Good Morning!
I’m crashing a drink-up at [The Ramp] in SF tonight that’s being hosted by my colleagues at The Duckbill Group; come crash it with me from 6-8PM.
If last week’s Google Cloud Next overemphasis on Generative AI is a preview of what AWS is planning for re:Invent, you can give yourself a terrific gift by cancelling your ticket and staying home, because you will miss nothing of actual substance. Yes, Generative AI is neat. Yes, I believe it can unlock value all over the place. But watching middle-aged companies tripping all over themselves to pivot their entire messaging around it is neither of those things–it’s just sad.
From the Community
Fig has been acquired / acquihired by AWS. Good on them for actually making an announcement about it instead of following the usual AWS Way of the Weasel Marketing Playbook; Stackery’s website still doesn’t disclose that they were acquired by AWS years ago; the only reason I found out about that one is because I was a Stackery customer.
Honeycode is getting Googled.
A fine collection of AWS billing horror stories.
I bet the AWS marketing folks are INCENSED that their look is being used by the AWS Works Council Germany.
The best way to ensure I link to your article is of course to quote me in it. Anyhoo, the Amazon Linux 2023 virtual machine images are still missing.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: AWS Wallet Extractor
Last Week In AWS: Everybody Owns This Podcast So Nobody Does
Last Week In AWS: us-west-1: The Flagship Region That Isn’t
Screaming in the Cloud: How Redpanda Extracts Business Value from Data Events with Alex Gallego
Screaming in the Cloud: Reflecting on a Legendary Tech Career with Kelsey Hightower
Choice Cuts
Amazon QuickSight adds scheduled and programmatic export to Excel format – Quicksight now supports exporting to its better-featured, less expensive competitor.
Amazon S3 now supports multivalue answer in response to DNS queries – One great database learns to integrate with another.
AWS Backup now supports local time zone selections – This is a good use of timezones that doesn’t change the underlying datastore’s understanding of timezones. Good work.
AWS Lambda Functions powered by AWS Graviton2 now available in 6 additional regions – Ooh. Now do HTTP APIs Gateway and I’ll be able to deploy to those regions as well in time for my upcoming CDK Day talk…
AWS Neuron adds support for Llama 2, GPT-NeoX, and SDXL generative AI models – WTF is AWS Neuron? Oh, an SDK for Generative AI hardware nonsense, and so it can be safely ignored.
AWS Private CA launches Connector for Active Directory – I have it from multiple authorities that this is a Big Deal for customers running Windows workloads. Apparently this is Actually Serverless and "just works" for customers. Sweet, say goodbye to the CA on a USB thumbdrive…
Streamlining Prior Authorization with Treatline’s Generative AI Platform for Healthcare and Insurance Providers – Oh hell yes, thanks for making it easier for people who are not doctors to weigh in on how doctors are treating their patients. Thanks, AWS!
Updating AWS CloudFormation Stacks Without Service Disruption to Support Rapid Business Innovation – When a post on the AWS Partnerships blog starts with the phrase "as a DevOps engineer," you know AWS has just given up completely on targeted marketing and are just spewing out random content bits via every content channel / orifice they can gather.
Why AWS Customers Choose to Procure Software Through Channel Partners in AWS Marketplace – Yes, I’m sure customers (company 1) are just lining up to buy some vendor (company 2)’s software through the AWS marketplace (company 3) by way of some random 4th company.
Announcing Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink Renamed from Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics – Oh great, an AWS service gets renamed from a bad name to a somehow worse one. At least it’s more clear what the heck it does, so AMSAF it is…
Deploy Amazon OpenSearch Serverless with Terraform – Terraform isn’t really open source, and OpenSearch Serverless isn’t really serverless, so this tracks.
How AWS AppFabric helps companies overcome tech overload – AWS has launched so many nonsense competing services that the only answer is "it doesn’t, because people stopped paying attention long before whatever the hell AppFabric is ever saw the light of day."
Reinventing the in-store experience with Smart Store solutions – Well this is a fun combination of "stalking the customers" meets "firing most of your staff" meets "making the customer do some of the work the staff you just fired used to do." I can’t wait.
Automatically generate impressions from findings in radiology reports using generative AI on AWS – Yes siree-bob, "radiology" is precisely the niche in which I want a computer to blatantly make shit up. Great plan!
How MongoDB and AWS Collaborated to Enable Running the Open Source MongoDB Kafka Connector in Managed Environments – Oh, right, AWS came out with Amazon Basics MongoDB (they call it "DocumentDB") at the nadir of their ability to partner with other companies, so now it’s time to trot them out for another hostage video talking about how great everything is in partnership land.
Embracing our broad responsibility for securing digital infrastructure in the European Union – You mean that broad responsibility you’ve spent millions upon millions of dollars lobbying explicitly against? Sure, Jan.
Tools
Some CDK constructs to self-limit resources that cost you money. If it works, awesome–but it feels like this is a never-ending game of whack-a-mole until AWS fixes some stuff on their end.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
