Good Morning!
Do you want to get your company’s product or service in front of prospective customers in a way that might inspire them to give a toss what you’ve got to tell them?
"Well, yeah…"
Do you have large piles of money cluttering up your office to the point where it’s rapidly becoming a safety hazard to your team?
"That’s right, I do! Someone’s going to break an ankle here!"
Consider solving both problems by sponsoring re:Quinnvent, my own little media circus buried in the fibrillating heart of re:Invent! Questions? Hit reply and ask me about them; I’ll pass you to someone as fast as humanly possible because you do NOT want me to be on the critical path for these conversations, and let’s see what cynical yet delightful magic we can create together.
From the Community
A good question from the Pragmatic Engineer: Why are Cloud Development Environments Spiking in Popularity, Now?
The company Striving to be the Earth’s Best Employer is also striving to defeat an Oregon data center clean energy bill.
The former head of DynamoDB (Jim Scharf) is now the CTO at MongoDB; between him and Rick Houlihan, it’s pretty clear that MongoDB is a straight-shot upgrade from DynamoDB.
I feel seen; Charity Majors thinks a lot of "AIops" stuff is complete nonsense, because it is. Yet she’s also cautiously enthused about the potential for LLMs, as am I. It’s a weird dichotomy, yet here we are.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: Email Vendor Selection Influences Security
Last Week In AWS: Incrementally Making Massive Improvements
Screaming in the Cloud: Ask Me Anything with Corey Quinn
Screaming in the Cloud: Making a Difference Through Technology in the Public Sector with Dmitry Kagansky
Choice Cuts
Amazon DataZone is now generally available – In a move that handily solves a problem I’m not entirely sure exists, AWS has rolled out yet another service: Amazon DataZone. This apparently makes it "easy" to aggregate, sift through, analyze and curate your data in a "cost-effective" manner, because of course, why wouldn’t customers want another billable service for something that they’re probably already doing through more conventional means? "Oh, I simply cannot wait to pile more data into more AWS services," said the CTO who has completely given up on keeping track of his monthly AWS expenses. Don’t fret if you’re lost in the sea of AWS’s commitment to ‘innovation’; remember this is ‘generally available’, not ‘generally understandable’.
Amazon EC2 Hibernate now supports more operating systems – So now that it’s supported broadly, I look forward to it being adopted by the CNCF, pronounced "high-ber-net-ease", and abbreviated to "h8s."
Lambda test events are now available in AWS SAM CLI – Another day, another opportunity for AWS to roll out a feature that should’ve been baked in from day one. AWS has finally graced us with the ability to test Lambda functions using SAM CLI without needing to perform the complex ritual of manually passing JSON test events or maintaining separate test scripts. Now, isn’t that revolutionary? Next thing you know, they’ll be implementing "save" buttons that actually save your work on your first attempt. The SAM CLI is bravely going where virtually every other coding environment has gone before.
Simplify data transfer: Google BigQuery to Amazon S3 using Amazon AppFlow – AWS is here to simplify your life by making it easier to transfer your data from Google BigQuery to Amazon S3 using AppFlow. What’s next, instructions on how to drain your swimming pool to refill your neighbor’s?
Coming November 2023: A new analysis experience on Amazon QuickSight – This is something atypically clever of AWS: announcing a change that will be visible to your business users before they log in one day to discover that everything is new and different. I’m not kidding! Can you picture Microsoft pulling that nonsense with Excel? The army of financial analysts, management consultants, and other business users marching on Redmond to burn them out of their offices would get that change reverted within MINUTES. If Amazon is serious about QuickSight, and it seems for some reason that they are, they’ve gotta continue on in this vein. Good for them.
Implement auto-increment with Amazon DynamoDB – The fact that this very common task requires a 300-level blog post to explain is probably solid signal that the DynamoDB team might want to do some of that undifferentiated heavy lifting for us and implement an auto-increment type natively, no?
The Future of Personal Digital Records: Unlocking Security and Efficiency through Blockchain and Smart Contracts – The future of personal digital records, AWS proclaims with feverish glee, is here. And guess what wonder tech-duo is going to guide us into this sparkling utopia? Blockchain and Smart Contracts. They try to coin "Blockchain 2.0" which is not and will never be a thing, and of course don’t cite a single actual customer using this nonsense because honestly who would? But I had to read this fever-dream travesty of a blog post and now you get to hear me gripe about it as a result. Keep this nonsense to the AWS blockchain blog where it belongs; those of us reading the database blog have actual work to do.
Slack elevates media pipeline with AWS Elemental MediaConvert and Amazon Transcribe – I’d be very interested to learn more about this. Every time I’ve looked into the Elemental offerings previously it felt like I’d be setting large piles of money on fire were I to use it.
Integrate multiple Microsoft Entra ID tenants with AWS IAM Identity Center – Reminder that “Entra ID” used to be “Azure AD,” and that not all rebrandings are great ideas. They’re particularly not great when they hurl decades of terminology that’s become globally known into the dumpster, and replace it with something that sounds like the sad remains of the encyclopedia you bought and killed years ago.
Building high-throughput satellite data downlink architectures with AWS Ground Station WideBand DigIF and Amphinicy Blink SDR – I’m sorry… AWS Ground Station Wideband DigIF Amphinicy Blink SDR? That name simply rolls off the tongue like a bag of hammers gracefully being dumped down an unfinished spiral staircase during an earthquake.
Save the Date: Join AWS at the Reality Capture Network Conference, Oct 17 – Oct 19, 2023 – At Soviet tech conference, reality captures you.
Tools
A useful tip on creating a future-proof Terraform provider definition.
if you work for a large company that’s demanding your butt in the office, then daktilo will help you make everyone regret that choice. It makes typewriter sounds (or anything you tell it to) on every keypress. I wrote this issue on a plane and almost got thrown off the flight as a result.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
