Hello!
Hey you cool cats and kittens (maybe you get it, maybe you don’t but moving on), super excited to be taking over as the guest author this week .My name is Brianna and you’ve probably seen me floating around twitter, or maybe somewhere else for all I know but I am super excited to be taking over. If I had to describe myself (which I enjoy doing from time to time) I would say….that I’m an authoritative force conquering dynamic duality as an Infrastructure Program Manager at Google and founder of my lifestyle empowerment brand, Bri Limitless. In my spare time pre-COVID I loved to go to dinner and host my friends, I do a lot of presentations, teaching and speaking specific to the cloud, computing observability and automation. And I also love wine, on any given day I love a good chardonnay (I think that rhymed, actually I’m sure it did..say it slowly).
My daily mission is simple, and that is to diversify the engineering industry, I’m from Detroit, Michigan native (yes I am a midwest girl living a very California life right now) and I have been resiliently sharing my voice and vision for inclusivity across STEM fields, simultaneously serving youth and fellow millennials with mentorship and enthusiastic encouragement to live life without limits.
If you want to find me, follow me on Twitter @brilimitless, I get really mouthy there so follow at your own risk. Also please subscribe to my website BriLimitless.com. Alright, let’s hop into some content for the week.
From the Community
Download today: Kubernetes security ebook – tips, tricks, best practices
The rapid adoption of Kubernetes to manage containerized workloads is driving great efficiencies in application development, deployment, and scalability. However, when security becomes an afterthought, you risk diminishing the greatest gain of containerization – agility. Download this ebook to learn how to (1) build secure images and prevent untrusted/vulnerable code, (2) configure RBAC, network policies, and runtime privileges, (3) detect unauthorized runtime activity, and (4) secure your Kubernetes infrastructure components such as the API server. Sponsored
Elasticsearch is by far one of my favorite tools (don’t worry I ‘ll talk about why in the tools section) and because of that I thought this blog was really cool. Elasticsearch can be used for a variety of use cases, Arm-based M6g instances provide better throughput and lower latency values up to 25% respectively compared to x86 based M5 instances while performing varying type of data analytics. These instances also provide 20% cost benefit. It’s something to deeply look into if you want to improve your open-source text-search and analytics engine.
Jobs
If you’ve got an interesting job for this newsletter’s eminently employable subscribers, get in touch!
If you’ve been working on infrastructure for a while (OK more than a week maybe) you’re sure to have Opinions on how our industry could improve the workflows we put in place to keep systems secure. Come work at Sym to help us build the platform to solve this! We’re looking for a Security & Infrastructure Engineer to lead our security program and improve the safety and reliability of our environment.
Chime is a challenger bank providing free banking & credit services – our mission is to give people financial peace of mind, we’re tangibly helping people in the real world, and we were recently valued as the #1 most valuable fintech company in the US (with a $14B valuation). We’re looking for AWS/Terraform experts who can help us secure our cloud infrastructure – if you’d like to learn more about it then we’d love to hear from you (for “How did you hear about this job?” please enter “LastWeekInAWS”).
Do you hold a US Security Clearance? Do you want to build exciting things? Protect exciting secrets? Make big trouble for Moose and Squirrel? Check out the AWS Cleared Jobs and see if AWS might have a role that’s up your alley. Many restrictions apply; see page for details.
Choice Cuts
Engineers own the security of their cloud infrastructure – and that’s good news because it’s a problem tailor-made for engineers to tackle. Download the Engineer’s Handbook on Cloud Security to gain a better understanding of the nature of cloud misconfiguration and think more critically about securing your use cases. Sponsored
Amazon Connect now supports one click drill downs for real-time metrics – Has anyone ever heard that not all data is good data and not all metrics are good metrics? I think AWS heard this and decided “hey, we are going to not change the way we do data back make the way we retrieve it FASTER”. Happy one clicking!
Addressing environmental challenges with the AWS Cloud – If you are interested in how we are using the cloud to address the change in water…get it…cloud…water..okay maybe not but you may still want to read this one. Who knew that clouds could help address environmental challenges.
How public sector security teams can use serverless technologies to improve outcomes – When I initially saw this headline I thought to myself…hmm, how can you use the word public and security in the same sentence without hearing the word s “possible breach” in your ear. I don’t know but it looks like AWS has figured it out.
Mission: Providing business continuity for the future of work – I could’ve saved myself about 10 minutes of reading if they would have changed the title of this headline to “how AWS plans on going from in office to a hybrid solution aka giving their employees flexibility to work where they want. Instead I wasted about 10 minutes in which I do not think I’ll be able to get back.
Supporting a safe return to campus with cloud-based mobile applications – If we hand’t already come up with enough ways to be tracked, AWS is seemingly coming up with just one more, welcome to the “we plan to use this for COVID tracking however we will simutaneously be tracking your every move all day as well”.
How to automatically archive expected IAM Access Analyzer findings – How to properly archive? DELETE
Online Tech Talk October 21: Using Amazon S3 with AWS Outposts – To my earlier point, if you want to figure out a way to retrieve even more data then you probably should attend this talk. That is if, you care about needing data residency requirements, to process and store data on-premises, or access to data for local processing, whatever this means.
3 Ways to Go from Database Administrator to Database Innovator – This headline is just mixed jargon, not a lot of subtance. But I guess I am guilty because I read it anyways. Admin to Innovator? Are Admins not innovators too.
AWS re/Start program builds US cloud skills and job readiness on east and west coasts – This headline almost assumes that there was no cloud skills on the east or west, wait until the people that live there hear this… is AWS going to just take credit for everything?
Now available: 5 new, free AWS Cloud, machine learning, and security training webinars – Now THIS is news the we all can use. I think Corey might actually like it if we took advantage of these opportunities, it’ll give him far more reason to add a little extra snark to the newsletters once he gets back from maternity leave. I’m going to take it upon myself to sign his whole team up lol in all honesty, this is great, I am enjoying seeing more corporate companies offering these kind of benefits outside of traditional education.
Tools
Broken processes aren’t great. A broken process during an actual incident is REALLY not great. So how do you test how you’ll manage an incident?Our friends at FireHydrant hosted a webinar this past week to share some actionable tips- watch the on-demand webinar to learn how to use chaos engineering philosophy to test your declaration, communication, and escalation processes. Sponsored
I do a lot of observability and monitoring work and Elasticsearch Service has always been one of my favorite tools because it integrates across multiple stacks. You can build, monitor, and troubleshoot your applications using the tools you use everyday because of the easy integration factor. The service provides support for open source Elasticsearch APIs, managed Kibana, integration with Logstash and other AWS services, and built-in alerting and SQL querying.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
