Good Morning!
I had a guest appearance on Bret Fischer’s "Docker and DevOps" video podcast; I missed doing things like this. I should start doing more of them!
From the Community
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It caused a bit of a stir when Amazon’s Prime Video team reduced costs by 90% via giving up Serverless and moving back to a monolith. Well no kidding; I want this cited in the next "go serverless" keynote talk, please.
To be an Amazon Clinic customer you’re giving up some privacy rights. And people wondered why the first thing I did when Amazon announced it was acquiring One Medical was to cancel my membership. Perhaps, and I’m just speculating here, Amazon doesn’t need to be in every possible industry all at once?
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: A Quiet But Bad Week
Last Week In AWS: Implementing Search For Google Docs in Google Docs
Screaming in the Cloud: Learning eBPF with Liz Rice
Screaming in the Cloud: Operating in the Kubernetes Cloud on Amazon EKS with Eswar Bala
Choice Cuts
Announcing Provisioned Capacity for Amazon Athena – This really, really feels like Amazon is inflicting their pain onto their customers, and making us pay for the privilege to boot. "Athena’s too slow? Give us more money" rings hollow.
Amazon EFS Replication is now available in all AWS Regions – I don’t usually bother to cover region expansions, but "all regions" is a milestone and worth celebrating. Good work, EFS team; no notes.
Amazon Redshift launches ra3.xlplus instances in additional Middle East, Europe and Asia Pacific Regions – Sorry, "ra3.xlplus?" Are we just making up animals now?
AWS Compute Optimizer now supports filtering by tags – Okay this is fun once you scratch away the nonsense to figure out what it means; you can now do things like "give me recommendations for the web server fleet only" and it’ll do what you ask. They also launched separate MS SQL filtering as well.
AWS Console Mobile Application launches push notifications – I sure wish it would launch support for Yubikey MFA when using IAM Identity Center for federation; until it does I need to either use a permanent IAM user (bad pattern) or not use the AWS Console Mobile Application at all (better pattern).
Announcing AWS User Notifications general availability – My congratulations to the product owner for this new service that really should have been a feature instead; your ambition does you credit. It really needs a "send me everything" starter option for smaller accounts, because setting this up takes Some Work I tell you hwat. Oh, and an API; please give me an API.
Process price transparency data using AWS Glue – Someone at AWS didn’t remember their own billing model before writing this headline.
Patterns for building an API to upload files to Amazon S3 – In a just world, that pattern would be "this is clearly a global problem, so Amazon has built a suite of turnkey answers to this" but of course they have not, leaving it to you to go to their digital Home Depot and assemble your own from parts you pick up wandering the aisles.
Improve query performance and reduce cost using scheduled queries in Amazon Timestream – You can further improve performance and massively reduce your costs by not using Amazon Timestream at all. When I want a time series database, no I don’t. When I’m pressed to use a time series database, I use Influx instead.
Working with JSON data in Amazon DynamoDB – Oh god. Maybe it’s just me, using Python as my lingua franca, but I’ve always found working with JSON-like things but really aren’t JSON within that language to be monstrous. This feels like it’s something I want someone else to implement for me please.
The history and future roadmap of the AWS CloudFormation Registry – This post is absolutely fascinating and will doubtless be considered by AWS internally as a massive mistake, as it’s directly responsible for me joining the new-to-me CloudFormation Discord server.
Partnerships extend Just Walk Out technology to more colleges and universities – A fine week for it, as "Just Walk Out" technology has also extended to Hollywood TV and Film writers as well as their strike is ongoing as of this writing.
Quickly build high-accuracy Generative AI applications on enterprise data using Amazon Kendra, LangChain, and large language models – This perfectly encapsulates AWS’s laggard positioning with generative AI; rather than talking about the power and opportunity it unlocks for your business if you buy their goods and services, instead they’re presenting a pile of components you need to forge yourself into something that AWS doesn’t quite do a decent job of articulating. I want to be clear: I think this technology is transformative. I just don’t want to build it myself from parts.
Introducing AWS Verified Access – General Availability – The last time a VPN-less service was put out by AWS was Amazon WorkLink, which has oh-so-very-quietly been deprecated in favor of ‘WorkSpaces Web" whatever that might be. Hopefully this one fares better…
How to scan your AWS Lambda functions with Amazon Inspector – This feels like it’s basically Dependabot for Lambda functions.
Tools
Ben Kehoe reminded us last week about aws-error-utils; it makes boto3 errors less cumbersome and a lot better understood. I adore his work so very much…
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
