Good Morning!
A grim horrible week in the US just went by, and as a result I find myself turning to what’s effectively become our national pasttime: escapism. Specifically, talking about cloud services, because at least I see a path to fix those problems.
In far lighter news, Broadcom is acquiring VMware. This amazing screed makes the compelling case that the old VMware is truly dead, and highlights the upcoming layoffs (a mathematical certainty), the shredding of the company into bits (inevitable) and the death of the VMware cultural ethos (it’s been sick for a while).
On the YouTube front: I spoke to Maciej Winnicki about his tool, Cloudash; I also went through the next steps you should take if you get an AWS free tier bill that’s unexpected.
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 your free copy of the new Gartner Market Guide Analytics Query Accelerators, courtesy of ChaosSearch. 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!
The end of an era; Adrian Cockroft (AWS VP / Amazon VP / Used To Work at Neflix®) is retiring..
In case Slack wasn’t chatty / annoying enough, now you can let Slack Notify You on Cloudwatch Errors With AWS Lambda.
Whenever Silvia Botros writes, you should read it, and Not My Job is no exception.
Everyone’s struggling with the Apple Silicon migration of basically every developer laptop in even halfway dynamic companies, and Terraform is no exception.
A Why I left Amazon experience report.
I hadn’t heard of Amazon’s Away Team Model before.
A deeper dive from James Hamilton into Graviton3.
I’m not unconvinced that "because we spend too much time on Hacker News" wasn’t the real reason Why We Moved from C++ to Rust.
Apparently a brief protest meant that for a shining moment the AWS Public Sector keynote was actually interesting.
Time Magazine lists Andy Jassy as one of the year’s 100 most influential people, loving profiled by Steve Ballmer.
Elastic and AWS are now besties, given that nobody likes Amazon Basics Elasticsearch.
FreeBSD is now on Graviton3.
I still maintain that AWS Has a Moral Responsibility To Fix the Free Tier.
Not strictly AWS, but Nozama is a privacy respecting analyzer for your Underpants Store purchase patterns.
I see an article titled 3 Pitfalls of AWS Step Functions and How You Can Avoid Them, and I just know that my remediation of "never using Step Functions because it’s incredibly over-complicated and a serious vendor lock-in problem" didn’t make the cut.
Amazon’s first clothing store opens its doors in Los Angeles and I’m calling it Amazon Pants!. Yes, the "!" is part of the brand, like Yahoo!’s was. Let’s get serious; I’ve seen how your execs dress on stage. You’ve got some work to do.
Jobs
The AWS Insights and Optimizations team is aggressively expanding! We need product managers to drive the future of cloud optimization capabilities. If you have a passion for helping cloud customers achieve optimal workload sizing, discount purchasing, resource management or implementing optimization programs, take a look at our open roles! Be warned, Corey will likely ping you with product feedback regularly!
AWS AppStream provides a fully managed Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) solution that enables end users to access applications and desktops from anywhere on any device while data remains secure. The Amazon AppStream developers solve some of the most interesting problems associated with providing secure, reliable, fast and highly scalable solutions. AppStream developers have the opportunity to work on a number of industry leading AWS services including EC2, S3, DynamoDB, Kinesis, Step Functions, Lambda and SWF. Amazon AppStream centrally manages non-persistent desktops and applications, and stream them to any user. We are looking for engineers who are motivated to take new challenges and work on a service that will be used by millions of customers and create meaningful impact to their functions and interactions.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: Amazon’s Original Risk Store
Last Week In AWS: An AWS Free Tier Bill Shock: Your Next Steps
Last Week In AWS: Security Model Citizen Development
Screaming in the Cloud: At the Head of Community Development with Wesley Faulkner
Screaming in the Cloud: Let Your Backups Help you Sleep with Simon Bennett
Screaming in the Cloud: On the Corner of Broadway and Tech with Carla Stickler
YouTube: An AWS Free Tier Bill Shock: Your Next Steps
YouTube: “Cloudash”ing onto Mac with Maciej Winnicki
Choice Cuts
Observability is critical for managing and improving complex business-critical systems. With observability, any software engineering team can gain a deeper understanding of system performance, so you can perform ongoing maintenance and ship the features your customers need. Preview Honeycomb’s upcoming O’Reilly book to understand the value of observable systems and how to build an observability-driven development practice.
Amazon CloudFront now provides TLS version and cipher suite in CloudFront-Viewer-TLS-header – Yeah, if I were charging AWS’s per-GB data transfer rates, I’d be stuffing more into every packet. Unfortunately for that conspiracy theory, this is for inbound requests apparently–which are free.
Amazon EC2 enables customers to protect instances from unintentional stop actions – A more customer focused EC2 would enable customers to protect instances from unintentional start actions.
New – Amazon EC2 C7g Instances, Powered by AWS Graviton3 Processors – I’ve been using one myself for months now. It’s snazzy, but it’s also not the transformative evolution that going from Intel to Graviton2 was. That’s to be expected, but AWS is treating it as if it’s the second coming of Christ or something.
New for AWS DataSync – Move Data Between AWS and Google Cloud Storage or AWS and Microsoft Azure Files – This might be one of the most impressive AWS features I’ve seen in a while. It acknowledges both the existence of other clouds as well as the fact that customers might want data to live there sometimes. Well done.
Synchronize your AWS Glue Studio Visual Jobs to different environments – "Ooh, this is handy, how do I do that?" "Okay, you’re gonna need Python 3.6 or later and the latest version of boto3 to start." This is definitely an AWS offering.
Use the AWS Toolkit for Azure DevOps to automate your deployments to AWS – AWS is jealous of Azure because of the horrible service name that is "Azure DevOps."
How NXP is Moving Chip Design to AWS – I can’t wait for AWS to announce Amazon Basics NXP Chips from Annapurna Labs at an upcoming re:Invent.
AWS offerings available to support your cloud migration – "Why are there six different AWS offerings mentioned in this blog post?" Because it’s an excellent introduction to cloud, Harold.
Latency-based routing leveraging Amazon CloudFront for a multi-Region active-active architecture – I built something very much like this last week. More to come on that another time.
AWS launches first Defence Accelerator for startups – This is in the "Defense" section of the blog. It’s spelled the "Defence" Accelerator though because it’s in the UK, and AWS is nothing if not willing to pander shamelessly any time it smells a dollar.
AWS supports development of U.S. Army’s first enduring tactical cloud environment – Strategic clouds are of course a grimmer threat.
Ordering free COVID-19 test kits with the help of the cloud – AWS claims credit for the amazing effectiveness of the COVID-19 response. You can’t make this up.
Tools
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.
The EC2 Spot Interruptor is– HI I’M COREY! It’s a simple CLI tool that triggers– I WRITE A NEWSLETTER! Amazon EC2 Spot Interruption Notifications– YOU SHOULD TELL YOUR FRIENDS ABOUT IT! and Rebalance Recommendations.
libaws is a wrapper around AWS for humans. I like its simplicity quite a bit.
I hadn’t heard of fd (a replacement for find) before. I find myself on too many weird systems even now to trust custom tools to always be there, but most people aren’t me.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
