Good Morning!
Google has killed Stadia, which many folks saw coming. What many folks didn’t see coming is that some of their development partners finding out via Twitter–and that has significant consequence for just how far customers can trust Google Cloud to stick around.
From the Community
Observability Leader Honeycomb Releases O’Reilly Book on Observability
Honeycomb helps you sift through billions of events to see your application’s hidden problems so you can quickly debug before users notice. Get your FREE copy of our new O’Reilly book and register for our Authors’ Cut Series to discuss key concepts
I didn’t realize what CDK Aspects were until reading this post. Sure enough, tagging is the first example it gives.
I’m glad someone wrote My Favorite Obscure AWS Service Names so I didn’t have to do it myself.
Redmonk’s Dr. Kate Holterhoff is very clearly an academic, since her most recent blog post How to Reach Software Engineers through Social Media is 2000 words long instead of being a single word: "Shitposting."
I might have gotten more email about The Baffling Maze of Kubernetes than I have about the past two months of articles combined.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: Getting Twitchy About the AWS Bill
Last Week In AWS: Inadvertent Compliance Week
Last Week In AWS: The Baffling Maze of Kubernetes
Screaming in the Cloud: The Controversy of Cloud Repatriation With Amy Tobey of Equinix
Screaming in the Cloud: The Unseen Impact of Cloud Migration with Donovan Brady
Choice Cuts
The LAN was a magical place to learn about computers. You could do things that would be unthinkable on today’s internet: permission-less file sharing, experimental servers with no security, shared software where one machine could easily bring down the network, and surly network admins who somehow didn’t get ejected from companies due to their toxic attitudes. Try now – it’s free forever for personal use with up to 20 devices. I’ve been using it for over a year personally, and am moderately annoyed that they haven’t attempted to charge me for what’s become an essential-to-my-workflow service.
Amazon S3 Replication Time Control for predictable replication time now available in the AWS China (Beijing) and AWS China (Ningxia) Regions – I would not have predicted that getting this feature over there would take this long.
Amazon SageMaker Canvas supports mathematical functions and operators for richer data exploration – …neither of which justify its $1.90 an hour ‘per logged in session’ charge that doesn’t stop billing you until you remember to log out manually–weeks or months later when the bill hits.
Snow Amazon Linux 2 (AL2) Amazon Machine Image (AMI) available on all Snow Family jobs – I didn’t know this was in the works, because nobody on AWS’s Snow team turned Informer (a licky boom boom dem).
Announcing 1-Click templates and tutorials in AWS Budgets – This is a (small) step towards helping customers out of the Free Tier Trap, but so much work remains to be done…
AWS Certificate Manager Private Certificate Authority is now AWS Private Certificate Authority – Congratulations to the new top-level service "AWS Private Certificate Authority (with openssl genrsa -out ca.key 2048 compatibility)." Yes, I know, it speaks ECDSA, but my crappy bash script from 2006 where I went rummaging to find the syntax for this joke absolutely does not.
AWS Cloud Control API now supports AWS PrivateLink – I really wish that Cloud Control API was simply "everywhere." Until then it feels like the service gaps are surprising and painful. It’s a hard problem for AWS to solve…
AWS Compute Optimizer now supports 37 new EC2 instance types and new memory metrics for Windows instances – I am… disheartened, to discover that Compute Optimizer was that far behind (and still misses roughly 50 other instance types as of this writing); that means that its recommendations may well not be accurate or authoritative.
AWS Copilot, a CLI for the containerized apps, adds IAM permission boundaries and more – Someday someone is going to use very small words and explain to me what IAM Permission Boundaries are. Maybe today?
AWS Cost Categories now support retroactive rules application – I know it doesn’t seem like much, but a fundamental underpinning of modern Cloud Economics just shifted with this release. It’s a change for the better.
Amazon File Cache – A High Performance Cache On AWS For Your On-Premises File Systems – I was worried when this was announced about what it would do to data transfer charges. If it automatically populates itself with files, couldn’t it make decisions that were… suboptimal, from a customer economics standpoint? I needn’t have worried; AWS launched the service with a per-GB month price ($1.33!) that’s so high that you won’t notice or care about the usually-expensive AWS data transfer portion of the bill.
Amazon WorkSpaces Introduces Ubuntu Desktops – 2023 is apparently the Year of Linux on the Virtual AWS Desktop.
Migrate from Oracle RAC to AWS: Alternatives on AWS – Oracle RAC is great, but it’s also very expensive. AWS has several alternative services you can use instead that are also very expensive.
Set up enterprise-level cost allocation for ML environments and workloads using resource tagging in Amazon SageMaker – It seems to me that of any Machine Learning problem space that could be solved, "tagging resources effectively" would be a slam dunk win–so why is this a manual process?
Secure media delivery at the edge on Amazon Web Services – Forget secure for a minute, how do we get affordable media delivery given AWS’s egress charges?
Tools
Push your code when it’s ready, launch it when you are ready, and most importantly: log off you’re ready and not worry about your coworkers calling you at 3AM and screaming you the songs of their people, specifically "Rage in D Minor." Take control of your launches with AWS AppConfig Feature Flags, and stop causing problems for other people on purpose.
lights-off-aws uses tags to turn off instances and databases on predefined stop/start schedules. I like this quite a bit, but its use cases are going to be somewhat constrained. Be careful!
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
