Good Morning!
Welcome to a brand new year, full of opportunity and possibility in equal measure! It’s a clean slate; let’s see what we can write on it.
From the Community
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I really wish this was a first-party option built into GitHub, but sadly it isn’t. How to Securely Access Your AWS Resources From Github Actions is left as an exercise for individuals to implement…
A great read on problematic employers in tech by former AWS employee Deirdré Straughan.
I rounded up Last Year in AWS.
Remember that big Capital One breach in 2019 by a former AWS employee (note: at no point has it been alleged that they used inside information to get the data!)? It got settled for $190M and a few embarrassing headlines.
The WSJ (paywalled) has an article on how Google and other clouds are investing in their cloud clients — read as “buying customers.”
Jobs
If you’ve got an interesting job for this newsletter’s eminently employable subscribers, get in touch!
The tools that we use every day have profound impact on the entire software development process. Better tools lead to higher quality software, faster delivery cycles, and happier developers. AWS Code Suite is on a mission to enable efficient software development for organizations of all sizes from scrappy startups to the largest enterprises in the world. We are looking for deeply technical, collaborative people to advance this mission and help grow the AWS business. The AWS Code Suite team creates products that allow customers to model their development processes and automatically build, test, deploy, and release applications of all types. We embrace our customers’ existing languages, platforms, tools, and communities. We build technology-agnostic solutions that seamlessly integrate with each other and the larger developer tools ecosystem. By joining the AWS Code Suite team, you will make an impact and work on software that powers innovation across multiple industries. You will build the next generation of highly responsive, modern developer tools using the latest technologies available.
Truss is a distributed-first, software consultancy that cares about communication, inclusivity, and modern software development practices. We push the envelope on building efficient technology that improves people’s lives. Currently, we’re seeking stellar Sr. Infrastructure Engineers to help us with commercial and government contracts.
Choice Cuts
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AWS announces phone number enrichments for Amazon Fraud Detector Models – “Using ML under the hood” but still somehow talking about it ALL THE TIME. Once more: for a service like this, customers care about outcomes, not how trendy the backend systems are.
Implementing Hyper-Personalization in the Banking Sector with Amazon EMR – “How to be creepy and still miss the mark.” Customers feel creeped the hell out when they feel hyper-personalized. Further, when’s the last time you got a notice from your bank that made you super glad they sent it when they did?
Power highly resilient use cases with Amazon Redshift – The real highly resilient folks are the product managers for Redshift who bravely soldier on in the face of Snowflake DB eating their breakfast, lunch, second lunch, elevenses, afternoon tea, dinner, and supper.
How Twilio modernized its billing platform on Amazon Aurora MySQL – Cool, now can the AWS billing system modernize on I don’t even care what database, just make my endless hell suck less?
Define application boundary using AWS resources tags in Amazon DevOps Guru – Be sure to also define work/life boundary by turning the on-call pager off. It’s a brand new year, after all.
CxO Insight: Reporting Cybersecurity to the Board – Or more honestly, “how not to get fired as a CISO when you have Very Bad News to report.”
Community update for Amazon GameSparks – “GameSparks,” “Amazon Kindle,” “Amazon Fire.” It’s time for “AWS Burninate.”
Airports Want to Innovate Faster – I’m not saying that airports is a focus industry for AWS right now, but the author of the post is “Worldwide Head of Airports at AWS.” It’s AWS, so don’t worry; they still make him fly coach.
Recap of re:Invent 2021 for the CPG Industry – I had to read the footer of the post to realize that “CPG” means “Consumer Packaged Goods.” Are you sure that everyone working in that industry is familiar with that descriptor, AWS?
How and when to enable session cookies with Amazon CloudWatch RUM – “A key part of RUM is the concept of a session.” Yes, AWS, it very much is. That’s what every other RUM vendor on the planet charges based upon, since it’s at least theoretically within the customer’s control. You instead continue to charge per data item, which means the next time a big CDN takes a nap your product managers will get to all buy matching yachts.
Identity Guide – Preventive controls with AWS Identity – SCPs – I’ve been waiting for a good explainer on SCPs to come out for a while and… this looks like it actually is the thing I wanted. Nice!
Tools
CockroachDB wants to help you keep that New Year’s resolution to lose a little weight. No, we can’t help you un-eat those three (okay, four) slices of fruit cake. But we can help you trim the fat from your appdev workflow. We sponsored a free O’Reilly book, Building Serverless Applications with Google Cloud Run, to help developers learn how serverless development can simplify how they build and scale apps. And all without cutting back on carbs. Win. Win. Sponsored
A lightweight dockerized version of the AWS CLI is super handy; I run aws via Docker myself to make sure I’m always up to date.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
