Good Morning!
A bit of a slow start to the year but that’s okay; it’s definitely shaping up to be a weird one. I have so much more to come this week; you’ll see what I mean in a few days.
From the Community
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Aidan Steele’s blog has some great economic analysis of Shared VPCs, demonstrating that they’re underrated.
A tale of someone who took a job at AWS and left after ten months.
“Which AWS endpoints support ipv6” is sure to lead to a whole bunch of nerd sniping…
There are many uses for IPv6 addresses, so have something as ridiculous as a Route 53 database.
Given recent staffing trends I half expected the answer to How to Speed-up Long DynamoDB Queries by 2x was to move them to MongoDB.
An attorney remarks on the AWS Contributor Licensing Blurb.
I apparently kicked the beehive with my thoughts about The AWS Service I Hate the Most.
Six years and $75 million in funding later, AWS serverless trailblazer Stedi finally deigns to tell us what EDI is.
I move that all AWS documentation be written and illustrated like this article from WikiHow.
Jobs
If you’ve got an interesting job for this newsletter’s eminently employable subscribers, get in touch!
On June 25th Amazon closed the acquisition of Wickr Inc., a company of privacy specialists that build end-to-end encryption (E2EE)-based collaboration solutions that feature messaging, voice and video calling, and file sharing for public sector (federal and state/local government) and commercial enterprise customers. While we’re new to the AWS team we’re already working on several innovations including a new SDK, updated crypto protocols and developing Wickr as an AWS service. Our customers include the Air Force Special Operations command, PWC, crypto currency companies and millions and millions of everyday users. If you like privacy you like Wickr come talk to us.
Truss is a distributed-first, software consultancy that cares about communication, inclusivity, and modern software development practices. We push the envelope on building efficient technology that improves people’s lives. Currently, we’re seeking stellar Sr. Infrastructure Engineers to help us with commercial and government contracts.
Choice Cuts
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Amazon EC2 On-Demand Capacity Reservations now support Cluster Placement Groups – Big news for folks saturating bandwidth between instances, incredibly complicated news for the rest of us.
Amazon EKS now supports Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) – Kubernetes and IPv6: two great tastes that people will absolutely not stop talking about on Twitter whenever the subject arises.
Introducing Autoscaling in AWS Glue jobs (Preview) – “Serverless” and “now supports autoscaling” strike me as being two contradictory concepts, but maybe one of those things has changed in 2022.
Announcing Personal Identifiable Information (PII) detection and remediation in AWS Glue (Preview) – You can now get alerted as to the name of the horse that was turned into AWS Glue.
AWS Lambda now supports ES Modules and Top-Level Await for Node.js 14 – This has the potential to make Lambdas smaller, but you should really just be packaging them up as Docker containers these days anyway. WAIT. Before I finish this paragraph, I just want to add that it’s imperative that you do not email me about it.
Instance Tags now available on the Amazon EC2 Instance Metadata Service – The metadata service has existed for a long time, but I’ve wanted to get the value of instance tags inside of an instance for many years. Finally, FINALLY it’s easy now.
How to Build a Fintech App on AWS Using the Plaid API – In a previous life before Plaid I worked on something that stored banking credentials in a database. I would give almost anything to never do that again, so this is worth paying attention to.
Building a Cloud-Native File Transfer Platform Using AWS Transfer Family Workflows – Oh right, they launched Workflows for the AWS Transfer Family. This is great for folks who need to take in things via FTP and then do things with them. Banking sector, I am very much speaking to you.
Validating addresses with AWS Lambda and the Amazon Location Service – See, this is what I’m talking about when I say AWS doesn’t offer anything up the stack that customers are asking for. There’s a whole “build it yourself” process here. Meanwhile in the real world, a number of established companies offer turnkey address validation APIs. Why wouldn’t you use one of those?
Build and visualize a real-time fraud prevention system using Amazon Fraud Detector – It beats the usual “fraud detection ten months after the fact when your controller is living large in Bermuda.”
Announcing AWS CloudTrail Lake – a managed audit and security Lake – A couple of weeks ago I asked what people were using to analyze CloudTrail logs. This came out as if it were AWS’s formal answer to it. I kicked the tires on it and give it a launch-day grade of A-. Give a bit more transparency into pricing and how much data it’s got inside of it, and it’ll be pretty close to flawless / ready for new features.
Automatically resolve Security Hub findings for resources that no longer exist – Your excitement about this new feature will last only until you click the link and realize that no, it’s a build it yourself from AWS services “solution.”
Tools
Here’s one for your New Year’s reading list: Programming AWS Lambda, the new ebook from O’Reilly, provides a solid overview of serverless development fundamentals, plus hands-on tutorials and exercises for building, packaging, testing, and deploying Java-based Lambda code. Get your free copy, courtesy of our friends at Cockroach Labs, by clicking HERE. Sponsored
Someone pointed out the AWS Innovation Sandbox to me after last week’s rant about Isengard. It’s not a half bad account vending machine…
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
