Good Morning!
So how’d those IPv4 charges treat you in this month’s AWS bill?
I’ll be hosting a webinar about network management this week; I intend to more or less make my friends at Kentik answer the hard questions, then turn my networking frustrations on you–the audience. Drop by and see what shade we can throw around…
And starting on Thursday ‘ll be at [SCaLE](https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/21x) next week to give my brand new "Terrible Ideas in Kubernetes" talk; if you still want to attend feel free to use code ‘DUCK’ to drop the ticket price down to $45. This remains one of my very favorite conferences, and the first tech conference I ever attended oh so many years ago. Come to Pasadena!
And of course if you’re not in California, Monkigras didn’t check the global event calendar; I will be there someday when there isn’t a conflict.
From the Community
There are a few AMIs (pronounced Ay-Em-Eye) you can choose for EKS; it seems like Bottlerocket might be a winner.
I’ve always liked versions of The AWS S3 Denial of Wallet attacks; though you’ll likely ignore a politely worded note from a researcher, you won’t ignore a $3 million surprise on this month’s bill.
In a move that will surely end well for everyone, AWS acquired a nuclear powered data center campus in Pennsylvania. This is just a stone’s throw away from their data center facility in Centralia, where a massive underground mine fire has been burning since 1962.
Dr. Matt Wood chatted with The Information (paywalled) about AI chips, and came across as a dynamic human being in ways that AWS has been largely unable to deliver on in quite some time. Could I quote him out of context very easily to make the company look ridiculous? Of course! That’s what happens when you let people be humans! I’m not going to DO it because that incentivizes exactly the wrong kinds of behavior.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: Mexico Region and GenAI Open Season
Screaming in the Cloud: A Beginner’s Guide to Surviving AWS re:Invent with Chris Hill
Screaming in the Cloud: The Nuanced Power of Headless Browsers with Joel Griffith
Choice Cuts
Start your Engines! Announcing the 2024 AWS DeepRacer League – This is a helpful reminder that sometimes, when a product team ships something while the corporate communications team is distracted, AWS can still ship things that aren’t GenAI.
Accelerate no-code ML with a refreshed homepage in Amazon SageMaker Canvas – They of course did not refresh its surprise $2K a month "session fee," which would turn Canvas into something I potentially advocated for instead of warning everyone I speak to away from.
AWS re:Post introduces re:Post Live – If Mohammed won’t come to the mountain, the mountain must rebrand its Twitch livestream as MountainView and hope that the existing attendees improve its mountaineering KPIs. Or put more simply: re:Post is a graveyard, but that’s not stopping AWS from trying to make it A Thing.
How Accenture Accelerates Building a Secure Cloud Foundation Natively on AWS – I’m old enough to remember when Accenture scored itself an S3 bucket negligence award by exposing client data, so hearing that they’re going to help clients securely use the cloud strikes me as a bit rich.
Revolutionize Your Business with AWS Generative AI Competency Partners – My 6-year-old telling me that I’m "good at computers" has the same level of credibility as AWS saying a company is competent at Generative AI. AWS themselves are not GenAI competent, are desperate to shift that perception otherwise, cannot shut up about it (else I’d not actually care that they’re trailing here), and now are trying to associate themselves with companies that are in fact succeeding in the space. The hell of it is, the companies they’ve slapped together for this first pass at a competency is almost all consultancies–plus HuggingFace, since AWS has them over a barrel. The companies that are actually succeeding want remarkably little of AWS’s GenAI failure-stink on them.
Amazon RDS now supports io2 Block Express volumes for mission-critical database workloads – This is sincerely interesting, and a reminder that there are still subversive teams inside of AWS who are building things that customers want instead of what AWS Leadership thinks it wants. I recently had a customer who was pushing the limits of RDS I/O performance; they’re excited as all get out on this one.
Free data transfer out to internet when moving out of AWS – Google did it, so now AWS is doing it too. This is almost entirely done for optics; if someone’s debating moving a workload off of AWS (this happens less frequently than the tech press would have you believe) they aren’t stopping because the egress fee is expensive; it’s ~3 months of storing the data in S3. Instead, the fee hurts when customers are doing their usual business and sending traffic to customers, not "when they’re leaving the cloud." This change does nothing to fix that core pain, but it may look like it does to regulators if they’re not on the ball.
Unlocking Innovation: AWS and Anthropic push the boundaries of generative AI together – This blog post mentions Anthropic 20 times. The Anthropic launch announcement mentions AWS once, in the same sentence as Google. It’s very clear exactly who needs to be seen as working closely with whom in this space.
The benefits of running controlled substance databases with AWS – Oh fantastic, AWS thinks it’s found its true calling as the DEA’s IT department. Honestly, if AWS knows where all of the various drugs are, that’d explain a heck of a lot about their increasingly "fists of ham" strategy around what they’re saying to the market these days.
Introducing the AWS WAF traffic overview dashboard – Oh man, if I never have to build such a thing again myself I will die mostly happy. This is long overdue and I really hope it works the way it’s described.
Tools
If you’ve heard of Prettier, the code formatting tool, you’re gonna love the exact opposite: Shittier. It’s… less pretty. Just go ahead and install this, then reformat your production code base. Force push it with a commit message of "DEAL WITH IT" and thank me later!
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
