Good Morning!

A surprisingly light week from our friends at AWS. It’s not that there weren’t a lot of announcements, it’s just that most of them were (to be very direct) boring–at least to me. My tastes have always influences what gets covered here, so if you disagree, you are welcome to hit reply and fight me on the matter.

On the YouTube front: I spoke to Rick Houlihan about MongoDB, and I make the case that Fixing Amazon’s Free Tier is No Longer Optional.

Meanwhile, The Duckbill Group recently launched a AWS cost management newsletter. Subscribe to receive monthly cost management tips and updates. You can afford (but probably don’t want) to miss out!

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!

Scaling data access by moving an exabyte of data to Google Cloud – The real poison pill is the egress charges if they ever want to move it somewhere else.

It sure is great to see Microsoft respond to European Cloud Provider feedback with new programs and principles whereas its US customers can continue to go screw themselves.

I Wrote a Recursive Lambda Function That Cost My Company Hundreds of Dollars is of course a title that resonates with anyone who’s touched AWS in recent memory.

If you’ve been smacked with a Surprise AWS Bill, An AWS Free Tier Bill Shock: Your Next Steps is worth a read.

Amazon is a case study in crappy 401(k) vesting policies. If you leave before your 3 year anniversary, you don’t get a dime of the corporate match. "Earth’s Best Employer" at it again…

Jobs

AWS Auto Scaling enables AWS services to deliver on the promise of cloud: elasticity and scalability. It leverages predictive scaling, which uses state-of-art machine learning algorithms to help AWS customers save millions of dollars in compute cost while maintaining their availability SLAs.Scaling based on a schedule allows our customers to scale their application ahead of known load changes. Scaling based on a target value for a specific CloudWatch metric allows our customers to scale their application in response to the load changes. Scaling based on a set of scaling adjustments that vary based on the size of the alarm breach allows our customers to step scale their application in response to the threshold changes.

Get your free copy of the new Gartner Market Guide Analytics Query Accelerators, courtesy of ChaosSearchThe 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!

Choice Cuts

What if there were a single place to get an inventory of what you’re running in the cloud that wasn’t "the monthly bill?" What if there were a way to compare that inventory to what you were already managing via Terraform, Pulumi, or CloudFormation, then automatically add the missing unmanaged or drifted parts? And what if there were a policy engine to immediately flag and remediate a wide variety of misconfigurations? Stop dreaming and start doing; visit GoFirefly.io today!

Amazon CloudWatch announces improved console experience – Isn’t that called Datadog?

Amazon Kendra releases Jira connector to enable document search on JIRA repository – It’s like mixing peanut butter and chocolate if both of those things cost $10K a month.

AWS Backup adds support for Amazon FSx for OpenZFS – Along with NetApp ONTAP support, Backup is leading the way in taking away your excuse for losing half of the data warehouse next week.

AWS Control Tower can now use customer provided core accounts – The definition of what Control Tower is vs. isn’t continues to grow ever blurrier.

A Reference Architecture for a Front Office Risk Store – Two weeks ago I ordered a new Apple Watch charger from Amazon, fulfilled by Amazon. I paid full price and got a refurbished unit. I guess what I’m saying is that Amazon leads the way in running a Risk Store.

Automate Patching by Replacing Amazon ECS Container Instances – "Instead of repairing something, throw it away in favor of a new one" is absolutely how our economy works now.

Detect social media fake news using graph machine learning with Amazon Neptune ML – I detect Social Media Fake News primarily by seeing if it was tweeted via the Sprinklr Twitter client. Take Amazon’s corporate accounts: if they tweet from Sprinklr, it’s boring and corporate. If they tweet from an iPhone, some exec stole the password again and you’re about to see some hilarious nonsense.

Top five reasons AWS Partners should take AWS Training – "Because if you don’t we’ll boot you out of the Partner Program" is presumably not explicitly on the list, but it should be.

Amazon Redshift re-invented – Amazon Redshift was already re-invented to great success; it’s called Snowflake.

Tools

Finding skilled DevOps engineers is a pain in the … And if you need to deploy a secure and compliant application to AWS, forgettaboutit! But that’s where DuploCloud can help. Their comprehensive no-code/low-code software platform guarantees a secure and compliant infrastructure in as little as two weeks, while automating the full DevSecOps lifecycle. Get started with DevOps-as-a-Service from DuploCloud so that your cloud configurations are done right the first time. Tell them Corey Quinn sent you and your first two months are free.

I’ve been using this short URL redirect service built on top of Google Sheets via Google Cloud Run for a few months now. It’s awesome and demonstrates that none of AWS’s 17 ways to run containers are fully baked for customer use when it comes to simple projects.

… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.

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