--- title: "CloudFormation Salvation At Last" id: "14933" type: "newsletter" slug: "cloudformation-salvation-at-last" published_at: "2025-02-10T14:30:00+00:00" modified_at: "2025-02-10T14:30:00+00:00" url: "https://www.lastweekinaws.com/newsletter/cloudformation-salvation-at-last/" markdown_url: "https://www.lastweekinaws.com/newsletter/cloudformation-salvation-at-last.md" excerpt: "Good Morning! We’re solidly into 2025 now and uh… how’s everybody doing? Amazon’s earnings are out and it turns out we collectively spend over $100 billion a year now on AWS. Maybe it’s time to revisit our Managed NAT Gateway..." --- About the Author Corey is the Chief Cloud Economist at Duckbill, where he specializes in helping companies improve their AWS bills by making them smaller and less horrifying. He also hosts the "Screaming in the Cloud" and "AWS Morning Brief" podcasts; and curates "Last Week in AWS," a weekly newsletter summarizing the latest in AWS news, blogs, and tools, sprinkled with snark and thoughtful analysis in roughly equal measure. Sign up for the Newsletter Stay up to date on the latest AWS news, opinions, and tools, all lovingly sprinkled with a bit of snark. "*" indicates required fields ## [Good Morning](https://bsky.app/profile/quinnypig.com/post/3lgwv3lxy6s2d) ! We’re solidly into 2025 now and uh… how’s everybody doing? Amazon’s earnings are out and it turns out we collectively spend over $100 billion a year now on AWS. Maybe it’s time to revisit our Managed NAT Gateway choices… ## From the Community Congratulations to my friends Matt Coulter and Kristi Perreault (both AWS heroes) on [their recent engagement](https://bsky.app/profile/nideveloper.bsky.social/post/3lhbkh4ztak2r) ! Be sure to chime in with your best AWS-related pun. I have a new blog post up about a sneaky upcoming change: [AWS Tightens the Reins: New AWS SaaS Marketplace Rules Will Impact Your Commitments](https://www.duckbillgroup.com/blog/new-aws-marketplace-rules/) Yikes; [reused AWS S3 buckets a weak link in supply chain security](https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/04/abandoned_aws_s3/) isn’t a headline you like to read. ## Podcasts Last Week In AWS: [What the Hell is a Zone Group?](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/aws-morning-brief/what-the-hell-is-a-zone-group/) Screaming in the Cloud: [S3 and the Evolution of Storage with Andy Warfield](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/s3-and-the-evolution-of-storage-with-andy-warfield/) ## Choice Cuts [Amazon EBS now supports additional resource-level permissions for creating EBS volumes from snapshots](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2025/01/amazon-ebs-resource-level-permissions-creating-ebs-volumes-snapshots) – Joy of joys, because IAM permissions weren’t complicated enough. This is gonna get folks in trouble. [Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus collector adds support for cross-account ingestion](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2025/01/amazon-managed-service-prometheus-collector-cross-account-ingestion/) – Three and half years later, AWS realized that everyone who was gonna build their own cross-account ingestion out of spit, Lambda functions, and AWS credits had already done so, therefore it’s time to make it a "click the button" level of simplicity. [Amazon Redshift Concurrency Scaling is now available in 1 additional region](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2025/01/amazon-redshift-concurrency-scaling-1-region/) – It’s Malaysia. There, I saved you a click. AWS headline writer, you should be ashamed of this one. Go back to Buzzfeed! [Amazon Q Developer now troubleshoots AWS Console errors in all AWS Commercial regions](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2025/02/amazon-q-developer-console-errors-aws-commercial-regions) – "Isn’t this neat?! We have an AI assistant to tell you what to do for the error types we know about." "Why not just make the documentation better / solve the errors in the first place?" "Now listen here, you little…" [Amazon Q Developer introduces a new, simplified setup experience for Pro tier subscriptions](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2025/02/amazon-q-developer-experience-pro-tier-subscriptions/) – I tested this out a couple of months ago using the old flow. Surprisingly, having to play "Puzzle Quest, AWS Console Edition" was not the highlight of my week. Hopefully this is better. [AWS IAM Identity Center now offers improved error messages and AWS CloudTrail logging for provisioning issues](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2025/02/aws-iam-identity-center-error-messages-cloudtrail-logging-provisioning-issues) – "We made the error messages actually informative." Now, dear reader: was it AI or Intern? Place your bets. [AWS Step Functions now supports 100,000 state machines and activities per AWS account](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2025/02/aws-step-functions-100-000-state-machines-activities-account/) – State machines only charge you per state transition. You know what that means: this is a new free database! [Cost Optimization Hub supports more EC2 Auto Scaling group recommendations](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2025/02/cost-optimization-hub-ec2-auto-scaling-group-recommendations/) – I’m always intrigued by how elegantly the corporate wording is around releases like this–because the truth of it distills down to "if you’re not using it, turn that shit off." [Announcing the general availability of AWS Database Migration Service Serverless support for files with an S3 source endpoint](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2025/02/general-availability-aws-database-migration-service-serverless-files-s3-source-endpoint) – Excuse me a second, I just need to take another victory lap around the folks who’ve insisted to me for years that S3 isn’t a database. [AI-Powered Football Match Analysis: SAP Sports One on AWS](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/awsforsap/ai-powered-football-match-analysis-sap-sports-one-on-aws/) – I can only imagine what Lovecraftian horror of a corp-dev deal led to this monstrosity of an announcement. Hint: the post starts (and I am not making this up) by thanking 11 different people. [Introducing AWS CloudFormation Stack Refactoring](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/introducing-aws-cloudformation-stack-refactoring/) – Holy crap I have wanted this since CloudFormation first came out. It sounds ridiculous, but until now the approach has always been either "replace it or learn to live with it," or the next thing to it via nested stacks. … and that’s what happened ***Last Week in AWS.*** ## You might also like [More Newsletter Issues](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/newsletter/) Issue No.457 ### [https://www.lastweekinaws.com/newsletter/15259/](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/newsletter/15259/) [Read More about](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/newsletter/15259/) Issue No.456 ### [https://www.lastweekinaws.com/newsletter/15252/](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/newsletter/15252/) [Read More about](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/newsletter/15252/) Issue No.455 ### [https://www.lastweekinaws.com/newsletter/15235/](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/newsletter/15235/) [Read More about](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/newsletter/15235/) Issue No.454 ### [Impromptu Security Week](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/newsletter/impromptu-security-week/) [Read More about Impromptu Security Week](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/newsletter/impromptu-security-week/)