Good Morning!
Last week was… yeah. For those of us in the US it felt like it lasted for a month. Regardless, let’s see what AWS got up to during and after the chaos.
From the Community
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This GitHub repo takes an example application from an AWS blog post and extends it into a fully working application. “Taking things AWS does and extending them into something useful” is of course the entire world of cloud computing.
An article on how Google Maps’ Moat is Evaporating, which it absolutely is. Amazon Location Services is the latest entrant and the entire ecosystem is exploding. Huh, maybe Google hiking the price of a widely adopted service by 1400% for some use cases turned out to be a stupid idea?
Medium tells me that this article on How to Enable Logging on Every AWS Service in Existence is a 16 minute read. Yup. It really is that bad.
AWS developer advocate Nathan Peck has a retrospective on his past four years at AWS. Sadly missing are the time I tore his personal AWS bill in half, and a truly dynamite “Nathan Pecking order” pun I once made about a domain name. I expect better in his eight year retrospective in 2025.
Lesser Known Techniques for Attacking AWS Environments is the kind of thing that everyone should sit up and pay attention to.
Longtime AWS employee and friend of the newsletter Alex Wood is engaged. We wish him the best!
CloudFormation now supports more resources than Terraform for the first time. Isn’t that depressing?
“You are the only AWS customer who did X” is my favorite kind of AWS response.
The S3 “competitor” Wasabi has frankly been more than a little obnoxious in terms of the various hit pieces it puts out about the perceived failings of S3. I mostly ignore it, but I admit a bit of me smiled at the fact that they were down for half a day because one of their customers hosted content that was against GoDaddy’s AUP, and knocked them off the internet entirely. Operations is hard, but “don’t use GoDaddy for things you care about” is Ops 101 stuff.
Among many other companies, AWS has told far-right social networking app Parler that it is no longer welcome to use their services. “This is censorship!” cry the worst people on the internet. If you can find me an example of this that isn’t based on outright law breaking, I’ll take that complaint way more seriously; from where I sit this was a long time coming.
The Information (registration gated) has a blockbuster piece of investigative journalism that shows that HBO Max coming to Amazon TV didn’t happen until WarnerMedia extended their commitment to use AWS. I don’t like it when companies misbehave like this.
Two of my favorite entities: AWS’s VP of Storage Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec and tech publication The Register got together for a deep dive into what’s new in AWS storage.
Jobs
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Choice Cuts
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Amazon API Gateway now supports data mapping in HTTP APIs – This is a super handy feature, but like so many serverless enhancements, you won’t understand why until you’ve used the services in question for long enough to appreciate how annoying doing stuff like this by hand was.
Amazon CloudSearch announces updates to its search instances – This is the first CloudSearch enhancement since last March, and it’s timely. I like this service because it always reminds me that cloudsearch.google.com exists and is a way better search engine for G-Suite than anything else, and is included. Now that I’ve mentioned it publicly, Google will no doubt kill it because “a search engine having a good search function for their own app suite even if they hide it” is an intolerable state of affairs to the brain trust over at Google who decides these things.
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling now allows to define 40 instance types when defining Mixed Instances Policy – This is sad because while you can now define up to 40 instance types for your auto-scaling groups, as of this writing there are 392 possible instance types currently available in us-east-1. That is not something I made up; the number is real.
Amazon EC2 R5B Instances now certified for SAP workloads – The big certification delay was apparently ensuring that AWS’s bank wouldn’t freeze their accounts on suspicion of fraud once customers started paying them the GDP of Belize every month to run SAP workloads.
Amazon SQS announces tiered pricing – SQS pricing now lower, more complicated. This is obviously a very clever business development strategy by the makers of Microsoft Excel.
AWS Step Functions adds support for AWS Glue DataBrew jobs to prepare data in analytics and machine learning workflows – Now that reInvent has passed and a bunch of new services have been released, customers and other AWS service teams alike are discovering them and figuring out how to integrate them into their work.
New beta exam for AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate – I have enrolled to take this certification. So far there are a bunch of conflicting instructions, and I’ve already found one security issue that has been reported to Pearson VUE. This is… not an auspicious start, but my test date is next month.
We want to hear from you! – This is a phenomenally bold article title for AWS to put on their Cost Management Blog of all places. It’s like they’re poking me with a stick daring me to bite them.
New – AWS Transfer Family support for Amazon Elastic File System – NFS is now extended across the internet into your facility. It’s no better an option now than it was in 1998 when you first tried this stunt.
Estimating scoring probabilities by preparing soccer matches data with AWS Glue DataBrew – AWS endorses gambling. Personally if I want to gamble, it’s much more invigorating to test out a new AWS service without reading the pricing docs, then see what happens at the end of the month when the bill shows up.
Use Amazon QuickSight to visualize data from Amazon Honeycode – This is a great service pairing because my opinions of the current states of QuickSight and Honeycode are both similarly low.
Discovering sensitive data in AWS CodeCommit with AWS Lambda – “Do it yourself in Lambda” is the AWS way. Meanwhile, GitHub detects this automatically and alerts you within seconds or minutes because they are an actual business with customers instead of a weird science project service offering.
Need a Pandemic Hobby? Get AWS Certified – One of the dangers of AWS posting suggestions like this is the very real danger that I will take them up on it. And I will. My exam is scheduled for next month and will doubtless inform future content as I go through that process.
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… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
