Good Morning!
I’m in the wilds of Maine this week for Monktoberfest. If you’re here, come say hi. If you’re not, rejoice in not being in Maine; I grew up here.
From the Community
Fantastic AWS Policies and Where to Find Them is a great tour through the various IAM aspects.
Picking a cloud provider is its own form of lock-in whether you want it to be or not. For more see my upcoming talk at KubeCon in November.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: EKS on Raspberry Pi, But Please Don’t Check the Pricing Page
Choice Cuts
AWS Organizations supports full IAM policy language for service control policies (SCPs) – This is nuanced and I’m not up to speed enough on the intricacies of SCPs to say for certain how transformative it is, so if you think it’s a big deal please hit reply and tell me why.
Amazon Route 53 Resolver Query Logging now available in Asia Pacific (New Zealand) – This is one of a flurry of AWS announcements of service expansions to New Zealand. At some point you’ve gotta ask yourself "when is an AWS region actually considered launched?"
A guide to reducing waste and improving efficiency with AWS – This blog post is borderline incoherent. It swings from sentence to sentence between cost optimization, security best practices, pitching various AWS service offerings, and then I couldn’t take it anymore and closed the tab. Who exactly is this for?
Amazon RDS announces cross-Region and cross-account snapshot copy – You might rightly say "hey wait a second, didn’t we ask for this back in 2014?" And while the answer is "of course you did," you have to realize that the RDS team doesn’t like customers because they don’t have to like customers; they play in a space where people give money to Oracle, for god’s sake. I’m not saying their pace of innovation is low, but they did announce RDS for DB2 in 2023, so you’ve got a good few decades before it catches up to 2025.
You can now preview Amazon S3 Tables in the S3 console – This is a neat enhancement I guess, but isn’t it also kinda S3 Tables Stakes?
AWS announces EC2 instance attestation – This is useful for folks who trust their cloud providers but also don’t trust their cloud providers in very specific combinations.
Humane World for Animals uses AWS to scale global animal welfare programs – They care deeply about animal welfare, but not so much about employee welfare these days up in Seattle.
On Halloween, S3 is going to be deprecating its SOAP API. Pour one out for XML.
Prompt Library | AWS Startups – AWS apparently quietly launched this last week, and I saw folks talking about it on social media, but there’s been no official announcement as of the time of this writing. I’m surprised; you’d expect the messaging around this thing to be… prompt.
AWS named as a Leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for AI Code Assistants – Amazon Q is a Leader but Cursor is not, so this quadrant strains credulity so hard it needs hernia surgery. This is a swing and a miss, smacking solidly into Gartner’s credibility. I don’t believe it to be true, but putting out stuff like this that is obviously not the market’s overall position is where a lot of the "Gartner is pay for play" grousing comes from.
Tools
It’s not AWS specific, but looking at how Tigris built its S3-alike API I wonder why the AWS SDKs are so damned verbose about stuff like this.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
