Good Morning!
From the Community
Apparently Amazon Prime Video’s Microservices Move Doesn’t Lead to a Monolith after All, because apparently at Amazon "we’re willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time" provides air cover for sloppy writing that gives readers a false impression.
AWS pledges $100M to launch generative AI innovation center. This is similar to my not having the slightest clue what the hell it means to be a Girl Scout, so instead I buy $400 a year of their cookies in order to pass myself off as a scouting expert.
We’re constantly asked for comparative benchmarks. My business partner takes time from wrangling me, his yappy dog, to pen a piece on Why Benchmarks Miss The Mark for AWS Spend.
The folks at Google who kill beloved products and the folks product managing RHEL at IBM Hat are apparently competing over which will be crowned the biggest clowns in tech. Amazon Linux 2023 has an opportunity here, should they be bold enough to claim it.
US firm ‘breached GDPR’ by reputation-scoring EU citizens is a weird headline to include in this newsletter, but a bit of reading into it shows that AWS was one of the customers of this firm. That’s right, AWS apparently "reputation scores" its customers as an anti-fraud measure. I guess the old saw "nobody knows their own reputation" is true…
The Verge’s piece on the humans that make tech seem human made me wonder what the working conditions are for the folks behind SageMaker Ground Truth; it wasn’t mentioned in this article because it’s an AI service, so of course it’s significantly behind the state of the art given that it’s an AWS service.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: Amazon Calls Down Regulatory Lightning
Last Week In AWS: Infosec Brain Worms
Screaming in the Cloud: Building Reliable Open-Source Social Media with Jake Gold
Choice Cuts
AWS Lambda simplifies copying environment variables in the console code editor – Look at this feature and then tell me ClickOps isn’t alive and well. You can’t, because there’s no way to tell me that that doesn’t involve clicking around in a web interface.
What is a spam trap and why you should care – This is an important article. It’s the reason that if you’re receiving this email, you had to enter your address in a form, then click a link that was emailed to you. If you’re getting this email, someone in control of your email address requested it. As a result, the newsletter hits your inbox rather than your spam folder.
How we learned to program with atoms in 24 hours flat – and man oh man are you going to hate the new AWS pricing dimension that makes this headline particularly relevant.
Running an SSH server on AWS RoboMaker – I told you! I TOLD you that RoboMaker can run containers!
New training series: Starting your Career with AWS Cloud – That’s kinda like starting your driving lessons by entering a Formula 1 qualifier.
AWS to remove 62,000-message Simple Email Service ‘always free’ tier from August 2023 – This wasn’t included in AWS’s blog spew, but it’s something that should have been. This feels like it’s more aligned with anti-spam efforts than actually caring about a theoretical maximum ~$6 a month in revenue that can now be captured.
AWS continues to invest in Ohio – As Warren Buffet once said, "be greedy when others are fearful, be fearful when others are greedy." AWS has internalized this and has put another $7.8 billion into Ohio when every right-thinking person is trying to get out of Ohio as fast as is possible. Even data wants to get the hell out of Ohio, which is why data transfer between us-east-1 and us-east-2 is half price.
The INFORM Consumers Act takes effect on June 27. Here’s how Amazon is protecting our customers and sellers from bad actors. – …which presumably are on a list that prominently includes "Amazon Basics."
Tools
A ChatGPT plugin that aspires to one day manage your cloud resources for you. I hope it works.
aws-simple-ec2-cli is a tool that dramatically simplifies the process of launching, connecting and terminating an EC2 instance. Shockingly, it comes from AWS itself.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
