Good Morning!
Another week closer to re:Invent, and we’re starting to see things come out that are undoubtedly the underlying foundation of some more notable alerts. The tempo only increases until the show…
From the Community
It’s not just me; the Verge also reports that Amazon’s giant ads have ruined the Echo Show. I got rid of mine, and I basically buy everything electronic that Amazon makes.
Someone took my joke https://www.linkedin.com/posts/tobiasmuellerlg_in-2020-corey-quinn-published-a-humorous-activity-738 and once again made Route 53 into an actual database.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: Introducing Amazon QuickSlap
Screaming in the Cloud: Cloud Repatriation: Because Conspiracy Theories Are Cheaper with Deana Solis
Choice Cuts
Amazon Location Service Introduces New Map Styling Features for Enhanced Customization – They’re charging you to add contour lines to maps in 2025. Google Maps has been doing this for free since before some of your DevOps team was born. But sure, let’s call it "enhanced customization" instead of "catching up to baseline expectations while monetizing topography."
AWS Resource Explorer launches immediate resource discovery within a Region – This makes it sound like it’ll instantly see things, but this is AWS; nothing’s instant. You just don’t have to enable Resource Explorer, then come back tomorrow to find something anymore.
AWS SAM CLI adds Finch support, expanding local development tool options for serverless applications – I tried to get this working years ago and gave up in disgust. Maybe it’s time to review again.
Simplified model access in Amazon Bedrock – It just dawned on AWS that making customers navigate a bureaucratic hellscape just to try an AI model was bad for business. Now you can use Bedrock without filing paperwork like you’re applying for a mortgage. Progress is admitting your own friction was the problem.
Amazon EC2 now supports CPU options optimization for license-included instances – I don’t get it: EC2 has supported this for almost a decade. What exactly changed, the fact that the license now reflects the reduced cost?
Introducing Amazon EBS Volume Clones: Create instant copies of your EBS volumes – I do not understand the pricing decision here. You’re creating multiple EBS volumes, for which you charge, and you should charge for them, but you’re also charging a tiny fee per GB (that works out to 80¢ per TB) just… because you can? I can’t see this driving meaningful AWS-scale revenue, so I can only assume someone’s trying to fund their product team’s GenAI inference budget so they can start using the good Claude models instead of the cheap ones.
Optimizing document AI and structured outputs by fine-tuning Amazon Nova Models and on-demand inference – Fine-tuning Nova Lite for document processing costs $0.00021 per page at inference, which sounds great until you realize that’s on top of the training costs, storage fees, and the engineering hours explaining to your boss why the "simple OCR project" now involves machine learning ops.
Introducing URL and host header rewrite with AWS Application Load Balancers – After only a decade of asking, ALB now can rewrite URLs without forcing you through Lambda or some Rube Goldberg machine of redirects. Progress moves at the speed of feature requests backed by Enterprise Support contracts.
New Amazon EKS Auto Mode features for enhanced security, network control, and performance – They’ve added IPv6 egress translation, custom certificates, and KMS encryption to EKS Auto Mode, which should have been available on day one. They haven’t fixed the insane pricing.
Monitor, analyze, and manage capacity usage from a single interface with Amazon EC2 Capacity Manager – They made a dashboard to see if you’re wasting money on unused capacity. Spoiler: you are, and it’s called AWS.
Performance optimization strategies for MySQL on Amazon RDS – AWS publishes a 3,000-word guide on MySQL performance tuning that boils down to "you’re still doing all the hard work, we just charge you for the privilege of not managing patches." At least they’re upfront about customers bearing responsibility for schema design while AWS collects the managed service premium.
AWS re:Invent 2025: Reimagining customer experience with Amazon Connect – They’re hosting a reception at Giada, and after seeing customer Connect bills I can understand how they’re affording it.
I wrote about AWS Deprecates Two Dozen Services (Most of Which You’ve Never Heard Of). Don’t worry, it’s fine.
A FinOps Guide to Comparing Containers and Serverless Functions for Compute – Imagine that: the "serverless is always cheaper" narrative was marketing fiction. Turns out Lambda’s per-millisecond billing adds up fast when you’re not running a hello-world demo and start to scale to something that looks like a steady state. Spoiler alert: the answer to "which is cheaper" remains the consultant’s favorite response: "it depends."
Announcing vector search for Amazon ElastiCache – Amazon ElastiCache now does vector search, which is perfect for all those AI workloads you’re definitely not overpaying for already. Redis and Valkey both supported this before AWS blessed it, but now it comes with that signature "pay us to flip the switch" markup. Your LLM bill just got a friend.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
