Good Morning!
I don’t really know what we expected from Adam Selipsky’s re:Invent 2026 keynote, but it sure wasn’t what we ended up getting.
In other news, AWS has decided to launch a hiring campaign on Blind apparently centered around the theme of Don’t Read the Comments. Forget Day 2 thinking, we’re into Day 3 with this level of garbage.
On YouTube I speculated on the events of re:Invent 2026. It’s pretty dramatic.
From the Community
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I really enjoyed this even-handed review of the CDK: The Good, The Bad and the Scary.
Seeing the Clouds with the Cloud is a story about attempting to use AWS Ground Station. The author’s experience mirrors my own; despite both of us requesting access to the service for some experiments, neither one of us ever heard back from AWS about the service ever again. The author went with Azure’s equivalent and I think I’m going to do the same.
Jeff Barr told a highly entertaining story about the time four people from the FBI put themselves onto his calendar.
Demonstrating the leadership that Amazon professes to have but absolutely does not, Microsoft is going to remove its non-compete clauses from its employment agreements. They’re also no longer going to be enforcing them for existing employees; the exception to this is "senior leadership." I’m mostly okay with this; by the time you’re a Microsoft exec, you are a Serious Professional and can negotiate effectively in a way that a 22-year-old new hire likely cannot.
Despite the strange title, The Strange, Too-Familiar Tale of ‘Uncle Suitcase’ is basically a dragging of Amazon Cognito.
After 17 years AWS VP of Identity Jim Scharf has left Amazon. That’s one hell of a run; he’s been one of those highly capable folks who’s led a number of turnarounds on services over the course of his tenure.
An Amazon engineer is suing Amazon for not covering work-from-home costs in California as employers are required to do. Source: I am a California employer, and we absolutely cover those costs for our staff in accordance with our legal obligations / a basic sense of decency.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: Cars 4, featuring “Pixar Tractor on AWS”
Last Week In AWS: Azure’s Nightmare Year
Last Week In AWS: Googling the AWS CDK V1
Last Week In AWS: Kubernetes Firewalln’t
Last Week In AWS: The Strange, Too Familiar Tale of Uncle Suitcase
Screaming in the Cloud: Connecting Cybersecurity to the Whole Organization with Alyssa Miller
Last Week In AWS: re:Invent Keynote 2026: Analysis
Screaming in the Cloud: Conveying Authenticity in Marketing with Sharone Zitzman
Screaming in the Cloud: Learning in Public with swyx
Screaming in the Cloud: Not Just a Dinosaur with Guillermo Ruiz
YouTube: Diving Duckbill First into the Depths of Data with Alex Rasmussen
YouTube: re:Invent 2026 Analysis
Screaming in the Cloud: Working Smarter with Oki Doki and Marie Poulin
Choice Cuts
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Amazon EKS now supports DNS resolution of the cluster private endpoint in AWS GovCloud (US) regions – In my head-canon I choose to believe that prior to this release GovCloud customers were having to rsync an /etc/hosts file around to all of their containers.
Announcing AWS Cost Allocation Tag API – This is a huge deal to me as a Cloud Economist. Unfortunately there’s no great way for me to explain why I’m so happy about this without channeling "finance nerd who’s incredibly giddy about a change to an accounting rule" energy in the process.
AWS DeepRacer introduces quota management – DeepRacer gets the cost limitation controls that the rest of the services desperately need but do not have, presumably because DeepRacer competitions strike at the heart of the AWS Marketing budget.
Reduce read I/O cost of your Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL database with range partitioning | AWS Database Blog – Hoo boy, this one has a story behind it. The original version of this article had a typo that labeled "IO operations" as "cost." As a result, it looked like this hypothetical workload was optimizing a $2 trillion Aurora bill into a $6 trillion Aurora bill. Having made a number of similar errors myself, my heart goes out to the authors along with an enduring offer to take them to dinner should we ever be in the same zip code. ❤️
The updated post is very good and worth reading.
Building Games on AWS: Security – New YouTube Video Series Launch – I prefer this to the customer approach of "playing games with AWS Security."
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.
How service providers can use natural language processing to gain insights from customer tickets with Amazon Comprehend – "Wow," says the service provider in a stunning lack of empathy, "customers sure do use some coarse language when talking to our reps. I’m sure glad I’m not on the support floor!"
Weekly forecasts can now start on Sunday with Amazon Forecast – This entire thing is absolutely amazing to me. The mindset of not thinking to make this adjustable originally. The sheer triviality of the request for almost every use case. The one finnicky customer who must have raised absolute hell about the issue. The sheer blinding frustration they must have smacked into. The obnoxious work no doubt required to make what looks like a tiny change but is certainly a colossal change under the hood. Art. This whole feature enhancement is art.
Cloud rendering using Pixar Tractor on AWS – "Pixar Tractor on AWS" is destined to be the absolute worst character in Cars 4.
Using open data to study the sounds of the ocean and create art – This is the most poetic description I’ve ever heard for "receive your AWS bill, then immediately hurl yourself into the sea out of grief."
Tools
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Accumulus is a tool that purports to simplify your AWS Lambda view. I rather like the model.
If you want to run your own GitHub Actions runners on Fargate or Lambda, check out cdk-github-runners. I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks now.
An AWS Lambda quickstart generator exists in the form of function-stencil. I really need to dig into the CDK extensibility options; I want to be able to run a version of cdk init that adds some custom stuff–project tagging, for example. If anyone has any tips on this, please send them my way.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
