Good Morning!
In Amazon’s earnings call, Andy Jassy said that every Amazon team is working on Generative AI, which no matter how you slice it is a completely ridiculous idea. I say this as a fan and booster of Generative AI! I see the value! But the idea that everything needs to touch it is legitimately nuts.
From the Community
I’ve begun curating a list of AWS’s service gaps in their IPv6 coverage, specifically those that have economic impact. Pull requests are welcome!
This AWS Horror Story about migrating an AWS organization absolutely rings true. I would seriously consider finding a new company to work at if I were an engineer tasked with doing such a thing at significant scale.
Some US Senators proposed a federal regulator to reign in Big Tech. I’m completely in favor if they start cracking down on "unnecessary use of generative AI in marketing."
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: Azure’s Customer Contempt
Last Week In AWS: Just a Generative AI Company
Screaming in the Cloud: Exposing the Latest Cloud Threats with Anna Belak
Screaming in the Cloud: Storytelling and Relationship-Building in Tech with Colleen Coll
Choice Cuts
Amazon Route 53 adds support for 14 additional Top-Level Domains – Your database’s namespace just expanded.
AWS NAT Gateway is now available in the AWS US West Phoenix Local Zone – …because screw those desert dwellers. Why should they get to be happy when the rest of us don’t?
Amazon EBS announces up to 128 volume attachments per EC2 instance – Two drives are required for RAID0, three drives are required for RAID5, and 128 drives are required for RAID my house for a welfare check before I cause harm to myself or others. I don’t want to know who needs this thing, because the implications are terrifying.
Introducing Amazon EC2 M7i-flex and M7i instances – If there’s one thing customers love, it’s having to do math to figure out whether these burst-like instances will work for a given workload or not.
Amazon EventBridge Scheduler adds schedule deletion after completion – It’s way better for your ticking time bombs to delete themselves after execution.
AWS Application Composer updates: Undo and Redo, Export Canvas, and Local Sync Mode – Oh, right! This is Stackery post their AWS acquisition. I like it, why don’t they talk more about it? It’s super handy…
RDS Custom for SQL Server now supports Local Time Zones – No. Absolutely not. NO. There is one true timezone for servers and databases, and it’s UTC. It’s a one-way door that you don’t realize you’re passing through and then you spend decades unpacking the mess. Google learned this with "Google Standard Time." Yes, yes, "most things never need to transcend multiple timezones" and that’s correct right up until suddenly they do. Display whatever timezone you like at the presentation layer, but the data layer should store time in UTC, and optionally a timezone offset.
"Gee, Corey–you seem awfully passionate about this." Yes, because this service needs a warning in the documentation to this effect. If I can’t buy a chainsaw without a warning label to not attempt to stop the blade with my hand, this needs a warning on it too.
Now Open – AWS Israel (Tel Aviv ) Region – But how did Generative AI help this come to pass? DO YOU SEE WHAT A RIDICULOUS QUESTION THAT IS?!
Prime Day 2023 Powered by AWS – All the Numbers – To answer the question an awful lot of you have asked me and the rest of you can guess, for the 48 hours in question roughly $102 million at retail prices. My full analysis is in editing.
Estimate cost savings for the Amazon Aurora I/O-Optimized feature using Amazon CloudWatch – The fact that you have to jump through these hoops is a pretty good indication that AWS forgets that not every company has tens of thousands of developers lying around to throw at problems like this.
Empowering your workforce with Amazon WorkSpaces services and Microsoft 365 – Microsoft has decided to magnanimously stop being shitheels about their Microsoft 365 license terms, which I’m sure has nothing to do with the extreme levels of regulatory scrutiny they’re currently under in the EU.
Exploring Fn::ForEach and Fn::FindInMap enhancements in AWS CloudFormation – "AI/ML are just a bunch of ‘if’ statements," goes the trope. Someone on the CloudFormation team got their flow control primitives mixed up, and deployed for-loops instead, in a futile effort to evolve their own generative AI play.
Identify and optimize public IPv4 address usage on AWS – Nobody cared about this until suddenly it costs them money starting in February. Now being responsible network citizens is all the rage.
Tools
A demo of VPC Lattice being used in anger.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
