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From the Community
When the headline said AWS previews CodeWhisperer trained on internal code repositories I was worried for a second that it was trained on internal AWS code; thankfully it trains on YOUR internal code instead of theirs. Otherwise, it would start "correcting" your APIs as soon as they demonstrated any kind of consistency.
Rewind has an analysis of how they lowered their AWS RDS spend using Aurora I/O-Optimized. Jumping through hoops to satisfy artificial constraints imposed by AWS’s billing model is exactly the kind of work every engineer wants to be doing.
I wish AWS would shut up about Generative AI. People living next to one of its data centers in Virgina just wish they would shut up.
The New Frontier of Cloud Economics: Why AWS Costs Are a Weighty Issue – I’m rather proud of my "Terabyte Pound Month" pricing dimension, personally.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: Message Vulnerability Researchers Well
Last Week In AWS: The New Frontier of Cloud Economics: Why AWS Costs Are a Weighty Issue
Last Week In AWS: The Pets-Not-Cattle Steer-ing Committee
Screaming in the Cloud: Solving the Case of the Infinite Cloud Spend with John Wynkoop
Choice Cuts
Amazon Aurora MySQL includes optimizations that reduce the database restart time by up to 65% – Isn’t this precisely the sort of thing that managed services are supposed to abstract away from a customer having to care about them? RDS remains frustrating in that regard.
Amazon EKS adds support for customer managed IAM policies – I like that it’s now easier for me to strip permissions from overly chatty EKS clusters to log their nonsense to CloudWatch Logs; that’s expensive at scale.
AMI Block Public Access now enabled for all new accounts and existing accounts with no public AMIs – Apparently, AWS has finally woken up and decided to put an end to the high school prom culture of "everyone has access" with their AMIs. I’ll never understand why this wasn’t the default fifteen years ago.
AWS Config now supports 19 new resource types – Oh balls. Config is about to get yet more expensive, yet again.
AWS Marketplace announces enhanced private offer user experience for sellers – This is no joke; I’ve done a few private offers over the past year, and to say that the old interface was "bad" is being considerably more charitable than I usually am.
AWS re:Post introduces Selections – If this had more content / a user base that wasn’t tiny, and was cited in more places than "dismissive replies from official AWS accounts on Twitter," this could turn into something. Go fix those things and find out, team!
EC2 Hibernate now supports 20 additional instance families on EC2 Spot – I’m sorry, I still can’t quite wrap my head around the idea that I still have to check, on a feature-by-feature basis, whether I can do something on a given EC2 instance type.
Announcing general availability of Amazon EC2 M2 Mac instances for macOS – Just in time for M3 Macs to drop later this week. Coming in RIGHT under the wire with this one…
Comparing AWS Lambda Arm vs. x86 Performance, Cost, and Analysis – Ooh, exciting: AWS is pitting Lambda ARM and x86 against each other in a performance, cost, and analysis smackdown. I wonder if the custom in-house chips that they’re pushing hard for everyone to use somehow come out ahead of the expensive Intel/AMD offering? Real nail-biter here, folks.
How Infosys Built an Enterprise Knowledge Management Assistant Using Generative AI on AWS – Infosys already has a naturally intelligent "knowledge management assistant" (and also attorney) that I’m quite fond of. Reader, I married her.
Rotate Your SSL/TLS Certificates Now – Amazon RDS and Amazon Aurora Expire in 2024 – Another day, another "didn’t we leave this behind in the dark ages" moment. The replacement certs expire in either 40 or 100 years depending upon which one you select. You’re burying a generational landmine, because you KNOW those systems will still be here to haunt our great grandchildren…
Build ROSA Clusters with Terraform – The problem with articles like this is that they tend to send the message "okay, after a decade of proving otherwise, pretend suddenly you’re about to start making smart decisions."
Build a web-based cryptocurrency wallet tracker with Amazon Managed Blockchain Access and Query – Every article like this on the AWS Database Blog erodes their hard-earned reputation as a serious division of a serious company.
Why AWS is the Best Place to Run Rust – The Rust Evangelism Strike Force and AWS Marketing team up to talk about work at you.
What’s top of mind for Chief Data Officers going into 2024? – "What the hell is my job, and what am I supposed to be doing day to day" is the honest answer.
EFA: how fixing one thing, lead to an improvement for … everyone | AWS HPC Blog – Led! It LED to an improvement! When the word "lead" is pronounced like "led," you’re talking about the element! Now, not to bury the lede, but this is a good story about how good acts can perpetuate other downstream positive outcomes.
Is Generative AI the Answer to All Questions? – Of course it isn’t. I choose to believe that this is an open letter to AWS’s executive leadership, begging them to let off the gas on the Generative AI torrent and get back to things that actually matter to their customers.
How to download your AWS Resilience Hub assessment results – What the… you click the clearly labeled "Download" button in the console! Right? RIGHT?! Oh my god you didn’t build one of those, so this article is one of your "glue a bunch of tools together and do Amazon’s work for them" pieces, isn’t it…
Gain practical experience building with Amazon CodeWhisperer through AWS Jam – Remember, it’s called AWS Jam because they can’t very well AWS Jelly sales pitches for their various products down your throat now, can they?
Boost your AWS proficiency with Solution-Focused Immersion Days – I too find that my AWS proficiency improves after attempting to drown myself in the river. Or, when it comes to Machine Learning®, the toilet.
Summary of the AWS Service Event in the Northern Virginia (US-EAST-1) Region – This is the first post-mortem in a while from AWS, and it’s fascinating reading. It’s wild to me just how much internal AWS stuff (including other services) depend on Lambda as a foundational building block. This writeup is amazing, and is a strong contender for "best thing out of AWS in 2023." I sincerely adore this.
AWS Disallowing Resale of Reserved Instances that were purchased at a discount – This was an email sent to specific customers, not an official AWS post, but I’m here for it. A number of crappy "resellers" were buying RIs for their customers under volume discount programs and then applying them to customer environments. There’s no real value to this past what customers can do on their own with a little bit of work; the only additional value was in the discount sharing. Trouble is, this has been against the AWS RI Marketplace’s terms of service since launch. I have no sympathy; if you build a business atop a ToS violation, you’ve made an ethical choice I cannot understand. This was always inevitable.
Tools
A curated list of tools that improve the cloud developer experience.
Thanks to Generative AI in reality, as opposed to what AWS Marketing thinks it means, the correct answer to "code is hard, can you describe your infrastructure bullshit to me using words" is now "yes" thanks to salami.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
