Good Morning!
If you (well, not you, but probably the saddest looking person on your finance team) are tracking commitments in spreadsheets and hoping your discount strategy still makes sense, you’re not alone. Most teams are cobbling together strategies/tools that weren’t designed for the scale and complexity of modern cloud environments. That’s why we’re building Skyway over at Duckbill—to take you away from all that. Now the exclusive sponsor of Last Week in AWS, and also the company I co-founded. Cloud contract issues? Get in touch.
Things I Found on the Internet
Matt Rosoff wrote the most humane take I’ve seen on Amazon’s 16,000-person layoff. No platitudes, no LinkedIn hustle culture nonsense – just honest acknowledgment that getting laid off isn’t your fault, even when everyone (including yourself) tries to make it feel like it is.
What AWS Has For Us This Time
Finally, a way to see which developers are using ChatGPT to write their IAM policies. HINT: it’s the folks with IAM policies that actually work. The feature itself is fine, but categorizing GenAI traffic separately feels like AWS preparing to itemize it on your bill later. At least TLS inspection means you’ll know exactly what you’re blocking.
More room to build: serverless services now support payloads up to 1 MB
Four times the payload means four times the bill when you realize those “simple” events are now hauling around entire transaction histories. Sure beats S3 workarounds, but your Lambda costs just got interesting. At least they’re solving a problem they created.
Introducing pre-warming for Amazon Keyspaces tables – Pre-warming your database so it doesn’t choke during Black Friday? That’s just admitting “serverless auto-scaling” was always a polite fiction. At least they’re honest about charging you to keep capacity warm instead of pretending it magically appears when needed.
Managing IP address exhaustion for Amazon RDS Proxy
RDS Proxy ate all your IP addresses and now AWS is graciously explaining how to fix the problem they created. IPv6 could solve this, but if you can’t use it, congratulations on your subnet expansion project. At least they send you an alert before everything catches fire, provided you’re paying attention enough to catch it.
Strategies for upgrading Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL from version 13
PostgreSQL 13 support ends February 2026, so AWS helpfully published a guide to convince you upgrading is worth the inevitable pain. They lead with performance improvements because “we’re forcing you to do this anyway” doesn’t test well in focus groups. At least you have a year to procrastinate–wait, it’s already 2026? SHIT SHIT SHIT
File integrity monitoring with AWS Systems Manager and Amazon Security Lake
They’ve turned “check if your files changed” into a six-service Rube Goldberg machine involving S3, Lambda, Security Hub, and Athena. This used to be a cron job and some shell scripts. But sure, let’s add QuickSight dashboards to monitor our config files.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
