Good Morning!
Happy AWS Billing Season yet again. Like clockwork, the monthly bills strike true this week.
Also happening this week, I’ll be hosting a drink-up on Wednesday evening in Los Angeles! Come hang out and drink on my tab at The Woodman from 7-9PM.
Don’t forget that we’re in the YouTube game now! Last week I talked about the 17 Ways to Run Containers on AWS and got into the nitty-gritty of Seth Vargo’s time at Alphabet.
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!
You can always stand to learn new things about DynamoDB because you pretty much have to keep up on it; these 40 DynamoDB Best Practices are super helpful.
This article discussing a showdown: MongoDB vs DynamoDB: Which NoSQL database is right for you addresses a question I’ve had for a while now. My tastes on the issue continue to evolve.
My take on "17 ways to run containers on AWS" has been extended by Matthew Rich to make the case that what AWS needs is an extra layer of permissions boundaries at the resource level. I do not disagree.
KellyAnn Fitzpatrick at RedMonk has a spectacular article highlighting just how critical good documentation is.
I was on theCUBE when I crashed the AWS San Francisco summit. This article summarizing the conversation disturbs me, because I don’t know who I am if my mouth isn’t open in a photograph.
In my post about AWS’s Open Source Problem I completely neglected to mention that a number of notable open source people are employed by AWS to work full time on open source. This is a great thing! It doesn’t deter the overall point; it in no way conveys "ownership" of the projects themselves.
Barry Cooks is apparently AWS’s new VP of EKS.
Protocol has an interesting dive into cloud cost management. I’m quoted towards the end; those parts I have zero disagreement with.
Adam Selipsky again dashes my hope that AWS will spin off from Amazon. He also mentioned that they’re likely to be ramping up their acquisition strategy.
AWS friends: please do not attempt to buy me. I’m pretty sure you’d have to replace your entire PR team after they all quit en masse.
Jobs
At AWS Documentation, our job is to make our customers feel like heroes. We provide the information that customers need to be successful using AWS services to their fullest potential.
On behalf of our customers, we do much more than just write the docs. We innovate, we research, we learn, and we experiment. We collaborate with product managers to understand our customers’ needs. We partner with software developers to learn the inner workings of AWS services so that we can influence design and the customer experience. We know that what we do makes a difference in the successful adoption and implementation of AWS services.
The AWS Documentation team writes and provides support for a diverse audience consisting of developers, DevOps professionals, IT professionals, technical program managers, and scientists. We have both the technical background and the writing background that enable our team to deliver high-quality technical documentation.
Do you love cutting-edge technology, believe that good content helps solve customer problems, and want to work with world-class writers, editors, and engineers in taking content to the next level? We’d like to meet you!
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: AWS GoForIt (With Expedia Group Compatibility)
Last Week In AWS: AWS’s Open Source Problem
Last Week In AWS: AWS Starts the Security Communication Improvement Slog
Screaming in the Cloud: Data Analytics in Real Time with Venkat Venkataramani
Screaming in the Cloud: Interlacing Literature, Academia, and Tech with Kate Holterhoff
Screaming in the Cloud: To SQL or noSQL, Why is that the Question with Chris Harris
YouTube: The 17 Ways to Run Containers on AWS
YouTube: From A to Z in Alphabet’s Soup with Seth Vargo
Choice Cuts
Software powers the world. LaunchDarkly empowers all teams to deliver and control their software. DevOps and feature management are reimagining how businesses build and release new products. Get control of your code to ship fast, reduce risk, and reclaim your nights and weekends. Learn how your team can reap the rewards of Continuous Delivery without all of the risk. Check out LaunchDarkly.
Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 is generally available – "It’s serverless but scales down to still costing you tens of dollars a month" isn’t really what I consider serverless.
Amazon Lightsail load balancers now support automatic HTTPS redirects and configurable TLS security policy – The more I look at LightSail, the more convinced I am that it’s simply a pricing and packaging wrapper around existing long-standing AWS services. This gives me optimism for what the future of AWS might look like.
Amazon SES V2 now supports email size of up to 40MB for inbound and outbound emails by default – Yet Gmail will still only support attachments of up to 25MB. That’ll be fun for some customers to troubleshoot…
AWS Control Tower now supports Python 3.9 runtime – I’ve already updated to this. Ideally AWS will stop emailing me about outdated Lambda functions that an SCP prevents me from updating.
AWS Launch Wizard now provides guided deployment of Microsoft Exchange Server – Much like Microsoft Exchange itself, wizards were all the rage back in the middle ages.
Use IAM to control access to a resource based on the account, OU or organization that contains the resource – Ooh. Finally, the ability to easily express "anything inside of my AWS organization, but nobody outside of it" in IAM.
Implementing macOS Build Agents into TeamCity Using Amazon EC2 Mac Instances – People point out that the EC2 Mac instances aren’t economically sound. In isolation, they’re correct, but what that position misses is that being able to manage them with the same tools as the rest of your estate and not stuff hardware under people’s desks adds value that far exceeds the cost of a Mac Mini.
Amazon MSK Serverless Now Generally Available–No More Capacity Planning for Your Managed Kafka Clusters – Their pricing page states that "With MSK Serverless, you pay an hourly rate for your serverless clusters and an hourly rate for each partition that you create." If that’s "Serverless," then IBM "Cloud" is a real cloud.
New AWS Wavelength Zone in Toronto – The First in Canada – At last Canada is on the same Wavelength.
Multi-user secrets rotation for Amazon RDS – Secrets Manager is worth the money for secrets that require large scale coordinated rotation of credentials.
Announcing Amazon CloudWatch for Ray – Do you think that maybe AWS services have gotten a bit TOO specific? "No," replies the team as they busily prepare for the launch of Amazon CloudWatch for Sharon.
Extend your pre-commit hooks with AWS CloudFormation Guard – Ooh. This taught me something valuable! See below in the "Tools" section.
Tools
Tired of egregious egress? Understand why SMBs and Enterprise are relocating their workloads from EC2 to Vultr in droves when you try Vultr’s new Optimized Compute Instances. Starting at $28/mo, you can free yourself from Big Tech’s unpredictable, competitive practices when you deploy in 60 seconds or less today. Redeem $150 in free infrastructure credit for Last Week in AWS readers!
As mentioned above, an AWS blog post taught me about the Pre-commit Framework. The trouble with git hooks to me has always been that they don’t convey with the repository. This is a multi-language package manager for pre-commit hooks, meaning that problem just got a hell of a lot easier.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
