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Newsletter

Issue No.381

Amazon Basics Corey Quinn

07.29.2024
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Corey Quinn HeadshotAbout the Author

Corey is the Chief Cloud Economist at Duckbill, where he specializes in helping companies improve their AWS bills by making them smaller and less horrifying. He also hosts the "Screaming in the Cloud" and "AWS Morning Brief" podcasts; and curates "Last Week in AWS," a weekly newsletter summarizing the latest in AWS news, blogs, and tools, sprinkled with snark and thoughtful analysis in roughly equal measure.

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

Welcome to this week’s issue of Last Week in AWS, coming from me, Mike Julian, Corey’s ~wrangler~ cofounder at The Duckbill Group.

Corey’s out on vacation for the next couple months so I’ll be filling in!

From the Community

Amazon’s Exabyte-Scale Migration from Apache Spark to Ray on Amazon EC2 – What I love about this, aside from my general frustration with all-things-Spark, is just how detailed the writeup is. AWS and Amazon Retail are generally worlds apart, so this is more akin to AWS doing a case study of a customer–except it’s way more behind-the-scenes than I would have expected.

Reversing AWS IAM unique IDs – A prototype neat decoder ring for AWS unique IDs (is that what they’re actually called by AWS?)

Revealing the Inner Structure of AWS Session Tokens – This is really neat stuff: a security researcher Tal Be’ery has figured out how to decode STS tokens.

NO_WILDCARD: How I discovered the Organization ID of any AWS Account – Spoiler: it’s already been fixed by AWS. Cool read, though.

Amazon’s Graviton Has Evolved Into A Formidable CPU Contender: Graviton1 To Graviton4 Benchmarks Review – Phoronix – I do love the performance from Graviton, so I’m glad someone did this benchmarking of all the Graviton generations.

Podcasts

Last Week In AWS: I’m Gone Like QLDB

Screaming in the Cloud: Generating AI Laughs with Daniel Feldman

Screaming in the Cloud: Piledriving the GenAI Grift with Nikhil Suresh

Choice Cuts

Amazon VPC IPAM now supports BYOIP for IPs registered with any Internet Registry – I’m a little surprised this wasn’t already a feature, but hey, better late than never. I do find the idea of using your own IP blocks for AWS networks to be interesting, but in this day and age, strikes me as a sort of code smell for antiquated architecture.

AWS Cost Categories now supports “Billing Entity” dimension – Cost Categories is seemingly little-known amongst customers, as I rarely run across anyone using it. Which is sort of a shame, since it’s pretty neat and useful. This is a minor capability addition, but honestly, it’s really more of an excuse for me to talk about how underappreciated Cost Categories is.

Enhance database performance with Amazon RDS dedicated log volumes – This sounds pretty great. Nice work, RDS.

QLDB deprecation–more on the way? – Last week saw the announcement of QLDB being deprecated and this particular article was posted right before. Now, we’ve got three new articles in the AWS blog:

  • Transition from Amazon CloudSearch to Amazon OpenSearch Service
  • How to migrate your AWS CodeCommit repository to another Git provider
  • How to migrate from AWS Cloud9 to AWS IDE Toolkits or AWS Cloudshell.

Will we see a deprecation announcement for CloudSearch, CodeCommit, and Cloud9 this week? 🤔

… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.

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