pastures.
Spacelift’s Adventures in AWS Lambda Land tells the tale of a migration success story.
It’s not overly cloudy in nature, but I encourage you to take a minute to read this interview with Dizzy Smith about Leading While Managing a Chronic Health Condition.
Maciej Radzikowski agrees with me; his guest post No, AWS, Aurora Serverless v2 Is Not Serverless is up on the Last Week in AWS blog.
Moderating user content at scale is a freaking nightmare. Amazon is learning this the hard way with respect to their acquisition of chat app Wickr.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: Cars 4, featuring “Pixar Tractor on AWS”
Last Week In AWS: Kubernetes Firewalln’t
Last Week In AWS: re:Invent Keynote 2026: Analysis
Screaming in the Cloud: Not Just a Dinosaur with Guillermo Ruiz
Screaming in the Cloud: Working Smarter with Oki Doki and Marie Poulin
Choice Cuts
Practical Guide to Incident Management – Every company needs a plan for when things go wrong. We’ve written these plans many times, and every time wished for a reference that reflects how companies actually work today. So here it is — our years of collective knowledge and experience distilled into a Practical Guide to Incident Management for your whole organisation. Enjoy!
Global Infrastructure Regions & AZs – AWS has an update to their global infrastructure page that shows what services get added to new regions, with a rough timeline. It’s great but doesn’t go far enough: take API Gateway. It’s supposedly a Day 1 service, but Osaka and Jakarta still don’t have HTTP API support there. Feature completeness is important–because you only discover that mid-project when it’s about to hurt you.
UI Improvements in AWS Budgets – Now that I have an ultrawide monitor (six weeks in and it’s already on the fritz!) I’m excited about changes that start taking advantage of the extra space.
Announcing support for cross-region search in Amazon OpenSearch Service – I dream of a world where I can search vast quantites of data that live across regions. I’d love a universe where global S3 buckets were a thing AWS handled for me that I didn’t have to think about. Sadly this doesn’t check most of those boxes, but it is admittedly a start.
A quick path to Amazon EKS single sign-on using AWS SSO – Oh thank god. I thought for a horrible moment that you’d want the containers to use SSO to spin up. If you only take one thing away from this issue, it should be that SSO is for humans, never automated systems!
A Political Agreement on DORA has been Reached: What it Means for the EU Financial Services Sector – Why do I have the sneaking suspicion that Dora the Explorer is about to find her overseas bank accounts problematic? "Estoy a punto de ser acusada! That means I’m about to be indicted!"
How Mantium achieves low-latency GPT-J inference with DeepSpeed on Amazon SageMaker – This is a huge marketing win for Mantium, because for the first time in their existence their company name isn’t the most confusing and awkward word in the headline.
Cockroach Labs’ 2022 Cloud Report – What can the knight from the end of Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade teach us about picking a public cloud provider? Two words: Choose wisely. Just think, depending on your workloads, opting for AWS might bring eternal scale, while going with Google Cloud might bring face-melting frustration. Thankfully Cockroach Labs’ 2022 Cloud Report is here to help take the guesswork out of your cloud considerations. The free resource offers the industry’s only truly unbiased look at how AWS, GCP, and Azure stack up across 56 instance types, 100+ configurations, and 3,000+ unique benchmarks. Download the free 70 page report now, then tuck it in your canvas satchel and swing into your next app adventure with cloud confidence.
Establishing RPO and RTO Targets for Cloud Applications – When talking about outages, RPO and RTO are important. Something that’s even more important and overlooked: figuring out in what circumstances you’ll activate your DR plan. You feel ridiculous when you start a 30 minute cutover and the service that went down comes back two minutes into the procedure.
Getting started with AWS Ground Station – I sure would like to, but my request for access is years old with no word as of yet.
Wings for Life World Run uses AWS to scale when it matters most – I like the architecture and the post, but I’d change the emphasis here. "Scaling up" is what everyone talks about. Talk to me instead about how once the traffic is gone how things scale either to zero or damned close. THAT is the interesting and valuable part that everyone glosses over.
How to secure an enterprise scale ACM Private CA hierarchy for automotive and manufacturing – I don’t build cars and I don’t manufacture anything that isn’t complete nonsense, but having a private CA and then not bothering to secure it is absolutely the kind of thing I’d want to avoid regardless.
Steps to start your AWS Certification journey – Step 1, is "pick a fight on Twitter." You’ll get some hilariously bad takes about certification there.
Tools
AutoCloud – Make DevOps suck less by getting your workloads to AWS in minutes instead of months using AutoCloud. Their platform automatically generates secure, production-ready Terraform code that is customized to your unique snowflake of a business. Once workloads are deployed, AutoCloud gives users full cloud security posture management (CSPM) capabilities along with drift detection, automatically generated architecture diagrams, BlastRadius™ security analysis for compromised resources, and a single internet-scale GraphQL API for all 1,000 of your AWS accounts. Make your weary CIO smile by aligning every cloud resource with your business today.
I like tiny tools that turn things off in development on the nights and weekends. Maybe you will too.
Now that CDK v1 has gone end of support, awscdk-v1-stack-finder helps you track down how many you’re running in your environment.
I am actively annoyed that I didn’t think to build a collection of useful utilities and toys that work over DNS.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
