Welcome to issue number 44 of Last Week in AWS.
A few exciting things going on soon. I’ll be speaking at Southern California Area Linux Expo; use “LAST” for a 40% discount on tickets to the conference.
I’ll also be keynoting DevOps Days Charlotte at the end of this month.
Finally, the “Last Year in AWS” survey is still running. I care deeply about your opinions about AWS, so I stuck a snarky survey at http://lastyearinaws.com. I’ll publish results after the poll closes.
Community Contributions
This tale of converting Yield.IO to AWS and Lambda hits a lot of the pain-points of the world of serverless, but also highlights a lot of the aspects that make working with Lambda sensible. Very even handed…
An exploration into the business strategy behind a lot of the re:Invent announcements. I think this analysis is pretty close to accurate, personally.
An AWS exec expressed an interest last week in longitudinal health records. He may well have the latitude to explore that…
Opsgenie dives into an analysis of how proportional CPU allocation works with Lambda. This makes a lot of things clear to me that I’d previously handwaved past and nodded sagely whenever they came up.
This Javascript tool gives a one-page inventory listing of everything in your AWS account. I’m a fan; if I knew Javascript a bit better I’d submit a few PRs.
A post around how to manage shared infrastructure with AWS Lambda. While the author makes good points, I prefer my lazy yet successful approach of “don’t.”
This very deep dive into an AWS CloudFormation security group gotcha goes into stupendous depth into just one of CloudFormation’s many, many sharp edges.
This one’s a DEEP technical dive, but it’s a fun exploration into using AWS Lambda, GoLang and Grafana to perform sentiment analysis.
This is a periodic reminder that upgrading between instance families is non-trivial at times. The highly capable folks at Remind engineering took a month to do it.
A good discussion of AWS Lambda’s Binaries Problem. This offers some handy approaches to take when statically compiling your binaries won’t work due to size constraints.
A quick howto on sharing SageMaker Models. I have to ask– is anyone other than AWS employees using SageMaker in the wild? If you are, could you whack reply and let me know? I’m debating whether it’s worth the time investment to delve into it…
I’ll be keynoting DevOpsDays Charlotte 2018 Tickets, Thu, Feb 22, 2018 at 8:00 AM | Eventbrite– that link includes a 25% discount code. If you attend, let me know; I’d love to catch up!
Choice Cuts From the AWS Blog
Amazon Aurora Parallel Query is Available for Preview – Yay! New SQL query parallelization that’s given no explaining detail. Will this change how we structure our queries? Will it work on anything that isn’t Aurora? We have no idea!
Addressing Data Residency with AWS | AWS Security Blog – This whitepaper is very handy for companies racing to comply with GDPR. If you have no idea what GDPR is, that sound you hear is Pandora’s box being flung open.
東京リージョンに新たにアベイラビリティゾーンを追加 | Amazon Web Services ブログ – This one’s a week late; if you speak fluent Japanese, you’re already excited. In case you don’t, a fourth AZ launched in the Tokyo region. Note that this won’t appear in all accounts. Thanks to Chris Maxwell for the tip-off!
Tools
This handy howto explains how to construct a Lambda function that automatically renews LetsEncrypt certificates should you opt to not use ACM instead.
Netflix has released a datastore benchmark tool that’s optimized for cloud environments.
Manage AWS resources as if they were composed of plain objects. This feels a bit like Boto for Javascript.
…and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
