Welcome to issue number 95 of Last Week in AWS.
This week takes me to Charlotte, North Carolina to keynote DevOps Days Charlotte. If you’re around, let me know; I’ve got swag for you. Next week I’m back on the west coast to host Tonight in AWS in Seattle; tickets are free but will sell out.
This week’s issue is sponsored by Digital Ocean. In what may be the least-AWS thing ever, they’ve shared a lot of what’s on their upcoming roadmap. Highlights include a Postgres-first managed database offering, new enhancements to their Kubernetes offering (DOKS, which is such a better name than AWSEKS4K8S(EKS) that I feel ill), and an application marketplace. I’m excited to see what comes out of it; thanks again to Digital Ocean for their continuing support of my ridiculous newsletter.
Community Contributions
Someone asked me a while back who my “dream guest” would be on my podcast. There are a lot of very good answers to that question, but mine was Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec. She’s not particularly public (though she was on the keynote stage last year at re:Invent!), so if you haven’t heard of her before, you’re far from alone. She’s AWS’s VP of S3, but beyond that she’s simply inspirational in ways I struggle to articulate. Virtually everyone at AWS is impressive in some way or another, but she’s a step beyond. I’d challenge anyone to sit in a meeting with her and not come away from the experience deeply impressed. Last week, I got my wish. Episode 46 of Screaming in the Cloud featuring Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec: Don’t Be Afraid of the Bold Ask.
AWS has released its new Architecture Icons, with a gradient background virtually guaranteed to clash with whatever color scheme your architecture diagrams try to use.
Not directly AWS focused and I don’t even care; this article from Silvia Botros on being a principal engineer is too good not to share with you.
A discussion of SLAs and availability in AWS from Cloudonaut.
The evocatively-titled “cloud skills shortage and the unemployed army of the certified” talks at the growing divide between beginners and experts. This is a problem I care deeply about; somewhere there’s a young Corey Quinn looking for a third shift tech support job and can’t find one.
MindTouch has released a new open source tool called LINK, or λ# if you prefer something impossible to type, read, or pronounce. It ties Lambda creation to CloudFormation in some way or other; it feels a bit like Serverless Framework to me.
A potential answer to the perennial question “how many AWS accounts do I need?”
A dive into how EBS latency manifests itself as slow CI. It’s always EBS…
If you want re:Invent videos from multiple years in a single place, I found a treat for you. All of the breakout sessions!
A terrifying new take on a known attack vector for targeting someone else’s AWS account: Unauthenticated AWS Role Enumeration.
Epsagon CEO Nitzan Shapira takes us on a deep dive into the hidden costs of Serverless, a topic sure to be of rising concern later this year.
I did a rage fueled tweet storm about how to save money on your AWS Bill that features surprisingly little snark.
On the other side of the “terrible <——> wonderful” artistic spectrum, Jerry Hargrove has released his visual service summary for Amazon WorkLink. I can only assume Amazon keeps him carefully sequestered away from their designers to avoid contaminating their artwork with something aesthetically pleasing.
Rubrik dodged an S3 Bucket Negligence Award, but scored themselves a Passwordless ElasticSearch Shame Trophy instead. “We put it on the internet and forgot to set a password” is just clown-shoes awful. That said, I don’t love the name of this new award yet; anyone have a suggestion?
Last week, Scalyr shared their “How to Monitor Nginx: The Essential Guide”. This week, they present what’s essentially a companion to both the official nginx documentation and our guide from last week. This week’s “An In-Depth Guide to Nginx Metrics” is a deeper dive into what those metrics are and why they’re important. Read this week’s guide here. Thanks to Scalyr for their support of this week’s issue.
Choice Cut From the AWS Blog, as it was apparently a slow week
Amazon Corretto is Now Generally Available – This is a good first release. It’s got a ways to go before I’ll install it on my Mac, though. It’s gotta get better at interrupting my work with a giant “YOU MUST UPDATE NOW” window, demand I close other applications, etc. before it can truly replace Oracle’s Java for me.
This week’s issue is also sponsored by GoCD. This week, they’re highlighting their Kubernetes integration. It makes it a lot easier to model Docker-based workflows more effectively, but still can’t answer the question of why you might want to run Kubernetes in the first place. My thanks to GoCD for their continued support.
Tools
AWS has released a Lambda Rust runtime. There’s a fascinating Lambda / Rust tension point, in that Lambdas can’t run for longer than fifteen minutes, while Rust fans can’t talk about Rust for less than fifteen minutes.
ec2 metadata filter supplies enhanced security around the EC2 metadata service.
Alex DeBrie just casually spills how to run Livegrep in Fargate. I love this thing so much.
…and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
