| Good morning!Welcome to issue number 109 of Last Week in AWS.Last week’s clarification of their S3 deprecation (discussed below) took folks a bit by surprise. Let’s see whether there are any more AWS surprises in store for us this week…The Billie the Platypus swag continues to sell, if you missed Friday’s email. |
| This issue is sponsored in part by GoCD. Trialing tools that solve complex challenges shouldn’t be as difficult as it is. That’s why we are bringing to you a new trial experience for GoCD to help get you from website to first pipeline in a clear and straightforward way. We want to make understanding the value of our tool the easiest part. Learn More |
| From the Community |
| Eric Hammond tells us how to use Step Functions to schedule or delay SNS message publication.A while back AWS changed its pentesting notification requirements. Here’s a dive into how it works now.I didn’t link this when it first came out; a tale of how someone left $500K a year at AWS to go do something else instead.A tale of how Fender analyzed their Lambda cost with Honeycomb. I will point out that for TLS negotiation, there’s a tipping point, usually around 1500MB of memory per function, that saves you money by executing more quickly. Modeling this out for your specific workload is of course required.In which Slalom discovers that your CloudWatch Logs stick around basically forever.A tale of how IOpipe uses AWS Lambda to Send High Volume Emails at Scale.With the recent release of S3 Batch, here’s a guide on how to use it properly.Amazon CTO and frequent keynoter Werner Vogels talks about increasing access to blockchain and ledger databases, both of which I find to be vaguely silly product areas.A previous S3 Bucket Negligence Award winner discloses that the breach cost them many millions in lost revenue. Mistakes have consequences.I wrote an article about Running Relational Databases on AWS. I’m sure you’ll all tell me what I got wrong!A great reddit thread idea: what is a fact about an AWS service that you are sad that you know?The Verge writes about Amazon’s invisible server empire, and how to map it. |
| This week’s issue is sponsored in part by N2WS. As a Systems Engineer, you’ve got one impossible challenge: to protect the applications running on AWS with the same level of scrutiny as you had when they were running on-prem. (Oh…and you need to retain backups for 7 years, which becomes prohibitively expensive with the amount of data flowing through your enterprise workloads.) But allow me to magically wave my digital wand over your AWS cloud and erase all of those worries! That’s essentially what N2WS Backup & Recovery does for your AWS cloud. N2WS allows you to cycle backups through different storage tiers so you can migrate critical apps and achieve not just the same but even better SLAs, while keeping costs lower than on-premises solutions–try it free today! Learn More |
| Jobs |
| If you’ve got an interesting job for this newsletter’s emminently employable subscribers, get in touch!It can often feel like keeping up with AWS is like drinking from a firehose. Why not work on an actual firehose? Kinesis Firehose (and other Kinesis teams) are solving hard problems around ingesting massive quantities of data at huge scale. With roles in Seattle, Palo Alto, and Cambridge (the one in the U.K.; they were banned from the one in Boston due to their insistence on pronouncing MIT as “mitt”), they’re a fascinating team with wonderful challenges. For more information, check out their open roles. For a lot more information, implement Kinesis Data Streams in your environment. |
| This week’s issue is sponsored in part by GitPrime. GitPrime’s new book draws together some of the most common software team dynamics, observed in working with hundreds of enterprise engineering organizations. Actionable insights to help you debut your development process with data. Get Your Copy. Learn More |
| Choice Cuts |
| Amazon Cognito launches enhanced user password reset API for administrators – “Holy crap, we have customers? I guess we’d better start releasing features that make this something a human being might be able to use…”Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) now supports per-second billing – I feel like it could easily have done this at launch, but they just wanted another headline to tweak MongoDB with. Well okay; I’m game.Amazon EC2 I3en instances, offering up to 60 TB of NVMe SSD instance storage, are now generally available – Not only that, but they offer an ever-more-confusing naming scheme. Hope you enjoy buying RIs; you almost certainly bought the wrong ones.,Reservation Expiration Alerts Now Available in AWS Cost Explorer – A feature that should have existed five years ago is here today. FINALLY!Share encrypted AMIs across accounts to launch instances in a single step– A great new feature, still no apology for the Amazonian in-house mispronunciation of AMI.Amazon S3 Path Deprecation Plan – The Rest of the Story | AWS News Blog – This is a much better path forward than the announcement last week led me to expect. Excellent walkback only a week later.How to BYOK (bring your own key) to AWS KMS for less than $15.00 a year using AWS CloudHSM | AWS Security Blog – Using your own key in KMS sounds handy, but almost nobody is going to want to do this unless their regulators tell them they must. |
| Tools |
| A handy tool that tells you whether switching to On-Demand Dynamo DB pricing makes sense for your use case. |
| … and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS |
