Good Morning!
Mike Julian and I have a secret monthly podcast called Behind the Curtain, exclusively for folks who refer 10+ subscribers to the Last Week in AWS newsletter. Here’s the most recent episode. Wanna hear it each month? Refer 10 people and you won’t ever have to miss us chattering at each other.
From the Community
Just released! The ChaosSearch 2021 Benchmark Report on Log Data Management and Analytics. Recognizing the need for a broader view on how companies are managing their log data, we recently surveyed a wide group of organizations that make heavy use of log data in their day-to-day operations. The result is the ChaosSearch 2021 Log Management and Analytics Benchmark Report – now available for free. Learn key insights and findings on how companies are using log data management today to drive their operations, including: best practices for log data management, performance assessment; real-life customer use cases; top challenges; key investment areas, and a few surprising use cases! Get your copy of the ChaosSearch 2021 Log Management & Analytics Benchmark Report today! Sponsored
CloudFlare took their turn dunking on AWS’s Egregious Egress fees.
You learn a lot by spending 6-months on a Typescript/AWS Lambda project
86 cities have scored themselves a S3 Bucket Negligence Award, which they can pass between them like it’s the Stanley Cup.
CloudFront gets smoked in a CDN experiment.
I wrote about the slow transformation of the AWS console into the Amazon.com website.
Amazon has officially stopped its multi-year migration off of Oracle onto Workday. They’re going with their backup option of having Andy Jassy legally change his name to “Jeff” instead.
Jobs
If you’ve got an interesting job for this newsletter’s eminently employable subscribers, get in touch!
Your curiosity of the world drives everything you do. You thrive in a collaborative environment where you get to build software in finance, healthcare, IoT, telecom, home security and automation, or other industries. You’d feel like you are home at Chariot Solutions. We’re a boutique software development firm looking for senior engineers – Java, Python, Node, AWS, React, Angular, iOS, Android. We’re one of top workplaces in the Philadelphia area, and we founded, curate and host Philly ETE, a conference with world-class speakers that’s been running since 2005. Our team sets us apart, including leadership that truly cares and treats you like family. We are committed to continuous learning and improvement, and we pay it forward to the tech community, attend and speak at conferences, and strive for work/life balance. Check out our job listings and apply to join us today.
The AWS User Experience Products & Platform team is responsible for products that enable AWS users to manage their applications and infrastructure on AWS. Our mission is to deliver an effective, efficient, and loved user experience that makes it easy for all users to discover, learn, and build on AWS. Today, we own the AWS Management Console, the AWS Console Mobile App, the AWS Chatbot, as well as the User Experience Platform used by 175+ AWS service teams to develop and deliver their user experience across multiple channels (web, mobile, chat).
Choice Cuts
Orca Security: Cool Vendor. Cool Category. Cool Customers – ### Orca Security: Cool Vendor. Cool Category. Cool CustomersGartner has recognized Orca Security as a 2021 Gartner Cool Vendor in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM). Orca Security surfaces the most critical risks in AWS, Azure, and GCP in minutes, not months. These include vulnerabilities, malware, misconfigurations, weak and leaked passwords, lateral movement risk, and misplaced PII for both the workload and the cloud configuration itself, all while guaranteeing 100% coverage. Before Orca, this was simply not feasible. Sponsored
Cribl LogStream is an observability pipeline that lets you collect, reduce, transform, and route machine data from anywhere, to anywhere. It helps you not only improve visibility into what’s going on, but also helps you save money. See for yourself what LogStream can do for your data. Go to Sandboxes > Sponsored
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling now lets you control which instances to terminate on scale-in – I choose to terminate someone else’s instances wherever possible.
Amazon Elastic Block Store now supports idempotent volume creation – Somehow I’ve never encountered duplicate volume creation before.
Amazon Kendra releases WorkDocs Connector – This is handy for what’s almost certainly the single customer who uses both Kendra and WorkDocs.
Amazon S3 Access Points aliases allow any application that requires an S3 bucket name to easily use an access point – My favorite part of this admittedly awesome feature is how the S3 alias names all look like what you’d have if you angrily threw your keyboard across the room.
AWS Amplify now supports Sign in with Apple – Sure wish the AWS console would do that. Alternately, let me tie multiple Yubikeys to one account please.
AWS Lambda now supports up to 10 GB of memory and 6 vCPU cores in the Middle East (Bahrain), Asia Pacific (Osaka), and Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) regions – It’s news to me that Lambda functions that work in one region wouldn’t work in another, despite Lambda being available in both regions. Yikes.
Improving Hospital-Patient Engagement and Increasing Hospital Ancillary Revenue Using AI – When I said “please tell more stories around AI/ML” I have to admit I wasn’t expecting “use it to make healthcare more expensive” to be the example AWS chose.
Introducing Amazon Route 53 Application Recovery Controller – This is in some ways turning Route 53 into an actual database. This is a service to watch.
EC2-Classic is Retiring – Here’s How to Prepare – The Classic networking mode for EC2 gets to live out the rest of its days playing shuffleboard at a farm upstate.
Heads-Up: AWS Support for Internet Explorer 11 is Ending – A lot of people are suddenly discovering that it’s going to be a real obstacle to Digital Transformation if your company mandates you use a 7 year old web browser.
Implement high availability for Oracle Enterprise Manager in the AWS Cloud – Congratulations to AWS for this awkwardly worded announcement that they hired an Oracle exec.
Use Key Management Service (AWS KMS) to securely manage Ethereum accounts: Part 1 – The KMS product owner apparently screwed something up, and as penance has to have their service subjected to a two part series tying it to blockchain. That’s messed up.
Announcing Amazon Genomics CLI (Preview) – A CLI tool that lets you gaze into your cells. The AWS CLI remains the tool of choice if you want to gaze into your soul.
Sterling Bank Drives Innovation in Banking with VMware Cloud on AWS – I’m sorry; this story is crap. If you want to tell stories about how banks are innovating on AWS there are a lot of stories you can tell. Leaving aside the fact that the “innovation” here is “an innovative single-point-of-contact digital service that interacts with any device” or as I’d refer to it “suspiciously close to a webapp,” their solution was to call Deloitte(motto: “World leading experts in Digital Transformation but please ignore that our website subdomain is ‘www2′”), who then rolled out VMware on AWS (motto: “Treat your cloud like a data center”) to power the thing. Moving to the cloud is hard, I get it; that goes double for regulated industries. But they really aren’t doing anyone any favors by calling this “Innovation.”
AWS Artist Series: Creating characters with dynamic wrinkles – Holy crap. This is the first AWS blog post that I can recall that touches on an AWS service (Nimble Studio in this case) that isn’t required to get value from the post. There are no architecture diagrams, hidden billing gotchas, or arcane references to other AWS services. Artists can just read this and learn how to do a thing. This is amazing.
Five reasons why I’m excited to attend AWS re:Inforce 2021 in Houston, TX – 1) Houston in late August is LOVELY! 2) The author won’t have to watch the Americas Online Summit, which will be streaming live at the same time.3) Getting a bunch of people who deal with risk for a living to gather en mass during a COVID19 resurgence is a great way to figure out who they shouldn’t hire.4) Catching up with colleagues whose companies consider them to be expendable.5) Figuring out whether vendor badge scanners can work with 6 feet of distance in the expo hall.
Strengthen the security of sensitive data stored in Amazon S3 by using additional AWS services – This is refreshingly direct; usually I have to read the article to figure out that it’s a services cross-sell.
Tools
Are you tired of juggling the costs of AWS backups and recovery with your SLAs? Quit the circus act and check out Veeam. They’re AWS backup and recovery solution is made to save you money— not that thats the primary goal, mind you—while also protecting your data properly. They’re letting you protect 10 instances for free with no time limits. So test it out now. You can even find them on the AWS marketplace at snark.cloud/backitup. Sponsored
A tool to manage git pre-commit hooks.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
