Good Morning!
As of last week, Ben Kehoe has left iRobot, leaving Amazon in the somewhat uncomfortable position of not being able to onboard someone who many people consider "the primary reason they bought iRobot." Ben’s a cloud legend; I’m very interested to see where he goes next.
And where’s he going next? Presumably to re:Invent! I am too, with my re:Quinnvent nonsense; that’s ramping up massively this week.
From the Community
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I found this list of AWS services that support IPv6. There’s still some room for improvement here.
On the lighter side, Volkswagen has released a driveable office chair with headlights and a horn. This is in no way a metaphor for the kind of announcements I’m expecting at re:Invent.
I’m still thrilled that there’s An alterNAT Future: We Now Have a NAT Gateway Replacement.
Jobs
The Pinecone vector database makes it easy to build high-performance vector search applications. At Pinecone you would have the opportunity to work with world-class scientists and engineers who have built large scale ML applications and platforms at leading companies and cloud providers. We have several engineering opportunities open in New York and Tel Aviv – visit www.pinecone.io/careers/ to find out more.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: An alterNAT Future: We Now Have a NAT Gateway Replacement
Last Week In AWS: EIP Moving Day
Last Week In AWS: Overly OpenSearch
Screaming in the Cloud: A Cloud Economist is Born – The AlterNAT Origin Story
Screaming in the Cloud: The Quest to Make Edge Computing a Reality with Andy Champagne
Choice Cuts
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Amazon Athena announces Query Result Reuse to accelerate queries – This reduces the costs of Athena if you use it; you don’t have to keep scanning the same original data to get the same result. Use it! No notes.
Amazon EC2 enables you to opt out of directly shared Amazon Machine Images – Aw, I didn’t realize I could shitpost by inflicting AMIs on other people until now–when they close the abuse vector.
Amazon EC2 placement groups can now be shared across multiple AWS accounts – This is awesome–it’s a step along my argument for "at some point, there will be an account boundary between every item on your architecture diagram, so plan for it" as a fundamental design principle.
Amazon EC2 now supports specifying list of instance types to use in attribute-based instance type selection for Auto Scaling groups, EC2 Fleet, and Spot Fleet – Okay, this is a big win; rather than describing instances via attribute with disturbing specificity, you can just give AWS a list of what you want. THANK YOU. This is a nice quality of life improvement.
Amazon Lightsail announces support for domain registration and DNS autoconfiguration – Amazon Lightsail continues its glorious work of "re-imagining all of AWS."
Amazon RDS now supports new General Purpose gp3 storage volumes – This is obnoxious; unlike on EC2 there’s no price difference per GB between this and the older gp2 volumes. It doesn’t work on multi-AZ clusters, and it costs more per GB than EC2’s EBS does. It’s getting harder to recommend RDS vs. just running your own databases on EC2 instances for some workloads…
Announcing recurring custom line items for AWS Billing Conductor – This empowers me to present AWS bills to people with a dedicated "shitposting" line item.
AWS Lambda announces Telemetry API, further enriching monitoring and observability capabilities of Lambda Extensions – I don’t like that there are a whole bunch of observability partner extensions at launch. Isn’t this the point of OTEL? That I can instrument the thing ONCE and send that data to any vendor I choose without having to reinstrument my application?
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AWS Cost Explorer’s New Look and Common Use Cases – This blog post starts with an admission that the redesign is getting mixed reviews. That’s a good thing: it’s proof positive that this service team is paying attention to what folks say about it. Expect good things down the road…
A New AWS Region Opens in Switzerland – eu-central-2 is now available. Many services you probably use aren’t fully "baked" there yet… This is a recurring problem for AWS region disparities; "this region has Lambda" and "this region has Lambda but only in x86 architecture" are two very different things.
Introducing AWS Resource Explorer – Quickly Find Resources in Your AWS Account – I liked this better when it was called Tag Editor. I’m also taken aback by the 36 hour update time mentioned in the post; are they submitting information via FedEx?
Overview of building resilient applications with Amazon DynamoDB global tables – I keep meaning to work with Global Tables; this four part series makes it look pretty compelling.
Publish Amazon DevOps Guru Insights to Slack Channel – I used to integrate a bunch of stuff into Slack; the trouble is that it becomes a lot of noise that people learn to ignore. Hopefully this service can avoid the same fate.
Uncompressed Media over IP on AWS: Read the whitepaper – Maybe also read the AWS pricing page first, specifically around how much money data transfer can cost.
Enable cross-account queries on AWS CloudTrail lake using delegated administration from AWS Organizations – A welcome release, this one’s a big deal. I hope Control Tower integrates an option to disable all trail logging except to CloudTrail Lake across the org…
NASA and ASDI announce no-cost access to important climate dataset on the AWS Cloud – Gotta call it: this is a great thing. No shade from me on this one…
Tools
The cyberthreat landscape is always evolving and keeping your web apps secure can feel like an infinitely expanding game of whack-a-mole. Fortinet Managed Rules for AWS WAF enable you to enhance and simplify your approach to security, helping you get the best protection against threats and malicious actors.
SadServers spins up some Linux VMs in a browser that are broken in specific ways. Your job is to fix them. I love this so much.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
