Good morning!Welcome to issue number 62 of Last Week in AWS.
EKS has been released, yet another instance type was launched, and conference season is heating up. I’ll be in Tokyo next week if any readers will be around and want to make fun of the cloud with me.
Community Contributions
I get my tech news from a lot of places. Here are some newsletters you should consider reading: DevRel Weekly – News specific to the Developer Relations (“DevReloper”) community. Webops Weekly – Weekly web operational news. Monitoring Weekly – A curated selection of monitoring / observability specific news. DevOps’ish – Chris Short’s curated selection of DevOps happenings.
The annual Node.js Survey shows that AWS remains the preferred location for Node developers to deploy their code, in case anyone has been asleep for the past half-decade.
Another “getting started” guide; this one uses Serverless framework, Node.js, AWS Lambda and DynamoDB. Is this starting to feel like a game of “Clue” to anyone else?
A video, slide deck, and accompanying code repository for how to deploy Jenkins onto AWS in an immutable way. Worth taking a look at this if you’re dealing with similar problems.
The inaugural REdeploy conference (exploring the intersections of resilient technology, organizations, and people) is coming to San Francisco this August. Last Week in AWS is proud to be a media sponsor. More to come on that in coming weeks…
Friend of the newsletter Datadog is having their Dash conference in New York on July 11-12. If it works for your schedule, I strongly suggest attending; AWS is a platinum sponsor, and longtime readers know how finicky they are about putting their logo on any conference that doesn’t have the word “Amazon” in the title somewhere. Use the code “DASHLAST” to get 20% off of registration.
If you’re tired of playing Instance Alphabet Soup, this EC2 Compute Instance Family Lineage is incredibly handy at sorting out which each family offers, as well as from where it descends.
Cloudonaut evaluates EKS vs. ECS; I’m really interested to see how this comparison ages as EKS matures.
This article goes into non-trivial depth about CloudFront settings that can dramatically reduce the bill. I’m doing most of them, but picked up a trick or two– just in time for me to start putting additional load through CloudFront.
While a bit dated, this post on using Lambda for image compression still has some good bits buried within it.
Last week I got to speak with David Torgerson about LucidChart’s migration to Aurora on Screaming in the Cloud. It was fun– check out Episode 13: Serverlessly Storing my Dad Jokes in a Dadabase.
This summer will see a Community Gardening session from HashiCorp; they’re going to fix a bunch of AWS bugs. If you’ve got a few things that annoy the heck out of you, come be a squeaky wheel.
If you want to test out VMware on AWS, it’s recently seen a price cut to “only” $4K a month, down from $24K.
Why are narrowly scoped instance roles important? So a Jira bug doesn’t expose your AWS credentials to attackers, for starters.
Choice Cuts From the AWS Blog
Amazon Aurora with MySQL Compatibility is Available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region – You can now upgrade your federally regulated workloads to Aurora; likely directly from punchcards.
Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes Now Generally Available – Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past week, you’ve heard that EKS has been released. I’ll be honest: I’m not sure what the value here is of this product. Somewhat more concerning, when I attempted to understand the value I got three very different explanations from three very well regarded people within the Kubernetes ecosystem. Time will tell what this turns into– another Aurora, or the next SimpleDB.
Amazon Sumerian Regional and Feature Expansion – Good news, the Sumerian augmented-reality hosts that are the stuff of nightmares can now apparently change their pants.
Application Load Balancer Adds New Security Policies Including Policy for Forward Secrecy – Yay, another option for the lengthy drop-down menu that lets you set your ELB security policy. This one is helpfully named “ELBSecurityPolicy-FS–2018–06.”
AWS Config Introduces New Lower Pricing for AWS Config Rules – Yay, a more confusing pricing model! “You’ll save money” is once again offset by the increased complexity of the new billing model.
AWS Deep Learning AMIs Now Include Horovod for Faster Multi-GPU TensorFlow Training on Amazon EC2 P3 Instances – I challenge anyone to explain this headline to someone who’s not in the tech industry in less than twenty minutes.
AWS Marketplace Launches New Website Workflow – Surprise! Have some late-in-the-week UI changes to the Marketplace, which surely will confuse nobody.
Introducing Amazon EC2 M5d Instances – Screamingly fast disks, reasonably priced resources, incredibly complicated decision tree to figure out what instance type you should be using.
Now You Can Use AWS Secrets Manager to Help Maintain HIPAA Compliance in the AWS Cloud – This is new to me. I always thought “HIPAA Secrets Manager” was a person’s job title.
AWS Shield Advanced Announces New Onboarding Wizard – Congratulations to the Shield Advanced team for successfully hiring an actual wizard. When they finish onboarding, magic should happen.
Amazon WorkDocs introduces Open with Office Online – I feel like someone’s having fun at my expense– I’m sorry, doesn’t this announcement tout a new feature enhancement to WorkDocs that distills down to “Good news, you don’t have to use WorkDocs anymore?” I mean, they’re not wrong, but that’s not really the point…
SAP on AWS – Past, Present, and Future | AWS News Blog – This post is hilarious if you replace “SAP” with the word “Google,” and “HANA” with “Chrome.” We’re going to need a lot more RAM…
How to create custom alerts with Amazon Macie – At $5 per gigabyte scanned, your first alert had better bloody well be a budget alarm.
Tools
AWS Labs’s cfn-python-lint serves as a handy CloudFormation Linter if you don’t have something else like Troposphere doing the job for you.
A handy way of injecting AWS SSM Parameters as environment variables. I tend to take a slightly different approach to this myself, but there are a lot of use cases out there.
Sparta is a framework to convert a Go application into a Lambda / API Gateway microservices driven app.
No sooner is EKS released, but third-party CLIs have hit GitHub for it. eksctl is one of them; I think it’s too soon to say whether there’s a need here.
…and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
