Good Morning!

Today is my wife’s birthday and starts the 11 day long Festival of Quinns, which ends with my birthday next week. Please be sure to wish her a happy birthday in the most obnoxious way you can muster.

From the Community

Are you struggling to determine what analytics workloads can perform well in the data lake, and which ones should be pushed to the data warehouse for peak performance? According to Gartner, you’re not alone. But thankfully, a category of technologies that Gartner calls “analytics query accelerators” are here to help. Learn how analytics query accelerators provide SQL or SQL-like query support on a broad range of data sources to deliver BI dashboards, interactive query capabilities, and support for data modeling. Help your data lake deliver faster time to value – get the free Gartner report, courtesy of ChaosSearch, today!

It’s 2022, so Azure decided it was probably a good time to release an Azure Developer CLI. Better never than late–wait.

I read this report about My Poor Experience With Azure (or why I’m sticking with AWS) and found myself yelling "YES" and pointing at the screen, because I encountered every one of this person’s stumbling blocks myself.

I read this walkthrough of how to instantly set up a VPC for public and private traffic and noted that they avoided the Managed NAT Gateway trap, so I’m willing to link to it.

I usually eschew clickbait headlines like 5 AWS Lambda Pitfalls Most Developers Don’t Know About, but I confess that two of them are new to me, so in it stays.

My post on my Personal Security Posture has gotten a lot of really interesting comments I’m going to have to revisit in the future.

Should I Stay or Should I Go is an article on cloud repatriation from Platformonomics. Frankly I love virtually everything Charles writes, and this is no exception.

SCALE 19x is next week. This is one of my favorite conferences, and is what got me started speaking in public. If you’re near Los Angeles, you owe it to yourself to go.

Matt Asay’s AWS is quietly getting better at open source does speak to an emerging truth. I still think they’re not quite as far along as they’d like to be, but the overall trendline is positive.

Podcasts

Last Week In AWS: AWS Bakery: Rolls Everywhere

Last Week In AWS: How I Spent My Summer Vacation and College Tuition

Last Week In AWS: My Security Posture

Screaming in the Cloud: Kubernetes and OpenGitOps with Chris Short

Screaming in the Cloud: Technical Lineage and Careers in Tech with Sheeri Cabral

Choice Cuts

If you’re like most developers, you have secrets you don’t want getting out… As in keys, tokens, and credentials. That’s why 1Password built 1Password Developer Tools, so you can eliminate plaintext secrets in your code and secure them in vaults that sync across platforms. From there, access your secrets directly within your terminal with a fingerprint or even automate in production.

Amazon CloudFront supports header names of up to 1024 characters in CloudFront policies – Oh hell yes, a new database just dropped!

AWS re:Post introduces profile pictures and inline images – re:Post is, of course, the successor dead wasteland of the original dead wasteland of the AWS Forums. Still, it serves a useful purpose: "go ask your question in the re:Post forums" is more corporate-friendly than telling a user to go screw themselves.

Future Proof Cost Optimization with Attribute-Based Instance Type Selection and Amazon EC2 Spot – Any time someone talks about future-proofing cloud cost optimization, they’re either lying or lacking a whole lot of imagination about what their future state might look like.

Amazon Redshift Serverless – Now Generally Available with New Capabilities – I haven’t gone in depth with this yet; if you have, please hit reply and let me know what you think about it.

New – Cloud WAN : A Managed WAN Service – Any time AWS launches a network thing, it’s usually both incredibly handy, and terrifyingly expensive. True to form, I have yet to find a way to get Cloud WAN’s pricing model into a single screenshot at less than 5K resolution. So… there’s that.

New — Detect and Resolve Issues Quickly with Log Anomaly Detection and Recommendations from Amazon DevOps Guru – There’s now a Machine Learning® powered service to ignore your logs for you instead of you ignoring your logs manually.

Optimizing Node.js dependencies in AWS Lambda – I don’t even have anything snarky to say about this one. I’ve been wrestling with optimizing my Node Lambdas for a while, so I threw this item into the newsletter queue as a reminder to check this out later. That’s right: I built myself a personal bookmarking system that has the side effect of wasting ~32K people’s time reading paragraphs like this one. Sorry, not sorry.

Subsidize Ethereum blockchain transaction costs for your users – The normal way of doing this is by lighting VC money on fire, but with the downturn that’s fallen out of fashion.

Developers are responsible for not just the code they write, but also the containers and cloud infrastructure their applications run on. And a big part of that responsibility is application security. Meet Snykers at AWS re:inforce or your local AWS Summit to learn more about how Snyk integrates seamlessly with AWS to keep applications secure.

How to manage Amazon WorkSpaces cost optimization at scale – This entire post would be unnecessary if Amazon WorkSpaces simply did the right thing by customers: charge by the hour until the usage reaches the "use it for the whole month" cost, and then cap it there.

A guide to making your AI vision a reality – My AI Vision is where I don’t really have to think about AI. It’s not "SageMaker," it’s "Azure Computer Vision API."

Tracking the Effectiveness of Cloud Adoption – You would be amazed to learn just how many enterprises do not do this. "If we track the actual gains against how we sold the idea internally, a bunch of us are going to get fired" is presumably why.

Achieve enterprise-grade monitoring for your Amazon SageMaker models using Fiddler – Does anyone, anywhere, at any time hear the phrase "enterprise grade" and think that it’s describing something that’s in any way good?

Announcing AWS AppConfig Extensions – A while back I did a short spoof video making fun of AppConfig because it’s basically crap. This release goes a long way towards making the service significantly less crap; my opinion is rapidly revising its way upwards.

Fully-automated enterprise-scaled provisioning of AWS Accounts via Self-Service using Jira Service Desk – Yup, if it’s enterprise scale it’s gotta be Jira.

Managing AWS account lifecycle in AWS Control Tower using the Account Close API – For far too long the AWS lifecycle has suspiciously resembled "immortality."

Introducing VPC Flow Logs for AWS Transit Gateway – Holy hell, finally. I was getting fairly tired of having to track down data transfer spend sources via "guess-and-check."

Tools

Every company needs a plan for when things go wrong. We’ve written these plans many times, and every time wished for a reference that reflects how companies actually work today. So here it is — our years of collective knowledge and experience distilled into a Practical Guide to Incident Management for your whole organisation. Enjoy!

While not exactly USEFUL to everyone, this week’s tool is a set of JWST AWS Bulk Download Scripts; they download the early JWST (which is apparently not a form of web token but rather is a space telescope) data for your own perusal. This is amazing.

… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.

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