Good Morning!
They dumped a LOT on us last week. If you worked on a feature that didn’t make the cut, you picked a poor time of year to announce it. Many things didn’t get included that would have (any other week!) been headline news.
We’re hosting our annual re:Invent drinkup in Las Vegas again on Wednesday of next week; smash the link for a calendar invite. We’re also hosting a breakfast right before Matt Garman’s keynote, so likewise smash that button if the idea of me before noon doesn’t sicken you.
Soon. It’ll all be over… soon.
From the Community
Aurora’s failover feature let both instances accept writes simultaneously, crashed the storage layer, and silently rolled back the upgrade. AWS confirmed it’s their bug with no timeline for a fix. The workaround? Stop all writes manually before failover, which defeats the entire point of Aurora’s "fast failover" marketing.
AWS maintains a 29% lead in market share while Azure and Google slowly nibble away at their dominance. Turns out when you charge premium prices and deliver mediocre support, customers eventually notice there are other options. Who knew competition would be AWS’s kryptonite?
My company launched its software product, Skyway. Cloud Cost Management, now for the 9-figure club.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: pre:Invent Drumbeat
Choice Cuts
Announcing agreement EventBridge notifications for AWS Marketplace – AWS finally moved Marketplace notifications from SNS to EventBridge—a migration that should’ve happened years ago but got delayed because someone had to justify another quarter’s roadmap. At least they kept SNS compatibility so your existing automations won’t explode overnight.
Announcing Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) version 8.0 – Amazon Basics MongoDB skipping three major version numbers to catch up with the real MongoDB 8.0 is a bold move. The 7x query improvement is nice, but let’s be honest – this is AWS playing catch-up while charging you premium rates to not run actual MongoDB. Your compliance team will love the "compatibility" asterisk.
AWS Lambda adds support for Rust – AWS finally made Rust official after years of "try it but don’t blame us if it breaks." Performance nerds rejoice, but remember: memory safety won’t save you from forgetting to set your Lambda timeout and watching your bill explode.
Introducing Amazon MWAA Serverless – They finally made Airflow serverless, which sounds great until you realize it only supports their own operators. Want to run custom code? That’ll require Lambda, Batch, ECS, or Glue—each with their own separate billing. Also, no web UI. Because apparently monitoring workflows through CloudWatch logs is "simplified operations."
Introducing flat-rate pricing plans with no overages – AWS discovered that surprising customers with five-figure bills after a DDoS attack is bad for business. The new flat-rate CloudFront plans solve this—starting at free and scaling to $1K monthly—but here’s the catch: exceed your allowance and performance tanks instead of costs spiking. I’m unsure how that’s going to present to customers as "you’ve exceeded your plan" and not "AWS’s CDN suddenly kinda sucks, maybe try another vendor." Pick your poison carefully.
New Amazon Bedrock service tiers help you match AI workload performance with cost – AWS just invented airline pricing for AI inference. Priority tier costs 25% more for maybe 25% better latency, while Flex tier means "we’ll get to it when we feel like it." Can’t wait to debug why my chatbot suddenly got economy-class responses because someone forgot to set a parameter.
Amazon EC2 P6-B300 instances with NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs are now available – NVIDIA’s barely-announced Blackwell Ultra chips are already on AWS, proving that when there’s margin to be made on AI hype, launch timelines become remarkably flexible. One region, capacity blocks only, contact your account manager for pricing—translation: if you have to ask, you can’t afford it.
Amazon ECR introduces archive storage class for rarely accessed container images – Archive storage for container images you’ll never use again but can’t delete? That’s not a feature, that’s therapy for compliance teams. At least the 20-minute restore window gives you time to reconsider your life choices before pulling that cursed image from 2019.
New AWS Billing Transfer for centrally managing AWS billing and costs across multiple organizations – Finally, a feature that lets you centralize the pain of AWS billing across multiple organizations. Because nothing says "enterprise ready" like needing a dedicated service just to figure out who owes what. At least your accountant can now cry in one place instead of logging into seventeen different management accounts.
Network Load Balancers now support Weighted Target Groups – They finally added what Application Load Balancers have had for years, but sure, let’s call it "launching" instead of "catching up." At least you can stop maintaining that janky Route 53 workaround your team built in 2019.
AWS NAT Gateway now supports regional availability – Finally fixing the "deploy NAT Gateway in every AZ or risk downtime" tax with automation that should’ve existed day one. Now you just pay once for the privilege of egress traffic instead of three times. Progress, I suppose, though your data transfer + NAT gateway data processing bills remain impressively unchanged.
AWS Secrets Manager announces managed external secrets – AWS finally automated rotation for SaaS secrets, which is genuinely useful. Of course, they launched with exactly three partners, because nothing says "fully baked feature" like supporting 0.001% of the SaaS ecosystem. Your Okta and GitHub tokens are still on you, apparently.
Accelerate infrastructure development with AWS CloudFormation intelligent authoring in IDEs – Finally shipping IDE tooling that should’ve existed a decade ago, right as everyone’s migrating to Terraform. The drift detection is legitimately useful though – nothing quite like discovering your coworker’s been clicking around the console at 2AM.
AWS Cost Optimization Hub introduces Cost Efficiency metric to measure and track cloud cost efficiency – AWS now offers a metric to tell you how badly you’re overspending on their platform. It’s like your doctor creating a scale that measures how much you’re ignoring their advice, except this one refreshes daily to maximize your guilt.
AWS Lambda announces new tenant isolation mode to simplify building tenant-aware applications – Finally, a way to avoid the "oops, we accidentally leaked Customer A’s data to Customer B" headline that keeps SaaS founders up at night. Of course, it comes with a pricing page, because AWS knows desperation when they see it.
Introducing 18-Month Forecasting and Explainable AI Insights in AWS Cost Explorer – This is one of the things we’ll be covering in one of my re:Invent talks in two weeks: COP203. There will be jokes, and (as of this writing) a nearly 4.5 minute crash-out monologue rant.
Simplified developer access to AWS with ‘aws login’ – Ooh, it’s like a shitty first party version of granted.dev. So soon?
Amazon DynamoDB now supports multi-attribute composite keys in global secondary indexes – Finally admitting that forcing developers to manually concatenate strings into fake composite keys was bad design. This should have shipped in 2012, but at least they’re not making you jump through hoops in code anymore to fix their homework.
Simplify access to external services using AWS IAM Outbound Identity Federation – Yay, another way to authenticate AWS against non-AWS things. This is what, six now?
Improve API discoverability with the new Amazon API Gateway Portal – AWS finally noticed that making developers cobble together their own API documentation portals was bad for business. This "fully managed" solution mostly just wraps existing AWS services you’re already paying for – Cognito, CloudWatch, RAM – into a prettier package with its own overloading of industry terms of art.
AWS Step Functions enhances Local Testing with TestState API – Finally, a way to test Step Functions without burning through API calls like a venture-backed startup at a WeWork happy hour. The mock validation feature is genuinely useful, though I’m skeptical about how well those contract checks will age as AWS services evolve faster than your documentation can keep up.
Amazon CloudFront announces 3 new CloudFront Functions capabilities – Three genuinely useful features at no extra charge? Did someone accidentally approve this without running it past the pricing committee? The SNI override alone saves multi-tenant nightmares, though I’m sure they’ll find a creative way to monetize your increased function execution time.
Recycle Bin adds support for Amazon EBS Volumes – They’re charging you full EBS rates to keep deleted volumes in limbo. Call it a recycle bin if you want, but it’s really just "pay us to not delete your data immediately." At least snapshots were cheaper.
Tools
I wrote a tool called imagemage to use Gemini’s new photo generation API that’s so snarky it needed its own manifesto. For the record, I stand by every word – especially the part about not needing half of npm just to hit an API endpoint. Sometimes spite builds better software than product roadmaps ever could.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
