Good Morning!
Apple last week announced new shiny iPhones. Yes, I’ve ordered mine; the really depressing part is that if you max out their most expensive model, the cost remains insignificant compared to the cost to rent just the equivalent compute resources for a year on any cloud provider. Onward!
From the Community
Data management is rapidly changing due to new technologies that focus on augmentation and automation. The Gartner® Hype Cycle for Data Management, 2022 will help you make decisions about the latest data management trends. Get your free copy of this 2022 Gartner Hype Cycle for Data Management, courtesy of ChaosSearch. Use this Hype Cycle to identify promising technologies and practices, plus decide when it is appropriate to evaluate them for adoption. While you are there, check out how companies like Blackboard, Armor and more are leveraging ChaosSearch to leapfrog their competition by massively scaling their access to critical business analytics.
When an article saying FTC sues data broker that tracks locations of 125M phones per month showed up in my AWS news dragnet, I think it’s safe to say we found one company that will absolutely not be a reference customer for this year’s re:Invent keynote.
Patio11 / Patrick McKenzie wrote a piece on how the optimal amount of fraud is non-zero. He got some heat for it; personally I would read something like this every day if he could somehow become that prolific. Unfortunately, the only person who can pull that magic off seems to be Ben Thompson over at Stratechery.
If you like charts and lack any patience whatsoever, this analysis of Serverless Messaging: Latency Compared is probably right up your alley.
A blog post on how to authenticate to AWS properly for (almost) every use-case.
I’ve only ever really cared for $latest, but this post on working with Lambda function versions may change that.
Some changes to the AWS Terms and Conditions surfaced last month! Most notably they stopped talking entirely about RDS on VMware, and malware analysis for GuardDuty may result in data leaving the AWS Region it starts out in. Yes, the zombie clause is still there for Lumberyard.
California is set to require salary ranges on job listings, following Colorado’s lead. This will ideally lead to better, more transparent pay in tech.
Jobs
Feature Flags at DevCycle is the cloud-based solution you need to help your product engineering team deploy code faster, reduce release complexity, and maximize impact. With a feature management suite like DevCycle in place, any bugs that make it into production can be resolved in a simple and structured workflow. So if you’re a feature flag developer, DevCycle is the place for you. Join us in supporting modern engineering teams that are shifting to continuous deployment using DevCycle. Together, we can shorten release timelines from 1-2 months down to deploying code to production multiple times per day.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: 26.5 AWS Regions
Last Week In AWS: Mobile Authentication to AWS is Hard
Last Week In AWS: The Harrowing Search for the Elusive Technical Answer
Screaming in the Cloud: Authentication Matters with Dan Moore of FusionAuth
Screaming in the Cloud: Trivy and Open Source Communities with Anaïs Urlichs
Choice Cuts
Free Copy of Honeycomb’s O’Reilly Book: Observability Engineering
Looking to make the switch from monitoring to observability? Download your free copy of Honeycomb’s O’Reilly book: Observability Engineering to help you get started. Debrief the chapters with the authors themselves during our Authors’ Cut Series.
Amazon DynamoDB now supports up to 100 actions per transaction – This is good news for your for loops, which now only have to work 25% as hard as they did before.
Amazon Managed Blockchain (AMB) is now available in AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region – It’s nice to see that government is safely behind the Gartner Hype Cycle…
AWS Fargate announces migration of service quotas to vCPU-based quotas – That sure is a lot of words to say "we’re making it much less obnoxious to manage your Fargate quotas." I’m amused that the old way stops working entirely on Halloween this year.
Introducing Seekable OCI for lazy loading container images – This is a new technology open sourced by AWS that’s surprisingly neat. The short version is that you don’t need to wait for a container to finish downloading before it can start doing useful work. As someone whose containers trend towards "large and ungainly," I appreciate this technology.
Now track user identity for API calls from Amazon SageMaker Studio in AWS CloudTrail – Introducing the SageMaker/DeepRacer AWS Billing Leaderboards, coming soon to an angry finance department near you.
Understanding and Cost Optimizing Amazon EKS Control Plane Logs – I’m just starting to dip my toes into the waters of Kubernetes–but if AWS is telling us how to cost optimize the logs, exactly how wordy is this thing going to be? Yikes…
Debug AWS DMS tasks using Time Travel – If I wake up with the sudden ability to travel through time, the absolute last thing I’m going to do is debug some broken AWS thing; I’ll be too busy winning the lottery six weeks in a row.
Detect audio events with Amazon Rekognition – "Display the audio waveform and then use Rekognition" sure seems to me like the kind of thing Rekognition should be doing under the hood, but no; AWS insists on making implementation details the customer’s problem.
Resolve Single Page Application integration issues with legacy API’s that do not support CORS using AWS – The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was driving CORS adoption. Yes, it’s a defense mechanism but it also drives me out of my freaking mind. If you’re doing it on API Gateway, be sure to check out the Amazon API Gateway CORS Configurator to spit out the proper attributes.
Move over IT, here comes innovation – This is certainly a bold choice of headline. I can only assume "Listen up, idiots" was already taken.
Introducing Amazon VPC Flow Logs to Kinesis Data Firehose – Misconfigure this and it will be like introducing a wolverine to your AWS bill, leading Finance to potentially introduce a bat to your kneecaps.
Open Sourcing Event Ruler – Tim Bray has a great rundown on why this is important. For my part I’ll just say I’d have called it "Event Knuckle-Rapper," and inadvertently landed a musical gig at re:Invent.
How Satellogic and AWS are harnessing the power of space and cloud – ♪ ♫ ♬ Build it, test it, sell it, launch it, boot it, AWS will bill it
Unfurl it, point it, zoom it, click it, check it, ship its data back to earth
Collect it, view it, compress it, stream it, ship it, scale it, DON’T SNAPSHOT IT
Can’t afford it, oops you did it, AWS will bill it, you will lose it, open ticket,
They will fix it, dodge a bullet, write about it, they will post it.
Satellogic. Satellogic.
Sr. Developer Advocate – AWS , AWS Console, AWS Chatbot, and AWS Console Mobile App – Job ID: 2009458 – Whoever ends up with this job, I look forward to having a variety of very interesting-yet-pointed conversations with you. Godspeed!
Tools
Push your code when it’s ready, launch it when you are ready, and most importantly: log off you’re ready and not worry about your coworkers calling you at 3AM and screaming you the songs of their people, specifically "Rage in D Minor." Take control of your launches with AWS AppConfig Feature Flags, and stop causing problems for other people on purpose.
I found this AWS CLI Builder that constructs the AWS CLI command you want without a bunch of tab completing / guessing and checking.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
