Good Morning!
There are definitely some doozies in this week’s AWS announcements. I’d call them out now, but why spoil them for you?
On the YouTube front, I recently talked about 17 More Ways to Run Containers in AWS and learned about the Magic of Tailscale with Avery Pennarun. Check them out!
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!
A handy way to convert websites to PDFs using Lambda Function URLs.
Brendan Greg is apparently now a Fellow at Intel. I look forward to him being promoted to a Nice Fellow at Intel.
My post on How to Win in Cloud is ideally going to land in the right quarters; I don’t want to have one big winner and then some also-rans in this industry.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise to regular readers of this newsletter, but The Register confirms that AWS, Google and Microsoft dominate cloud.
Jobs
The AWS User Experience Products & Platform team is responsible for products that enable AWS users to manage their applications and infrastructure on AWS. Our mission is to deliver an effective, efficient, and loved user experience that makes it easy for all users to discover, learn, and build on AWS. Today, we own the AWS Management Console, the AWS Console Mobile App, the AWS Chatbot, as well as the User Experience Platform used by 175+ AWS service teams to develop and deliver their user experience across multiple channels (web, mobile, chat).
The AWS User Experience Products & Platform team is a multi-disciplinary team comprising members from different areas – UX Research, UX Design, User Insights & Analytics, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Secure/Available/Scalable (at AWS scale) services, and Web/Mobile/Conversational User Interfaces. Our team is a great place for those who are passionate about building great user and developer experiences for millions of users across the globe. Our team members love solving challenging problems to innovate on behalf of AWS users who come from diverse backgrounds spanning different personas, differing levels of experience, different countries, and different expectations on how they would like to interact with AWS.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: Amazon CloudWatch for Sharon
Last Week In AWS: How to Win in Cloud
Last Week In AWS: Serverlessly Get Your CloudGoat
Screaming in the Cloud: Automating in Pre-Container Times with Michael DeHaan
Screaming in the Cloud: Leading the Cloud Security Pack with Yoav Alon
Screaming in the Cloud: The Magic of Tailscale with Avery Pennarun
YouTube: The Next 17 Ways to Run Containers on AWS
YouTube: The Magic of Tailscale with Avery Pennarun
Choice Cuts
Tired of egregious egress? Understand why SMBs and Enterprise are relocating their workloads from EC2 to Vultr in droves when you try Vultr’s new Optimized Compute Instances. Starting at $28/mo, you can free yourself from Big Tech’s unpredictable, competitive practices when you deploy in 60 seconds or less today. Redeem $150 in free infrastructure credit for Last Week in AWS readers!
Amazon RDS Data API now supports returning SQL results as a simplified JSON string – This… this is what 3/4 of REST APIs do, isn’t it?
Amazon RDS now supports Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) – It’s never been easier to use new and creative ways to rack up data transfer bills!
Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer now supports suppression of files and folders in code reviews – Cloud Economics win here: the suppressed lines of code are not billed.
Amazon Connect now supports up to six participants on a customer service call – Amazon Connect is gearing up for the absolute worst customer service call you’ve ever been on. Holy god, six people?!
The New Amazon ElastiCache console is now available – I read this as “the old ElastiCache console hadn’t been updated since 2012.”
Amazon Lex now supports custom vocabulary – Okay, hit reply and tell me what words would be in a “Last Week in AWS” custom vocabulary for Amazon Lex! C’mon, it’s only fair that you roast me for a change, AWS friends! The best entries will be turned into… well, something anyway.
AWS Compute Optimizer adds four new Trusted Advisor checks – I really think it’s a bad look to say “I know how to save you money, but I won’t tell you unless you pay for the Business or higher tier support package.”
Eyewitness to history: Watching as the cloud transforms customer experience – To my mind there’s no better way to describe “referring to the thing your company sells as ‘being an eyewitness to history'” than “wanking in the wind.” Do you HEAR yourselves?!
Introducing Kubernetes Resource View in Amazon EKS console – Whoa whoa whoa. What do the Kubernetes people need a console for? Shouldn’t this information be delivered via YAML?
Observability for AWS App Runner VPC networking – The real value of App Runner is how simple it makes deploying a containerized application, so of course here’s a way to once again complicate it back into disaster territory.
Reduce log-storage costs by automating retention settings in Amazon CloudWatch – Oh my god. Setting a default log retention policy in CloudWatch should be a button click in the console, not a Lambda function triggered by EventBridge.
Blocking illegal viewers from streaming services using GeoComply – “Millions of adults in the U.S. use a VPN to illegally access streaming services in other countries.” Bold claims require bold evidence; what law are they violating? Before you answer, consider that Terms of Service are not laws. Further consider that referring to people who work against your business model as “criminals” is a bold claim. I’d laugh this out of my queue had it appeared anywhere other than an AWS official blog. Note that before I called some attention to it, it looked like this, so if you click the AWS link and wonder what the heck I’m talking about, check that one before you email me.
Integrating existing AWS CloudTrail configurations when launching AWS Control Tower – I want to do this–OH GOD NEVERMIND I just saw the architecture diagram. Burn it all down and start again!
Bangalore International Airport Limited, AWS, and Intel announce new Joint Innovation Center – This is what happens when three years of backlogged budget for enterprise ads in airports all gets released at once.
How Natural Resources Canada migrated petabytes of geospatial data to the cloud – It’s worth pointing out that while transferring those two petabytes in to AWS is free, transferring them out to the internet just once would cost over $106K in US dollars.
Disaster recovery monitoring of AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery – I want you to read the title of this blog post aloud, and then wonder if it really embodies Insisting on the Highest Standards.
When Artificial Intelligence becomes more than a passion – …and starts becoming a problem? Snark aside, this is a great story from someone who took the time to learn about AWS’s ML offerings–because instead of handwavy marketing promises, he talks about how it directly benefited his career.
Tools
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.
If you need to see what your database looks like from multiple locations across the internet, this Multilocation DNS Looking Glass should help you out.
Not so much a cloud tool as it is a writing tool, Vale is effectively an open source Grammarly equivalent.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
