Good Morning!
Happy Monday! The first telltale signs of re:Invent are in the air–wait, no, that’s Halloween and AWS has broken me to the point where autumn and their mad rush to drop 5 million services are one and the same in my mind. That bodes ill…
From the Community
Free Copy of Honeycomb’s O’Reilly Book: Observability Engineering
Looking to make the switch from monitoring to observability? Download your free copy of Honeycomb’s O’Reilly book: Observability Engineering to help you get started. Debrief the chapters with the authors themselves during our Authors’ Cut Series.
Andreas Wittig asserts that AWS IQ is a race to the bottom and I do not disagree with his analysis.
Long time friend of the newsletter / person horrified to hear himself described that way James Sanders has gone to CCS Insight and put out his first post: How Cloud Platforms Are Transforming to Better Serve Customers. As usual, he gets it right.
It may seem odd for me to have written that AWS Ingress Actually Is Free, but it’s nice to have the proof.
I agree with everything in this AWS doesn’t make sense for scientific computing post, with a single caveat: "provided you have enough work to keep the hardware busy for the duration of the analysis period." The author obviously does; I obviously do not.
I’d somehow missed hearing about QUIC until CloudFront supported it; now The Register has a column explaining why QUIC is not a replacement for TCP, and is authored by Bruce Davie, a living networking legend. When he says things, smart people shut up immediately so they can listen.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: AWS Data Transfer Charges: Ingress Actually Is Free
Last Week In AWS: Getting Lost in Cloud Map
Last Week In AWS: Higher Cross-region SSO Availability
Screaming in the Cloud: Feature Flags & Dynamic Configuration Through AWS AppConfig with Steve Rice
Screaming in the Cloud: Raising Awareness on Cloud-Native Threats with Michael Clark
Choice Cuts
Managing shards. Maintenance windows. Overprovisioning. ElastiCache bills. shudder It’s time for caching to be simpler. Momento Serverless Cache lets you forget the backend to focus on good code and great user experiences. With true autoscaling and a pay-per-use pricing model, it makes caching easy. No matter your cloud provider, start free with Momento Serverless Cache today.
Amazon Chime announces new mobile apps with features to improve your meeting experience – I’m excited about this, but it’s been a week and they’re still not in the Apple app stores…
Amazon Detective improves search by supporting case insensitivity – It’s easy to sit here and cast stones for this taking so long, but honestly I just assume they were working on higher priority things, like making Rekognition stop supporting racial insensitivity.
AWS Activate is now open to all startups – This is a good thing. From the looks of it you can get credits for a business without having to spend three times their value filling out forms first.
AWS CloudFormation StackSets increases limits on three service quotas – You can now deploy up to 100,000 stack instances per stack set, which is a mind-bogglingly complex org account structure to me. If you need this or are using anything close to this, please hit reply; I want to talk to you about how your environment works.
AWS IQ now supports partners and independent consultants in Australia, Europe, Japan, and other regions – Amazon IQ ("Validating Upwork’s Business Model") expands beyond its initial launch of "USA only."
Announcing a new Cost Explorer console experience – I can’t honestly decide whether I dislike this because it’s bad, or it’s in fact a good change and I’m just prickly because six years of muscle memory have now been forced to change.
Omdia study: how the media and entertainment industry uses cloud marketplace solutions – Okay, this is the first thing I’ve seen from AWS that causes me to seriously reconsider my stance that the AWS Marketplace is purely to avoid procurement hassles.
Best Practices for Hosting Regulated Gaming Workloads in AWS Local Zones and on AWS Outposts – A regulated gaming workload is a type of workload that’s subject to federal, state, local, or tribal laws related to the regulation of gambling and real money gaming. Examples of this are casino operations, online poker, and not checking your AWS bill several times a week.
Reducing AWS Fargate Startup Times with zstd Compressed Container Images – "Compress it to be smaller and it moves a lot faster" is just one of several lessons we can take from childhood snowball fights. "Some jackhole will inevitably try and sneak a rock into one at some point" applies less to Fargate and more to SageMaker Canvas’s billing dimensions.
[Early Release] O’Reilly book: Identity-Native Infrastructure Access Management
Still using passwords? It’s not the 90’s anymore! Learn how linking access to identity is the only way to securely scale access. The first chapters of the latest O’Reilly book are available today. Download now.
Managing your Game Studio on AWS part 2: – This is pretty rich given that a game studio posted a heartbreaking post about how Amazon GameSparks shutting down is eviscerating them. Honestly I don’t know which cloud I’d trust if I were a gaming studio these days…
Netflix innovates and entertains the world, powered by AWS – Wait, Netflix is an AWS customer?! Why didn’t anyone mention this in a keynote, whitepaper, webinar, job posting, tattoo, LinkedIn profile, or unsolicited in every elevator at re:Invent?
How to use AWS Config and CloudTrail to find who made changes to a resource – Your blameless culture can now seamlessly pivot to a blame Steven culture.
Introducing AWS Global Accelerator IPv6 – It’s finally happening: IPv6 is starting to become ubiquitous. What will three very specific people I’m thinking of find to annoy people about now?
Canary Testing with AWS App Mesh and Tekton – Look, if you’ve got to test it this many times, I’m just gonna call it: your canary is probably not going to get in to Harvard.
The economic impact of AWS’s investment in Japan – I adore posts like this. "Why should I use AWS instead of my own data center" has a lot of answers, but there’s something visceral about "AWS invested over $2.3 billion in data centers. So far this year. In Japan alone."
Goldman Sachs and AWS examine efficient ways to load data into quantum computers – Faced with struggles regarding their foray into retail banking, Goldman Sachs repositions around extradimensional banking.
The importance of a mentor in your cloud learning journey – This one is too important to snark about. Mentors are everything when it comes to making the most of your career. If you don’t have one, I can’t urge you strongly enough to find someone you trust to give you context around so many things. An awful lot of our careers are built around unspoken norms, and those are only passed on through mentorship style conversations.
Tools
Push your code when it’s ready, launch it when you are ready, and most importantly: log off you’re ready and not worry about your coworkers calling you at 3AM and screaming you the songs of their people, specifically "Rage in D Minor." Take control of your launches with AWS AppConfig Feature Flags, and stop causing problems for other people on purpose.
kube-downscaler scales down Kubernetes deployments after hours. Unfortunately it then scales them back up again in the morning, but no tool is perfect.
cdk-fck-nat is simply put: a CDK construct that stands up NAT instances rather than the sadly expensive Managed NAT Gateway. It’s not suitable for all use cases–read the caveats carefully!
It seems time once again with the Cost Explorer console change to surface aws-cost-explorer-report, which queries CE and outputs an Excel report. If you don’t understand why someone would find this useful, you don’t work in Finance.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
