Good Morning!
Since my last email, folks have collectively donated tens of thousands of dollars to support racial justice. You really are the best audience in the world. Obviously this is only a start. More to come in the coming weeks…
Last week Slack announced that they’re partnering with Amazon Chime of all things to power their meetings going forward. I asked the GM of Amazon Chime what the hell was going on in a podcast.
From the Community
About 80% of software teams that do not yet practice observability plan to reach an advanced level within the next 2 years. We asked your peers to tell us how they’re doing.
Advanced observability teams are 3X more likely to work in an organization that understands the breadth and impact of their tech debt. A whopping 92% are confident they proactively notice and catch bugs after code is deployed to production.
Most teams have just begun their observability journey. See how you compare and let Honeycomb.io help you advance your practice. Sponsored
I love the idea of misusing Lambda; the idea that doing so leads to a data store that’s faster than DynamoDB is just gorgeous.
This older post on Dumb Security Questionnaires explains why every compliance form you have to fill out is terrible.
A curious dive into using a subdomain takeover pattern on S3.
I’ll be joining AWS for some kind of web streaming video thing next week; go ahead and register if you enjoy sarcasm, pain, and me inflicting both of those things upon high level AWS VPs who have no earthly idea who I am or what they’re in for.
I love how Polyverse’s “WordPress on ECS/Fargate” blog post takes the time to dunk on AWS’s WordPress reference architecture.
There’s now a Lambda runtime for Swift, a language only used on your iPhone, for AWS Lambda, which runs only in AWS environments. How… useful.
In lighter news, AWS apparently posted a blog post promotion to Twitter featuring a watermarked iStock photo. I’m not sure that this is the best expression of frugality, but you do you.
Matt Weagle has (taken a role)
In the midst of these long overdue transformational times I'd like to share some personal news…
I'm tremendously excited to be joining the @awscloud #awslambda team as an EM later this month.
— Matt Weagle (@mweagle) June 5, 2020
at AWS. He’s amazing; I look forward to hearing what his new adventures in Serverless look like.Similarly, AWS has acquired swyx / Shawn Wang as a developer advocate.
An stack of S3 Bucket Negligence awards goes to TVSmiles, Joomla, 8Belts, and one more that I’ll get into down below in the tools section of this issue.
Ugh. When a specific AWS employee says or does something I don’t agree with, calling them out personally is generally punching down. This guy has a bigger platform, and would ideally demonstrate correspondingly more empathy.
Jobs
If you’ve got an interesting job for this newsletter’s eminently employable subscribers, get in touch!
At Stedi, they’re working in one of the biggest markets on the planet – EDI, the technological backbone of the physical product economy. They’re building a next-generation platform: a ubiquitous commercial trading network to automate the trillions of dollars in B2B transactions exchanged by nearly every company on Earth. If you’re interested in what they’re building and how they’re building it, they’d love to hear from you.
Choice Cuts
Mistakes happen in the cloud. Just ask anyone who’s accidentally left expensive workloads running, put sensitive data in a public bucket, or agreed to deploy an Oracle product. The folks at cloudtamer.io believe that a well-governed cloud means never having to say you’re sorry–and not because Finance doesn’t know where to find you. cloudtamer.io unifies access and identity management, budget enforcement, and compliance automation into a single solution that works across both AWS and Azure. If your cloud ops team or developers apologized recently, check them out. If they refused to apologize, several notable tech companies are currently hiring. Sponsored
Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL Global Database Supports Managed Recovery Point Objective (RPO) – The RTO of course remains fixed at “however long it takes the snapshot to finish restoring.”
Amazon Redshift now delivers better cold query performance by significantly improving compilation times – Today I learned that you can compile SQL queries. Now that I know that, I’m about to go learn whether you can flavor cheap vodka with coffee.
Amazon SageMaker Components for Kubeflow Pipelines – Right now VC investments are down across the board due to the economic climate. Amazon could not possibly have picked a worse time to smash machine learning together with Kubernetes.
Announcing Cross-Cluster Search support for Amazon Elasticsearch Service – Declaring success on having made Elasticsearch easy and fun to maintain, Amazon decides to ramp up the complexity. ChaosSearch weeps for the souls of the Amazonians.
Announcing the General Availability of Amazon EC2 G4dn Bare Metal Instances – GPU instances with up to 8 NVIDIA T4 GPUs – And of course, a g4dn.12xlarge has 4 GPUs while a g4dn.16xlarge has 1 GPU because OH MY GOD AMAZON ARE YOU KIDDING ME
Announcing storage controls for schemas in Amazon Redshift – In a withering blow to their quarterly revenue, you can now restrict the amount of disk space used by a schema in Amazon Redshift.
AWS Data Migration Service now supports copying graph data from relational sources to Amazon Neptune – Yet for some reason you’re charged as if it were copying graph data from relational sources to the planet Neptune.
AWS DeepComposer announces autoregressive CNN algorithm for generating compositions and an associated learning capsule to understand the machine learning concepts – The AI has apparently broken free and begun writing AWS release headlines.
AWS Direct Connect enables Failover Testing – This is part of their Resiliency Toolkit. Think of it as AWS extending Chaos Engineering principles beyond the crapshoot of running in the Bad AZ of us-east-1.
AWS Systems Manager Explorer now adds support for a delegated administrator account to view operational data across multiple accounts and regions – Ooh, this is interesting. You can leverage Organizations without having to log into the master account for one less thing. At this blistering pace we’ll be able to delegate everything by 2040.
Database Activity Streams now available for Aurora with MySQL compatibility – It’s 10 o’clock; do you know what your database is doing? Of course you don’t, but with this enhancement you can pretend like you do when asked by regulators.
Introducing AWS CloudEndure Migration Factory Solution – “CloudEndure Migration Factory” is probably the most scathing on-the-nose name to come out of AWS in the past year. It’s PERFECT!
Real-time anomaly detection support in Amazon Elasticsearch Service – Detecting anomalies is harder than it sounds. This feature starts with detecting “you’re using Amazon Elasticsearch on purpose.”
Tighten S3 permissions for your IAM users and roles using access history of S3 actions – “Hey, this is the only set of permissions this role has used” is super handy! Now I want something kind of aligned: “I give a resource an open policy (in a test environment). I put it through everything that resource will do. Automatically build an IAM policy for it to do those things and nothing else.”
New – Amazon EC2 C5a Instances Powered By 2nd Gen AMD EPYC™ Processors | AWS News Blog – “They’re 10% less expensive” is the only official word on benchmarks. I’m not sure whether I should root for AMD or Intel here; it’s going to come down to who has the bigger booth at the next conference I attend.
Tools
Running a business is hard. Your cloud doesn’t have to be. DigitalOcean is the cloud that offers transparent, predictable pricing – even for Kubernetes clusters, which you’d have thought was impossible! You also won’t need 12 weeks of cloud school to absorb a zillion ancillary services just to be able to SSH into an instance. Is this the kind of simplicity you need out of your cloud provider? Check out DigitalOcean today. Sponsored
The US President’s birthday is apparently a thing, and his reelection campaign put up a website for supporters to upload videos wishing him well. Originally the S3 bucket was unsecured, but they fixed that. Now you can use this command line tool to upload your well wishes in bulk to a place where they’re charged by the gigabyte.
Spot Cost shows a much more accessible view of Spot instance pricing and its associated trends.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
