Good Morning!
I’ll be discussing that a16z article with the authors on Clubhouse this Thursday.
From the Community
With cyberattacks becoming more frequent and sophisticated, proactive Threat Hunting is increasingly critical. And here’s the good news: you can significantly improve your Threat Hunting game with existing staff & analytics tools (including the popular Open Distro Kibana). To learn more,Download The Threat Hunter’s Handbook from ChaosSearch, an amazing guide that covers: the 6 common stages of a sophisticated attack; how to adopt the mindset of an attacker; how to find the hidden clues of an attack in your log data; how to conduct a hunt using standard log analytics tools; and a detailed real-world example of combatting an advanced persistent threat. So check out The Threat Hunter’s Handbook from ChaosSearch and get a blueprint for identifying the clues in your log data that will stop cybercriminals in their tracks. Sponsored
If you haven’t opted out of giving your data to AWS to improve their AI services, you should be aware that AWS User Data is Being Stored, Used Outside User’s Chosen Regions.
VentureBeat reports that up to 46% of AWS S3 buckets could be misconfigured and unsafe, but I think that’s a bit overly dramatic.
Seven guiding principles of serverless systems.
A glimpse behind the scenes of AWS Lambda
A children’s book called Gently Down the Stream explains Kafka to young children for folks who are REALLY into messaging queues and/or alternative forms of disciplining their kids.
A Turkish beauty company exposed the details of half a million customers and scored themselves an S3 Bucket Negligence Award.
Is AWS Certification Worth It? Weighing All the Factors – The Last Week in AWS blog has a guest post about AWS certs up:
I tackled that cloud repatriation article in a post of my own: The Trillion-Dollar Paradoxical Arguments of a16z; I’ll be doing a Clubhouse discussion with the authors on June 24th.
Jobs
If you’ve got an interesting job for this newsletter’s eminently employable subscribers, get in touch!
Your curiosity of the world drives everything you do. You thrive in a collaborative environment where you get to build software in finance, healthcare, IoT, telecom, home security and automation, or other industries. You’d feel like you are home at Chariot Solutions. We’re a boutique software development firm looking for senior engineers – Java, Python, Node, AWS, React, Angular, iOS, Android. We’re one of top workplaces in the Philadelphia area, and we founded, curate and host Philly ETE, a conference with world-class speakers that’s been running since 2005. Our team sets us apart, including leadership that truly cares and treats you like family. We are committed to continuous learning and improvement, and we pay it forward to the tech community, attend and speak at conferences, and strive for work/life balance. Check out our job listings and apply to join us today.
98point6 sounds like a cool Seattle radio station but it’s actually a virtual care company that’s making primary care more accessible and affordable. They’re looking for engineers and engineering managers to further their efforts, build critical systems for on-demand care at scale and collaborate across the organization. Interested in joining their mission? Check out their open roles and apply now.
The AWS User Experience Products & Platform team is responsible for products that enable AWS users to manage their applications and infrastructure on AWS. Our mission is to deliver an effective, efficient, and loved user experience that makes it easy for all users to discover, learn, and build on AWS. Today, we own the AWS Management Console, the AWS Console Mobile App, the AWS Chatbot, as well as the User Experience Platform used by 175+ AWS service teams to develop and deliver their user experience across multiple channels (web, mobile, chat).
Think “GitHub for marketing teams” and you’d be pretty close to describing Loomly. They’re looking for someone to take ownership of and lead their DevOps/SRE efforts–and that person might well be you. They’re fully remote, post their salary ranges, and using a bunch of AWS services. I’m a fan of what I’ve seen from them so far; see if this role is up your alley.
Choice Cuts
Flying blind in the cloud? Lacework provides a flight recorder for your user, API, and container activity – all organized into behaviors that deliver answers in seconds and takes you out of the analysis paralysis game. Whether you’re ready to take the red pill or the blue pill, Lacework bridges the gap between DevOps and Security. Lacework makes it easy with everything from compliant service configurations to container app topologies – no rules required. Got doubts? Challenge accepted. See for yourself at lacework.com/lastweekinaws Sponsored
Got a headache from tracking down backups across dozens of accounts for compliance? Is the EC2-Other line item on your AWS bill exploding? Has AWS Backup taken you hours if not days to restore? All too common symptoms of AWS users until they met Clumio. This cloud backup tool can fix these problems and more, plus they just launched a free backup visualization and optimization engine called Clumio Discover, go check it out! Sponsored
Amazon EC2 adds new AMI property to flag outdated AMIs – This is huge. Eric Hammond (the first AWS Hero and someone I deeply admire) has published thousands of community AMIs over the past fifteen years; it’ll be great to see a lot of them stop showing up on searches.
