Good Morning!
Welcome to issue number 130 of Last Week in AWS.
We start with an announcement: the annual Last Week in AWS charity T-shirt drive has launched and will run for the next week. The design is glorious, and there are two options for you to choose from: a correct version stating that AMI has three syllables, or an incorrect version stating that AMI has two syllables. Note that the incorrect version costs $10 more, as there’s a very real price to being wrong. Whichever you choose, all proceeds go to benefit St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, which has helped raise the survival rate of all childhood cancers from 20% to 80% since their inception.
There’s more work to do–and St. Jude never charges patients or their families a dime for treatment, travel, housing, or food. They’re a worthy cause that only Larry Ellison could possibly object to. To buy, visit snark.cloud/charityshirt; time is limited, so act now!
Thank you for your support.
From the Community
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Rachel by the Bay has a great article that’s thought-provoking for those of us who depend upon layers of abstractions piled high–in other words, all of us.
A guide to EC2 instance selection from Helen Anderson.
A discussion of securing S3 buckets with s3audit. It seems to be working, there’s no S3 Bucket Negligence Award this week.
Tim Wagner (formerly the GM of AWS Lambda and the VPE of Coinbase) puts the boots to crypto’s scaling issues by contrasting it to DynamoDB’s 45 million TPS.
Serverless Mullet Architectures – A Cloud Guru – empty
TechRepublic did an interview with me; I ranted about how AWS billing is broken and Kubernetes won’t last, then got into a discussion about Walmart, Oracle, and AWS. I think just about everyone is going to be salty about something I’ve said in here.
“Mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the crappiest sue-happy vendor of them all?” asks Elastic’s leadership team. “Oracle” the mirror responded, before being smashed to bits. And then Elastic sued AWS for trademark infringement. They’ve got a solid case on trademark grounds here–but nobody sees this and thinks that Elastic is a better company for it.
I’ve ranted enough about multi-cloud; let’s let someone else do it this week.
Swirling rumors emerge that AWS is planning a region in Argentina.
Last week was Amazon CTO Werner Vogels‘s birthday, so I wrote a song and made a video out of it–an act for which I refuse to apologize. Happy birthday, Werner.
I was prolific last week! My cynical blog post You Need a Multi-Cloud Dashboard Because I Want To Sell You One was posted too.
Jobs
If you’ve got an interesting job for this newsletter’s eminently employable subscribers, get in touch!
While this week’s AWS team is super new it is run by AWS veterans out of Berlin, Germany and worth paying attention to. The team explores uncharted ways on how software teams will turn their ideas into well working and deployed source code at scale. If you want to join a new, fun, and inclusive team, they’re looking for a product manager, backend, and frontend developers.
Choice Cuts
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AWS Client VPN now supports Multi Factor Authentication for Active Directory – Until this release, the best security Active Directory admins had was job security.
Amazon Elastic Container Service now supports IntelliSense in Visual Studio Code – I’m vaguely amused that VS Code gets more love from AWS than its own Cloud9 does. Also saddened that both suck on iPads.
Amazon Elasticsearch Service provides option to mandate HTTPS – How very 2015 of them!
Amazon Lightsail now provides automatic snapshots – “See, this is what EC2 could have been. Sucks to be you though–it’s not.”
Amazon RDS for Oracle Supports User Authentication with Kerberos and Microsoft Active Directory – …and thus completes the holy trinity of Terrible Software Choices!
Amazon Textract now extracts text even more accurately, from even more types of documents – “Amazon Textract: Now with 20% less suck!” was of course rejected as the headline in the second draft of this release.
Amazon Translate now adds support for seven new languages – Greek, Romanian, Hungarian, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Thai, and Urdu – This really works! I set it to Greek and it correctly translated “Kubernetes” to “Complicated ECS that just helps your résumé.”
Announcing the latest release of AWS Thinkbox Deadline 10.1 with performance enhancements and ease of use improvements – I’d have come up with a better snarky comment for this one, but sadly I didn’t before reaching my own thinkbox deadline.
AWS Amplify Console offers end-to-end browser-based testing with Cypress – Oh hell yes, finally JavaScript testing can make you 🎵 Insane in the membrane / 🎶 insane in the brain! 🎵–wait, I’m sorry. I’m thinking of Cypress Hill, the Grammy-nominated multi-platinum rap group.
AWS Direct Connect Announces the Support for Granular Cost Allocation and Removal of Payer ID Restriction for Direct Connect Gateway Association. – If you’d challenged me to come up with a better example of AWS Billing’s dizzying complexity than this headline, I would have failed.
AWS IoT Things Graph, Now Generally Available – Welcome to the world, “AWS Internet of Things Things Graph,” you terribly named monstrosity.
DynamoDBMapper now supports optimistic locking for Amazon DynamoDB transactional API calls – When I hear about optimistic locking, I can’t help but think of “Hope and Change Management.”
Introducing Amazon SageMaker ml.p3dn.24xlarge instances, optimized for distributed machine learning with up to 4x the network bandwidth of ml.p3.16xlarge instances – At long last the SageMaker team has made a breakthrough on one of the longstanding hard problems in machine learning: “How can my training jobs run on instances that cost more than $43 an hour each?” Well done; this’ll get you one of those prestigious AI prizes for sure!
New Quick Start deploys Amazon Managed Blockchain – That’s a Quick Start for a super Slow Database!
Queuing Purchases of EC2 RIs – I don’t know what irritates me more–that this awesome feature took so long to arrive, or that they’re rolling out “basically a cron job” as a feature.
AWS IQ – Get Help from AWS Certified Third Party Experts on Demand | AWS News Blog – So they’re building /r/aws as a service? Lovely. I would have oh so very much to weigh in on about this service, but unfortunately my Cloud Practitioner certification doesn’t get me past the door.
Tools
In previous weeks I’ve mentioned how CHAOSSEARCH is better than the technical pain of running Elasticsearch yourself. With Elastic-the-company playing the lawsuit game last week, let’s talk about how it can remove the business pain. CHAOSSEARCH doesn’t sue your cloud provider with a pearl-clutching complaint. It doesn’t send nasty legal letters to your customers. It doesn’t cost Splunkish levels of “kidnap the princess for ransom” licensing fees. I’d recommend them even if they weren’t sponsoring this newsletter; to learn more visit CHAOSSEARCH.io.
What’s better than aws-nuke? Why, aws-nuke as a service of course.
A CLI for Kinesis? Sign me up!
s3st is a CLI utility that lets you stream data from multiple S3 objects. It’s awesome.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
