Good Morning!
Welcome to issue 173 of Last Week in AWS. Did you know you can sponsor this newsletter? It’s true. If you’d like me to tell over 20,000 people about your product, service, or wry observation, please reach out!
From the Community
Have you heard about ChaosSearch, the fully managed log analytics platform that leverages your Amazon S3 as a data store? According to the CTO at Armor, a global cybersecurity company with more than 1,000 customers in 42 countries, “ChaosSearch is a critical piece of our infrastructure for processing tens of terabytes per day of our customers’ log data.” And at Hubspot, the Engineering Lead said “We are able to process and analyze 10’s of terabytes a day of Cloudflare log data to identify and fend off DDoS attacks on behalf of our customers at a fraction of the cost of our previous self-hosted ELK Stack.” So take it from me, or take it from them – either way, take a look at ChaosSearch today! Sponsored
AWS believes that if they ignore feature gaps long enough, customers will fix them themselves; ideally using Lambda. It sadly didn’t use Lambda, but here’s how someone is fixing AWS’s Architecture Diagrams.
Chris Short’s surprise $2700 AWS Bill has been resolved, but it took a few days. Don’t panic.
A mystery about what looks like a strange SSH Denial of Service on AWS instances.
Summit Route has begun curating a list of AWS resource types that can be publicly exposed.
If working at AWS doesn’t agree with your particular ethical principles, consider an investment bank instead.
A tale of how AWS Lambda might not fix every reliability problem you have.
Platformonomics asks the burning question of our age: Can Brian Hall Fix What Ails Google Cloud?
Former AWS Distinguished Engineer and VP Tim Bray says some nice things about AWS.
Almost eight months between discovering your S3 Bucket Negligence Award and letting people know about it is unconscionable, Front Rush.
Usually I get cited in places like “Enterprise Computing Quarterly” or “The Taxonomic Guide to Cloud Migrations,” so the Wall Street Journal is new for me.
Jobs
If you’ve got an interesting job for this newsletter’s eminently employable subscribers, get in touch!
OpenEye Scientific is looking for a Backend Developer to be part of a team responsible for developing OpenEye’s cloud platform, Orion, a state of the art elastic workflow scheduler and orchestration system. Orion is a container-based scientific workflow system written in Go and Python. While there are some interesting workflow and container orchestration systems out there and also Kubernetes, none deliver the flexibility in using legacy applications and toolkits, ease of use, scalability, and reliability that they are targeting. Their system is made up of Floe, a Python workflow framework, and a cloud-based workflow runtime and user interface leveraging many technologies, including Django, Docker, and AWS.
Choice Cuts
Looking for easier ways to manage your cloud? Of course you are! Turbot’s cloud governance platform is your answer to automating your security, compliance, operations, and cost controls. Take it from David Boeke, Turbot CTO & VP Services, who says “If I had this 15 years ago, as an enterprise IT guy, I would have felt like I was ruling the world”. Learn more at turbot.com. Sponsored
Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose now supports data delivery to MongoDB Cloud – Because they’re not allowed to talk to one another, they required four different posts to mention that it ALSO delivers to New Relic, Datadog, and HTTP endpoints.
Announcing Preview for Amazon RDS M6g and R6g Instance Types, Powered by AWS Graviton2 Processors – I’m not entirely sure that Intel has a future in the AWS ecosystem judging by the price/performance I’m seeing. It’s a database engine; the underlying processor architecture poses zero compatibility issues for any customer workloads.
AWS CodeBuild now supports parallel and coordinated executions of a build project – The “run a single container serverlessly on a schedule” service now supports multiple containers!
AWS Fargate for Amazon ECS now supports UDP load balancing with Network Load Balancer – You can now use NLBs to easily load balance your Route 53 databases should you need to.
Introducing AWS Purchase Order Management (Preview) – The hard problems in Enterprise Computing aren’t cache invalidation or naming, but rather “moving a dollar from one company to another.”
Update: Elastic Load Balancing Code Change – AWS attempts to scare the bejeezus out of everyone, but no: the “code” that is changing is the billing code that shows up in your bills and cost & usage reports, not your production code.
Amazon Fraud Detector is now Generally Available – You’re of course forbidden from running Fraud Detector on your AWS bill.
Announcing the New AWS Community Builders Program! – If you’re interested in starting an AWS Community of some kind, AWS would like to hear from you. So would I; there are oh so many things I’d have done differently…
Announcing the AWS DeepComposer Chartbusters Spin the Model challenge – This sounds way easier than AWS PR’s “Spin the Narrative” challenge apparently is.
Testing a PR2 Robot in a simulated Hospital World – This looks amazing, but I can’t get the robot to fire its weapon. A little help?
Customer update: AWS and the EU-US Privacy Shield – “All is well” says AWS about an issue in which all is most assuredly not well. This is a great argument in favor of using cloud providers for regulatory reasons, though!
Over 150 AWS services now have a security chapter – “Here’s a collection of links to over 150 chapters of security need-to-knows about our services” definitely says something both about AWS’s commitment to security, and some of the problems with it.
Tools
…But allow me to magically wave my digital wand over your AWS cloud and erase all of those worries! That’s essentially what N2WS Backup & Recovery does for your AWS cloud. N2WS allows you to cycle backups through different storage tiers so you can migrate critical apps and achieve not just the same but even better SLAs, while keeping costs lower than on-premises and lower than using AWS directly. For a limited time N2WS is offering $100 in AWS credit just for setting up their free trial. Sponsored
A GitHub action to assume an IAM role.
A text based interface to manage ec2 instances.
If you want to use AWS to hurl a crapload of traffic at a webserver, this might help.
I’m playing a bit with this Lambda shell lately.
NetFlix has open sourced another project that they will presumably never update again. Why do they do this? It’s usually an engineer passing their work to themselves as they change companies.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