Amazon EC2 now allows you to create crash-consistent AMIs from instances with multiple EBS volumes without rebooting instances – Look, this is a great capability to be sure, but you couldn’t find a way to describe it without making EC2 sound like a rickety piece of crap?
Amazon Polly Launches a new German Neural Text-to-Speech voice – It just occurred to me to wonder how this would sound if you fed it English text.
Announcing per second billing for EC2 Windows Server and SQL Server Instances – Ooh, per-core-second licensing!
AWS Copilot launches v1.8 with improved support for load balanced web services and VPCs – I tried building something with Copilot last week and I can’t shake the feeling that for a CLI tool, the developer ergonomics are all wrong.
Heads Up – AWS News Blog RSS Feed Change – AWS has to change its RSS feed because (and this is true) Google deprecated something.
Migrate Your Workloads with the Graviton Challenge! – They’re right-it’s impossible to eat just one Graviton2 chip. I’m tickled that one of my tweets was included in the marketing video.
New – AWS Step Functions Workflow Studio – A Low-Code Visual Tool for Building State Machines – Incomprehensible Step Functions now potentially comprehensible! This is a big deal.
Exploring serverless patterns for Amazon DynamoDB – The server pattern for DynamoDB usually includes some “evangelist” without any context into your business vehemently insisting you should refactor everything to be serverless instead.
Integrate ROSA with AWS CodeCommit – Two tools you probably shouldn’t be using if you have other viable options now work together.
Best practices for converting a Single-AZ Amazon RDS instance to a Multi-AZ instance – So many of these migration guidances should really start with “Step 1, go back in time and make better decisions, because the rest of this is gonna suck.”
7 Pitfalls to Avoid When Building a CCOE – Number 8, “calling it a Cloud Center of Excellence.” As soon as you have a team that’s viewed as “where all the smart people go,” you have serious internal challenges with staff morale.
Digital Transformation: Hype or a Strategic Necessity? – Well what else are you going to call it, “waking up to the business necessity you should have been tracking a decade ago?” You’re not going to sell a whole lot of management consulting if you do that…
The Great Migration: Chime’s Move to AWS – At no point in this article did they feel the need to clarify that they’re not talking about Amazon Chime, which says a lot for its place in the market. A shame really; there are things I really like about it as a messaging product.
Case Study: Handling one million concurrent players with ease on AWS – I guess one of the first things that Adam Selipsky is doing now that he’s back at AWS is starting to call them “players” instead of “customers.”
Create a Jira issue using an AWS Config remediation action – After all if there isn’t a Jira ticket for something, not only is it not real but you’ll also receive zero credit for working on it.
Managing the multi-account environment using AWS Organizations and AWS Control Tower – Sure would have been great to have a lot of this guidance before many of us walked through the one way door of setting up our account structures.
AWS enables the US federal government’s move to IPv6 – This is a terrific partnership story, because IPv6 has been an afterthought for both the federal government and AWS for well over a decade.
Coming soon: AWS launching new Region in Spain by mid-2022 – The rain in Spain will soon fall mainly on the distributed control plane, and be billed by the litre-humidity-second.
Encrypt global data client-side with AWS KMS multi-Region keys – While it’s not quite a global key, this does make an awful lot of workloads WAY easier. The economic win here is not having to decrypt / re-encrypt data as it transitions between regions.
Tools
Observability is critical for managing and improving complex business-critical systems. With observability, any software engineering team can gain a deeper understanding of system performance, so you can perform ongoing maintenance and ship the features your customers need. Preview Honeycomb’s upcoming O’Reilly book to understand the value of observable systems and how to build an observability-driven development practice. Sponsored
Microsoft has a tool out called RESTler; it’s a fuzzing tool for automatically testing cloud services via their APIs. If you turn this loose on your AWS account you can expect it to cost all of the money.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
