Good Morning!
If you’re in Portland (specifically the one in Oregon), I’ll be hosting a drink-up on Wednesday evening, details to come in Wednesday’s issue!
If you’re not, catch the Monitorama Livestream for my talk two hours after this email gets sent.
From the Community
Are you struggling to determine what analytics workloads can perform well in the data lake, and which ones should be pushed to the data warehouse for peak performance? According to Gartner, you’re not alone. But thankfully, a category of technologies that Gartner calls “analytics query accelerators” are here to help. get the free Gartner report, courtesy of ChaosSearch, today! Learn how analytics query accelerators provide SQL or SQL-like query support on a broad range of data sources to deliver BI dashboards, interactive query capabilities, and support for data modeling. Help your data lake deliver faster time to value – get the free Gartner report, courtesy of ChaosSearch, today!
A data engineer is here to give us a perspective on AWS Managed Airflow vs. AWS Step Functions. I don’t use either, so I’m grateful someone else is deep in those weeds.
A speed run through how fast someone can create records on a low-budget Amazon Cloud PostgreSQL instance.
This list of small things you can do to make your coworkers / managers lives easier adds up to something quite grand indeed.
My thoughts on Should You Take a Job at AWS? are now up in written form. I stand by them!
Years later due to the speed of the justice system, the ex-AWS employee responsible for the Capital One breach has been convicted. Crime doesn’t pay very well in the grand sweep of time.
The Information sat for an interview with Adam Selipsky (paywalled). There’s not a lot of "new" here; one thing that can be said about Adam is that if someone ever gets him to speak extemporaneously about AWS rather than reverting to prepared statements, he’d seem somehow underdressed.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: Add a Mantium
Last Week In AWS: BugCrowd Bugs the Crowd
Last Week In AWS: Should I Take a Job at AWS?
Screaming in the Cloud: Google Cloud Run, Satisfaction, and Scalability with Steren Giannini
Screaming in the Cloud: Transparency in Cloud Security with Gafnit Amiga
Choice Cuts
Every company needs a plan for when things go wrong. We’ve written these plans many times, and every time wished for a reference that reflects how companies actually work today. So here it is — our years of collective knowledge and experience distilled into a Practical Guide to Incident Management for your whole organisation. Enjoy!
Announcing new Console Query Editor for Amazon QLDB – I keep asking it what a real world use case for QLDB is but the query goes unanswered. I have impressions and hints, but nothing concrete yet.
Amazon Lex Automated Chatbot Designer is now generally available – This apparently works by taking transcripts of chat conversations and using ML to design the chatbot appropriately. I want to be clear: had it had any other interface whatsoever I would have torn it apart for invalidating the entire value proposition of having a chatbot in the first place. Good work, AWS.
Announcing a new AWS Bills page experience – AWS has launched a bills page that makes things better for customers, but also removed the one shot quick-look I can do in someone’s account to get a bird’s eye view of where the money is going. We, by which I mean Principal Cloud Economist Alex Rasmussen, built an internal tool to generate that from the CSV available on that page–but that thing of course requires legacy Detailed Billing Reports to be enabled. The life of a Cloud Economist is beset with frustration, it would seem.
AWS WAF Captcha is now generally available – At last there’s a viable alternative to helping Google improve its self driving car algorithms under the guise of "proving that I’m a human" via their reCAPTCHA offering.
Integrating Amazon S3 Malware Scanning into Your Application Workflow with Cloud Storage Security – If I never have to see another "we grab files out of S3 onto an EC2 instance, run a virus scanner on it, then put it back into S3" workflow I will be a slightly happier person.
New – High Volume Outbound Communication with Amazon Connect Outbound Campaigns – AWS has gotten deadly serious in their attempts to reach you about your car’s extended warranty.
Now in Preview – Amazon CodeWhisperer- ML-Powered Coding Companion – I’ve been using GitHub Copilot for a while, and I really like it. For me, it’s less about "let AI write code for me" and more about "what are the parameters this function expects / demands?" It’s about boilerplate reduction, not automating my job away. Now that AWS is getting into the space, I view their offering as a bellwether as to whether or not they have the capability to move up the developer experience ladder.
Make DevOps suck less by getting your workloads to AWS in minutes instead of months using AutoCloud. Their platform automatically generates secure, production-ready Terraform code that is customized to your unique snowflake of a business. Once workloads are deployed, AutoCloud gives users full cloud security posture management (CSPM) capabilities along with drift detection, automatically generated architecture diagrams, BlastRadius™ security analysis for compromised resources, and a single internet-scale GraphQL API for all 1,000 of your AWS accounts. Make your weary CIO smile by aligning every cloud resource with your business today.
Cryptographic Signing for Containers – With 17 ways to run containers on AWS, it’s important that the container you run is the container you think you’re running.
Amazon DevOps Guru for RDS under the hood – I always like these "how AWS built something that they then offer for sale" insights.
Large object storage strategies for Amazon DynamoDB – I’m pleasantly surprised to discover that this is more than "store a pointer to an S3 object." Worth the read in my opinion.
Introducing Amazon Marketing Cloud Insights on AWS – This is the kind of integration story that Amazon has been historically weak on; if this works it’s a big leap forward. I’ll even forestall my usual unflattering opinion on Amazon Ads ruining the retail experience of being an Amazon customer.
New Twitch Series – AWS Cloud Quest: Cloud Practitioner launches June 22 – I should clear some time and do my own run-through of their Cloud Quest game on Twitch myself. I promise my version would be significantly more sarcastic than theirs.
How do you process space data and imagery in low earth orbit? – Amazon has sent the AWS Snowcone ("The world’s crappiest Kindle!") to the ISS for localized data processing. Note that this is in low earth orbit, so it’s immediately blown past by the AWS bill skyrocketing far beyond its reach.
Tools
What can the knight from the end of Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade teach us about picking a public cloud provider? Two words: Choose wisely. Just think, depending on your workloads, opting for AWS might bring eternal scale, while going with Google Cloud might bring face-melting frustration. Thankfully Cockroach Labs’ 2022 Cloud Report is here to help take the guesswork out of your cloud considerations. The free resource offers the industry’s only truly unbiased look at how AWS, GCP, and Azure stack up across 56 instance types, 100+ configurations, and 3,000+ unique benchmarks. Download the free 70 page report now, then tuck it in your canvas satchel and swing into your next app adventure with cloud confidence.
AWS Labs has put out a DynamoDB locking client.
This speedtest specifically tests file upload speeds between you and S3 in various locations using S3 Accelerate.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
