Good Morning!
After a fair bit of looking, I wasn’t able to find a job board that catered specifically to AWS-centric skills. I know people are looking for work right now, and I want to help them out–so I built one myself. Meet jobs.lastweekinaws.com; should you happen to work at AWS and wish not to, the lastweekataws.com domain points to the same place.
If you’re looking for work, check it out. If you’re hiring and want to source candidates that actually know what AWS is, then post a job.
This is the MVP / "v1" of the job board. Should people find it useful, I intend to do a whole lot more with the second version; stay tuned.
From the Community
Join my friends at ChaosSearch tomorrow on Pi Day (Tuesday, 3.14) for their sure-to-be-incredible “Embrace the Chaos” virtual event! Hear from Thomas Hazel, Founder & CTO, and Ed Walsh, CEO, as they disrupt the conventional thinking on data analytics, discussing how "what we think we know" vs. "what we truly know" is directly connected to our most valuable resource: data. Also hear from AWS’ own Kevin Miller, as well as the folks from Digital River, Transeo and more. Save the date & enter to win one of 10 Starscope Monocular Telescopes to be given away… see you there!
The AWS bill impact of making everything loosely coupled. It’s like I keep saying: in cloud, cost and architecture are the same thing.
What’s the current state of Cloud Repatriation Trends? Not seeing much of it actually happening, just a lot of noise about it if you ask me.
Guide to analyzing log data with CloudWatch Logs Insights — Cloudash Blog – empty
Twitter apparently decided to not pay its AWS bill, so Amazon threatened to pull its Twitter ads. I must confess, it never occurred to me to pull a "screw you, I’m not paying" as a bill reduction strategy. Please don’t try this.
Teri Radichel has a post on how best to Close an AWS Account in an Organization without leaving dangling resources orphaned forevermore.
Newly-minted AWS Hero Aidan Steele pointed out that if you want to run a go binary in lambda, it’s just a go build -o bootstrap away. I’d forgotten that; do that instead!
Amazon’s retail store has a notice (you may have to log into an Amazon account to see this) that order history reports will no longer be available after March 20th. Oh, now pulling data and analyzing it is too much work?
Benedict Evans has a great analysis of Retail, search and Amazon’s $40bn ‘advertising’ business. Their advertising business distills down to "paid placement on the underpants store" and frankly shouldn’t exist.
Andrew Warfield (AWS VP and Distinguished Engineer) gave a talk about his experiences with millions of hard drives that power S3. It’s a great talk, and also we now have official confirmation that S3 does in fact use hard drives to store data. This puts a stake through the heart of my "a bunch of elves with good memories and fast typing skills" theory.
This post by a pair of Zac(k)s talks about the relative performance tradeoffs of AWS-native provisioning methods.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: Happy Fun Podcast That Tells It Like It Is
Last Week In AWS: LastPass, LastHope, LostPass, LostHope
Screaming in the Cloud: Evolving Alongside Cloud Technology with Jason McKay
Screaming in the Cloud: The Realities of Working in Data with Emily Gorcenski
Choice Cuts
Are you dedicating engineering hours, days or months (!) toward writing infrastructure as code? Just stop it! Firefly can scan your cloud to find unmanaged cloud assets such as Lambda functions, S3 buckets, and more then create IaC such as Terraform and Pulumi – including dependencies and modules! Not only do you get fast IaC coverage, the results are consistent. Try it for free at gofirefly.io.
Amazon EC2 announces the ability to create Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) that can boot on UEFI and Legacy BIOS – I… why would I… okay, I am confused. AMIs run on EC2 and nothing else. Why would I need to support legacy BIOS–oh wait, some ancient operating systems demand that. What the HELL are some of you running on EC2?!
AWS Application Composer is now generally available – After being teased in preview, it’s now available for your "spinning up containers" purposes.
AWS CloudShell now supports the modular variant of AWS Tools for PowerShell – I’ve never heard of someone using PowerShell inside of a Linux shell (which is what CloudShell is) but I’m sure those folks are out there. If you’re one of them, would you mind whacking reply and telling me about your use case? I’m having trouble picturing it.
AWS Config now supports 18 new resource types – For most of us this is simply going to manifest as even more of an AWS Config tax. We don’t know what it’s doing, but Control Tower requires it and thus here we are staring at it on the bill.
AWS Lambda now supports up to 10 GB of ephemeral storage for Lambda functions in 6 additional regions – Unfortunately other than piecing together multiple blog posts like this one there’s no way to figure out which features of a given service are supported in a given region other than attempting to deploy something there and seeing if it succeeds. It feels like that should change.
AWS announces new competition structure for the 2023 Season – I was super excited to see what this meant for the expo floor at re:Invent this year until I clicked and realized it was talking about DeepRacer.
AWS Resource Explorer supports 12 new resource types – I keep forgetting that this doesn’t cover all resource types and now I’m realizing why I couldn’t find a thing I’d sworn I’d built in a particular account last week.
Announcing lower data warehouse base capacity configuration for Amazon Redshift Serverless – But it still doesn’t scale to zero, and thus is not Serverless.
Meet the Newest AWS Heroes – March 2023 – This quarter’s new AWS Heroes have been announced. Marvel at how heroic they are, then come sit with me on the curb so we can clap as they pass by.
Subscribe to AWS Daily Feature Updates via Amazon SNS – This is a bizarre way to sign up for an email newsletter; the email then fails to properly indent JSON while delivering the content in JSON anyway. I just… who is this for, exactly?
Calculate Amazon DynamoDB reserved capacity recommendations to optimize costs – Before you do this, you definitely want to see if switching a given table to pay-per-request is better for your workload. Thank me later.
How to use deletion protection to enhance your Amazon DynamoDB table protection strategy – Well guess what I’m enabling immediately? This reminds me of the time that Point-In-Time-Recovery for DynamoDB came out exactly three days after I really could have used the feature. I’m not tempting fate again!
Push notification engagement metrics tracking – Sure are a whole lot of companies out there who’ve forgotten that my electronic devices exist for my convenience, not theirs.
Build Cloud Operations skills using the new AWS Observability Training – I keep meaning to figure out how CloudWatch actually works; this might not be a half-bad way to do it.
Tools
One view to see them all! Kentik provides Cloud and NetOps teams with complete visibility into hybrid and multi-cloud networks. Ensure an amazing customer experience, reduce cloud and network costs, and optimize performance at scale — from internet to data center to container to cloud. Learn how you can get control of complex cloud networks at www.kentik.com.
A daily weather report of what the Lambda cold-start climate looks like across various runtimes seems like it might be very useful to track this stuff over time.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
