Good Morning!
An eagle-eyed reader saw a nuance to AWS’s recent price cut for Nvidia GPU instances: it seems that people who’d taken out a savings plan prior to (or slightly afterwards) won’t see a price reduction in the instance price they pay for the remainder of their term. It’s ambiguous, and I could be wrong, but that’s kinda the point. This is pretty expensive to be this ambiguous.
From the Community
An interesting dive into AI at Amazon: a case study of brittleness.
A remarkably handy guide to enforcing least privilege in AWS IAM by using IAM Access Analyzer and service Last Accessed data. I’d love to see the Access Analyzer do this natively.
AWS funded FreeBSD for a year and then stopped. I’m not sure how to feel about it.
My business partner drafted What To Do When You’re Underwater on Your AWS EDP, which is an increasingly common question. As AWS goes for more margin lately, it may be worth reviewing if it applies to your situation.
If you haven’t read my A Day in the Life of Server #47B-2: An AWS Data Center Memoir you’re missing out.
The Linux Foundation tiptoes around the reality of fixing the WordPress ecosystem, by launching a package manager to wrest control from the spiteful bastards at Automattic. They frame it WAY more delicately, though.,
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: AWS’s Snaky Region
Screaming in the Cloud: Presenting at re:Invent with Matt Berk and Bowen Wang
Choice Cuts
Amazon EFS is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Taipei) region – This is a delightful spin on "we missed last week’s launch window for the new region, so now we’re going to push it out and get another +1 in our launched features KPI."
Amazon S3 Tables now provide storage cost visibility for individual tables – Translation: AWS finally figured out that "How much does this specific table cost?" is a question actual humans ask. The implementation? This is AWS at its best: your tasks include enabling resource-level data, navigating Cost Explorer, configuring CUR reports, and waiting for a gradual rollout. It’s like they asked, "What’s the most complicated way to show a number?" and then added two more steps.
AWS Console Mobile Application adds support for CloudWatch Log Insights – Hell yes. No, I’m not being sarcastic here: hell yes. I want to know what the heck is going on when I get paged at dinner about my app breaking, and Log Insights is one of the best tools to figure that out from a phone. Now get Amazon Q to be able to consult its output, then talk to Siri. In a few years I’ll be able to ask my phone why the site broke without taking the thing out of my pocket.
AWS launches public preview of Amazon Elastic VMware Service (Amazon EVS) – AWS fires a warning shot directly into Broadcom’s bulbous ass, as it throws their customers/hostages a life raft.
Stream multi-channel audio to Amazon Transcribe using the Web Audio API – Okay, credit where due here. This post inspired me to build something zany. Claude Code is over in my terminal building it out now while I write this newsletter. Here’s a fun offer: if you’re on the Amazon Transcribe team, reach out and I’ll tell you about it.
Amazon to launch second Secret Cloud Region in 2025 – My dude, I’m afraid you’ve broken confidentiality by posting this. Secret’s out…
CVE-2025-6031 – Insecure device pairing in end-of-life Amazon Cloud Cam – Attention shoppers: That Cloud Cam gathering dust since Amazon killed it in 2022? It’s not just obsolete, it’s actively dangerous. When powered on, it tries to call its defunct mothership, fails, then opens itself to any passing attacker like a digital barn door. Amazon’s security team dutifully posted this consumer product warning in… let me see here… the AWS enterprise security feed. Because nothing says "we care about consumer product safety" like burying critical vulnerabilities where only DevOps teams will find them. Hardware from Amazon: Come for the features, stay because you forgot to check the AWS security RSS feed.
AWS screwed up the What’s New at AWS page – The "What’s New at AWS" page is now only viewable 8 posts into the past at a time, and it stops two years back. I have a backup myself, but this is both useful and important to customers. I’m hoping this is an intermediary step to something greater, because if it’s not, well… if I had that decision maker’s sense of self-awareness, I’d legally classify as furniture.
Tools
AWS has published API Models for all public AWS Services to GitHub. This is likely useful for some of you.
One of the many problems with Aurora is that when you kill it, it doesn’t stay dead. Keep it from resurrecting in a week.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
