Good Morning!
AWS suffered a fire that wasn’t really a fire in Frankfurt last week; for some reason it’s very important to them that everyone is aware that it wasn’t a fire, just a fire’s close cousin that they call “Increased Ambient Temperature.” Well okay then?
From the Community
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I don’t know what to make of AWS Hidden World, but I definitely like the originality!
A dive into phishing for AWS credentials via AWS SSO device code authentication.
Friend of the newsletter Maish Saidel-Keesing has a blog post up about how he’s no longer an AWS Solutions Architect, but rather an “EntReloper,” a term I already viscerally hate–but good luck to him!
I’m apparently giving a keynote at the first A Cloud Guru Community Summit in a couple of weeks. Oh my.
Netflix talks about using eBPF flow logs at scale for network insight.
A post on hibernating ECS and EC2 for cost savings.
I did a video interview with Google Cloud, and their Twitter account showcased it. I note that the official AWS twitter account has never tweeted about me. Hmm…
I’m becoming increasingly convinced that DocumentDB (with MongoDB Compatibility) was a strategic blunder by AWS. Nobody wants it; the correct direction would have been to partner with MongoDB on Actual Mongo as a service. I know I’ve given MongoDB a bunch of grief in years past, but I’m really coming around on it both as a platform and a company.
I maintain that The Key to Unlock the AWS Billing Puzzle is Architecture.
That schmuck who plotted to bomb an AWS data center pled guilty.
Fastly took a global outage that was reported, analyzed, fixed, and summarized in less time than it’s historically taken the AWS status page to even acknowledge that there was a problem at all.
I’d call CloudWatch Metrics many, many things–but not an unsung hero.
Jobs
If you’ve got an interesting job for this newsletter’s eminently employable subscribers, get in touch!
Your curiosity of the world drives everything you do. You thrive in a collaborative environment where you get to build software in finance, healthcare, IoT, telecom, home security and automation, or other industries. You’d feel like you are home at Chariot Solutions. We’re a boutique software development firm looking for senior engineers – Java, Python, Node, AWS, React, Angular, iOS, Android. We’re one of top workplaces in the Philadelphia area, and we founded, curate and host Philly ETE, a conference with world-class speakers that’s been running since 2005. Our team sets us apart, including leadership that truly cares and treats you like family. We are committed to continuous learning and improvement, and we pay it forward to the tech community, attend and speak at conferences, and strive for work/life balance. Check out our job listings and apply to join us today.
98point6 sounds like a cool Seattle radio station but it’s actually a virtual care company that’s making primary care more accessible and affordable. They’re looking for engineers and engineering managers to further their efforts, build critical systems for on-demand care at scale and collaborate across the organization. Interested in joining their mission? Check out their open roles and apply now.
The AWS User Experience Products & Platform team is responsible for products that enable AWS users to manage their applications and infrastructure on AWS. Our mission is to deliver an effective, efficient, and loved user experience that makes it easy for all users to discover, learn, and build on AWS. Today, we own the AWS Management Console, the AWS Console Mobile App, the AWS Chatbot, as well as the User Experience Platform used by 175+ AWS service teams to develop and deliver their user experience across multiple channels (web, mobile, chat).
Think “GitHub for marketing teams” and you’d be pretty close to describing Loomly. They’re looking for someone to take ownership of and lead their DevOps/SRE efforts–and that person might well be you. They’re fully remote, post their salary ranges, and using a bunch of AWS services. I’m a fan of what I’ve seen from them so far; see if this role is up your alley.
Choice Cuts
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Amazon Athena engine version 2 is generally available in all AWS commercial and GovCloud regions – A complicated service gets some new options to befuddle you with.
Amazon Managed Blockchain now supports customer-managed customer master keys – Just in case you’d started to take AWS seriously, they wish to remind you that they do in fact feature a “Managed Blockchain” service.
In the Works – AWS Region in Tel Aviv, Israel – AWS has announced a new region in Israel. Unlike most of their other regions, these data centers will be managed via screaming at people.
Automate the archival and deletion of sensitive data using Amazon Macie – AWS is now here to help you obliterate the cost savings of archiving or deleting data via the use of Amazon Macie.
Easily remove duplicate customer records using machine learning with Amazon Connect – Finally the secret of how AWS learned to stop emailing the same marketing email to all 50 accounts within an organization was revealed: Machine Learning®.
Announcing the general availability of AWS Proton – Proton is of course AWS’s way of removing a lot of the busywork of building containerized and serverless applications in a safe, repeatable way. Building applications like this yourself on EC2 is henceforth known as Anti-Proton, and of course if you try to do both of them on the same application they will annihilate one another.
Top 10 Innovations in Retail Since 2000 – Amazon breaks its arm patting itself on the back.
How to run an AI powered musical challenge: “AWS DeepComposer Got Talent” – “AWS putting on a talent show” is really the best punchline you’ll see in this newsletter all year.
Prepare data from Snowflake for machine learning with Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler – “Okay, we can’t get customers to stop sending their data to Snowflake instead of Redshift because Snowflake kicks the crap out of our data warehouse offering; how about we coax the data back so we can run some more Machine Learning® on it?”
Data egress waiver available for eligible researchers and institutions – AWS’s 1998 pricing for bandwidth now offers some relief for institutions and researchers willing to jump through some hoops.
A vanishingly rare AWS deprecation has struck! They aren’t doing an announcement on this one; it was quietly introduced in the docs and then reverted: we’re no longer able to access S3 buckets via BitTorrent.
Tools
RSVP now for Open@Amazon
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Patrolaroid snapshots AWS instances and buckets to “uncover malware, backdoors, cryptominers, toolkits, and other attacker tomfoolery that you probably don’t want in your prod.”
This Terraform module monitors cost for both AWS and Datadog.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
