Good Morning!
Last week was the AWS Summit in San Francisco. I was kinda expecting there to be a lot more announcements of import than there were. Ah well–that means that the newsletter remains at a sensible human length this week.
Don’t forget that we’re publishing YouTube videos now! This week I talk about ClickOps and discuss Acronyms with Liz Rice. Onward!
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!
Huh. 8 best practices for optimizing Lambda functions is a fairly common theme, but it’s rare that I don’t disagree with any of the recommendations.
I somehow missed this decision tree for choosing between AWS messaging services, but that’s okay because they missed a good dozen or so services that can be used as a crappy messaging service.
Brendan Gregg has left Netflix for parts unknown. Whomever snaps him up is going to be in a fantastic position; he’s a force of nature.
I wrote on Shitposting as a Learning Style. I think the most surprising part to most folks was that I actually wrote code and posted it in public.
Adam Selipsky says they’re more likely to pursue acquisitions in the future. I have some ideas; most of them are almost certainly terrible.
Jobs
Our research operations team is responsible for making our teams run efficiently. If you want to work on some of the world’s biggest research challenges, and make tools that builders will use to create the great products of tomorrow, join our team. The AWS UX Research Operations Program Manager will be a force-multiplier for our UX Research team, amplifying our efforts and impact. This is a people management leadership role. The person in this role serves as the first point of contact for research operations planning, roadmapping, and vision-setting.
At Modern Treasury, we are building payments infrastructure to power $750 trillion in bank transfers every year. Before Modern Treasury there has never been a universal API into the global banking system. Our ambition is to be the de facto standard for money movement for the world’s most innovative and fastest growing companies. Our customers use our APIs to automate payouts, direct debits, balance tracking and other payments use cases at scale. Join our engineering team at Modern Treasury to help build the new foundation of business and finance.
Podcasts
Last Week in AWS: Amazon’s Competitive Advantage
Last Week in AWS: gimme-aws-creds, Possibly Okta’s AWS Creds
Last Week in AWS: Shitposting as a Learning Style
Screaming in the Cloud: Allowing Aspiration to Lead with Tom Totenberg
Screaming in the Cloud: Creating “Quinntainers” with Casey Lee
Screaming in the Cloud: The Independent AWS Security Researcher with Scott Piper
YouTube: ClickOps
YouTube: Siphoning through the Acronyms with Liz Rice
Choice Cuts
What can happen when you copy Lambda function code from the Internet and deploy it to your AWS account? Read the Sysdig blog that walks you through a real attack scenario from a black box and white box angle to uncover a vulnerable AWS Lambda function and learn the best practices to mitigate this vector attack.
Amazon Macie adds support for discovering more types of sensitive data – And attendant with this comes the ability to discover more types of sensitive cost centers as this thing misconfigured still costs a king’s ransom.
Amazon Neptune now offers a free trial – No one knows what the hell a giraffe database is, but now you get a free month of begrudging usage to realize that you still don’t know what the hell a giraffe database is.
Amazon Polly Launches a new Austrian German Neural Text-to-Speech voice – I can’t wait for my Roomba to yell at me in a voice that sounds like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s robot sister.
Amazon Textract launches new Queries feature within Analyze Document API – Nice, I can ask intelligent questions about documents that Textract analyzes, such as "is this post-employment non-compete that AWS wants me to sign and is scoped to all of Amazon reasonable?" I do hope it correctly returns "no the hell it is not."
Autoscaling in AWS Glue is now Generally Available – A serverless service is defined by AWS as "automatically scales," so now AWS has apparently just flat out forgotten what words are supposed to mean.
Announcing general availability of AWS Glue Interactive Sessions – "Go in and putter around with it by hand" used to be an antipattern; now it’s a feature. It’s always been my debugging strategy.
AWS Security Hub launches cross-Region security scores and compliance statuses – This cuts my workload by 22x. Thanks!
AWS Step Functions expands support for over 20 new AWS SDK integrations – Nice! Kubernetes for AWS Services is how I’m going to start thinking about Step Functions.
EC2 Auto Scaling now lets you set a default instance warm-up time for all instance scaling and replacement actions – If you autoscale manually, the default instance warm-up time depends upon how awake your on-call person is.
Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 is Generally Available: Instant Scaling for Demanding Workloads – "A year and a half in preview" would have been odd but understandable had this been v1; I’d have considered v1 to be the preview personally. There’s "swing and a miss" and then there’s whatever the heck this is.
Automatically Detect Operational Issues in Lambda Functions with Amazon DevOps Guru for Serverless – The original version of this post mentioned it didn’t cost anything. It no longer says that. I’ve configured it and I’m going to find out one way or another where the truth lies…
AWS Migration Hub Orchestrator – New Migration Orchestration Capability with Customizable Workflow Templates – As far as service names go, "Kubernetes for Cloud Migrations" would ironically have been more understandable–not to mention accurate.
A decade of innovating with AWS Marketplace – I don’t largely give a toss about AWS Marketplace, but I also strongly advise that you read this blog post. Stephen Orban talks a bit about his personal journey with Marketplace within it. I care remarkably little for the minutiae of services, but very much for the stories of the humans who build them.
Amazon Redshift continues its price-performance leadership – Snowflake is in retreat. Redshift is the leader. We have always been at war with Eastasia.
Share data securely across Regions using Amazon Redshift data sharing – Yeah, no. See, I can handle sharing data between virtually any two points "securely;" it’s not exactly hard. SSH / rsync, two endpoints that can reach each other, done. I’m much more interested in sharing data economically, which thanks to AWS data transfer pricing dimensions is basically 14-dimensional chess.
Flexible IP Address Management Solution for AWS Control Tower – I like this solution very much! It’s "an alternative solution to the VPC IPAM feature" as per the article. Allow me to translate this for you: I could buy Microsoft 365 licenses for everyone at The Duckbill Group solely so they can manage IP addresses in Excel, and it would cost a couple of orders of magnitude less than VPC’s IPAM would cost us. It’s a great feature at an absolutely ridiculous price that I’m incapable of taking seriously.
How Expedia Group built Database as a Service (DBaaS) offering using AWS Service Catalog – Because the 40 managed database offerings AWS offers weren’t enough, Expedia Group built their own. "Sure, why not," said AWS, and let them post about it. We can only assume that "AWS GoForIt (With Expedia Group Compatibility)" is a forthcoming re:Invent launch.
Tools
While AWS doesn’t like to talk about it, this multi-cloud thing is…well a thing. This is where MinIO comes in. MinIO’s high performance, Kubernetes-native object store works on every cloud – literally all of them from AWS to Zayo. This means you can build S3-like data infrastructure anywhere. The world’s fastest object store with READ/WRITE speeds in excess of 325 GiB/sec/165 GiB/sec respectively, MinIO can handle any workload – from modern databases to AI/ML and advanced analytics. Couple that with a suite of enterprise features for ILM, IAM, security and resilience and organization can architect consistency for their data persistency – across and between clouds. Don’t take our word for it, see for yourself at min.io/download.
I historically used pandoc for it, but unofunction is an AWS Lambda function that converts any document format that LibreOffice can import to any document format that LibreOffice can export.
loggie is an open source version of what Cribl does as best I can tell. I love the space and am thrilled to see more options.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
