Good Morning!
The clear big announcement from this week was that AWS CEO Andy Jassy is going to be the next CEO of Amazon. (Amazon has stubbornly refused to comment on who is in the running to become AWS’s next CEO, but it’s Matt Garman).
Not only was I quoted in the New York Times, I successfully badgered their style guide into correcting “A.W.S.” to “AWS” because I am clearly as influential as I am petty.
From the Community
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Stories For Folks Who Love Spreadsheets is going to get a bunch of the readership clicking the link before getting this far into the sentence. It’s a dive into AWS Outposts and their economics, for the more reserved folks who don’t speak Accountant fluently.
A review of what’s new to v3 of the AWS SDK for JavaScript.
A post on avoiding cloud vendor lock-in.
A comparison between AWS’s, Azure’s, and Google Cloud’s cloud shell offerings. Given that AWS’s came out over five full years after GCP’s, unless it’s head and shoulders better than everything else in the space it should be considered largely a failure that was also late.
Apparently while completely re-imagining CloudFormation as the CDK, they neglected to account for “multiple stages / environments” as deploy targets. Here’s how to fix that.
I couldn’t sleep one night, so I made a video about AWS billing pain points that’s simultaneously catchy and horrifying.
CNBC has a profile of Andy Jassy that sheds some light on a private individual who overnight became a household name.
Remember DuckTools, our SaaS offering here at the Duckbill Group? We’re Googling it. A thorough blog post tells the tale.
The petty bickering between Microsoft and AWS over the JEDI contract may demonstrate that for the government the best cloud is no cloud at all. Nice job.
Now that earnings are out for the cloud companies people care about, here’s how 2020’s CAPEX for cloud buildouts breaks down.
Jobs
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AWS Amplify Hosting adds monitoring capabilities with Amazon CloudWatch integration – The party for front end developers draws to a close, as operations folks begin insisting they instrument their work in order to keep things running.
AWS Backup Events and Metrics now available in Amazon CloudWatch – Nobody cares about backup metrics, but they REALLY care about restore metrics. Those are unsupported but it’s okay because nobody really cares about CloudWatch either.
AWS Console Mobile Application adds support for new regions – Shut it down and work on a responsive design for the Management Console. This is patently ridiculous.
AWS Copilot launches v1.2 providing more deployment capabilities – Among other things, version 1.2 introduces support for CodeCommit, AWS’s git hosting service. Hopefully in version 1.3 it will introduce support for Perforce, a git competitor that almost nobody uses but still has way more customers than CodeCommit does.
AWS Lambda now supports Node.js 14 – This is notable because it means we’re about to get oh so very many emails again about deprecation of the oldest currently supported Node runtimes.
Insights is now generally available for AWS X-Ray – The first Insight it delivered was that X-Ray support is scattershot across AWS services and that implementing it is both difficult and annoying. Until those things all change, nobody is going to use X-Ray widely across the customer base.
Automation of User Onboarding and Offboarding Workflows – This solution should be of significant interest to the poor schmoos who have to find all the places in Amazon’s systems Jeff Bezos is hardcoded. It would absolutely be orders of magnitude simpler for the entire company if Andy Jassy would agree to legally change his name to “Jeff.”
Zurich Spain: Managing millions of documents with AWS – Without looking I know there is no possible way on God’s flat earth that this blog post will even mention the term “WorkDocs” once, because it’s a service that could do exactly this if it worked, but it doesn’t.
AWS PrivateLink for Amazon S3 is Now Generally Available – PrivateLink (usually used to communicate between VPCs) is now available for S3 (in this case used to communicate between a VPC and on-premises environments). No, you’re right, that makes little sense and is remarkably confusing. It’s not you.
New – Amazon Elastic Block Store Local Snapshots on AWS Outposts – Is this about Elastic Block Store, or is it about Storing Elastic Blocks? Terrible AWS product naming leads to widespread confusion–or would if enough people cared about this feature.
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Testing EC2 Image Builder pipelines using Chef InSpec – If you aren’t already using Chef’s Inspect, there’s no better time to start than after Chef gets acquired by Progress (motto: “Who are you folks again?”), lays off or fails to retain basically the entire team who made Chef special, and are struggling to understand what the hell the thing is that they’ve just purchased.
Identifying opportunities to place overlay advertisements in video content – AWS is obsessed with helping its customers annoy their own customers.
Dow Jones’s AWS Cloud journey and adoption of Amazon EBS io2 volumes – I wonder if Dow Jones really needs all of those io2 volumes for performance reasons, or just think they do because they were looking at an… industrial average.
Setting up cross-account access with S3 Access Points – This blog post is way, way, way too long for anyone to actually do this unless they’re forced to, which means that users will instead take shortcuts and not adopt an awesome feature. Good attempt, make this easier please.
Tools
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AWS Perspective lets you visualize AWS Cloud workloads. This would be in the AWS Console directly if AWS themselves had some Perspective.
There’s an AWS SDK for Rust. Note: this isn’t designed to actually be used for anything, but rather as a talking point in your ceaseless efforts to evangelize Rust instead of doing work.
Salesforce has put out a snazzy tool that helps create sensible SCPs for you.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
