Good morning!
Welcome to issue number 126 of Last Week in AWS.
I’m speaking tomorrow at the Sensu Summit in Portland, Oregon–and I’ll be here through Thursday. Sensu weren’t doing anything better anyway, come to the Sensu Summit and say hello, with a last minute discount.
I’ll also be haunting DevOps Days PDX. Hope to see you there…
Lastly, I’ll be giving my version of a re:Invent keynote on Friday in Mountain View at the (free) AWS Community Day. Come marvel as I tell a story so bold that Werner will regret hitting me with a belt afterwards. Mind you, he’ll almost certainly still do it, but he’ll not feel great about having to do so.
From the Community
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Epsagon screws up its Kafka, RabbitMQ or Kinesis comparison by blatantly excluding Route 53.
If your crappy architecture demands that you care about AWS Lambda cold start latency, this 2019 comparison by language should help.
A tour through AWS Data API for Amazon Aurora Serverless, which you’ve probably forgotten about until I mentioned it just now. There’s also a demo, and code.
If Richard Boyd wants to title an article AWS CDK TDD, LOL OMG, I sure can’t top it.
Ways to improve your CI/CD with Terraform, and a few other tools.
Yes Virginia, you do need to back up data even if it lives in the cloud. Obviously.
If I told you that a tech company was sending threatening letters to another company’s customers about possible license violations, you’d think I was talking about Oracle. This week, nay–it’s Elastic.
In which I reimagine what AWS Prime might look like if it existed.
If you want to run OpenFaaS inside of EKS instead of Lambda like a sensible person, you might want to reconsider less people think you’re tetched in the head.
This week’s S3 Bucket Negligence Award goes to Teletext Holidays, which is a real blast from the past. 200K call recordings exposed in a bucket. Shame shame…
AWS took an outage in us-east-1 a bit over a week ago, and The Register clearly has more information than most of us about what exactly went wrong. I wish AWS was more transparent about failure modes here. What is EBS under the hood? What steps can I take to reduce my chances of volumes becoming unrecoverable, if any? I feel like I’m thrashing in the dark here…
A defense of CDK from someone who uses it.
Jobs
If you’ve got an interesting job for this newsletter’s eminently employable subscribers, get in touch!
This week’s AWS team of note is none other than the [EC2 team](https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/jobs/)! In addition to being huge “Wheel of Fortune” fans (watch as they try to buy more vowels for their instance names!), they’re making massive strides in networking, virtualization, compute–and all of it at a scale you won’t find anywhere else. Take a look, check out what they’re hiring for, and then do me a personal favor and berate them for their cross-AZ data transfer pricing while you’re talking to them. That’ll endear you to them right quick! My thanks to AWS for their continued support, or at least tolerance, of me.
X-Team is hiring for a fully remote team, anywhere on the planet. The work is interesting, they partner with companies you’ve heard of, and you can work from wherever you care to be. Now before you wind up getting cynical, let me save you some time–I already did, and hopped on a phone call to chat with them and then berate them for their crappy culture. Instead I was pleasantly surprised: they invest in their people (including a personal development stipend), they have distributed community events (both online and in person around the world), and actually work with their employees; this isn’t a “send us a postcard if you ever get there” body shop. They’re looking for folks with AWS skills, as well as a wide variety of other technical abilities; this is legit. Take my word for it; join X-Team and see for yourself. Tell them Corey sent you…
Do you want to work in the Bay Area? Almost certainly not; the people are insufferable here. Consider instead staying wherever the hell in the US you happen to be and talking to Truss, a software consultancy. Picture all of the advice that I’d give you, and now envision that wrapped in something you could tell a customer without getting punched right in your sarcastic mouth. That’s what Truss does, but they for some unknown reason don’t describe it that way. Currently, they are seeking Senior Software Engineers anywhere in the US (yes, even the crappy parts) to help them with commercial and government contracts. Seriously, read this thing–they tell you what levels they’re looking to hire at AND THEN THEY EXPLAIN THEM SO YOU DON’T FEEL LIKE A MORON FOR NOT KNOWING THEIR INTERNAL RUBRIC! Virtually any other hiring manager who happens to be reading this should look at their job descriptions and feel comparatively ashamed.
Choice Cuts
Amazon EC2 Hibernation Now Available on Amazon Linux 2 – To all those of you who said I was kidding when they announced support of this for Ubuntu and Amazon Linux 1 a few weeks back and I taunted them for not supporting Amazon Linux 2, this victory lap is for me.
Amazon EKS Adds Support to Assign IAM Permissions to Kubernetes Service Accounts – This is great for deploying the principle of least privilege, but then again, if you’re running Kubernetes in production what are the odds that you’re suddenly going to start making smart decisions with regard to complexity?
Amazon FSx for Lustre Reduces Minimum File System Size to 1.2 TBs – How generous, for a service that charges by the GB/month!
Amazon QuickSight Announces Favorites, Anomaly Alerts and More – …and no customer numbers, as Tableau continues to stomp it into the dirt.
Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth Now Supports Private Worker Throughput Worker Logs and Metrics – With names like “Private Worker Throughput Worker” they’re giving Systems Manager Session Manager a real run for their money.
Announcing Amazon EFS price reduction for Infrequent Access storage – I’ve read this three times and can’t spot the catch, which means I’m probably the sucker.
New 3-Day Classroom Course: Advanced Developing on AWS – I hear good things about this course, but do remember it’s coming from the same company that thinks “LCUs” are a reasonable way to bill for load balancers, so take it with a grain of salt.
WorkDocs Drive enables Custom Drive Letter – Exciting news for those stuck in the days when caring about Windows drive letters mattered.
Summary of the Amazon EC2, Amazon EBS, and Amazon RDS Service Event in the EU West Region – AWS posts a great postmortem of its recent outage. No, not that recent outage, the other one.
Tools
Once you’ve broken into someone else’s AWS account, now what? Now you use barq, the AWS post-exploitation framework.
AWS data wrangler does pretty much what you’d expect it to from the name.
With an approach guaranteed to piss almost everyone off, this browser extension replaces occurrences of ‘serverless’ with ‘cgi-bin’.
If you need to update all of your Lambda layers to the latest version, this is for you.
While I like the idea of splash as “an interactive tool to explore the Lambda runtime environment,” its claim that it’s too expensive to do this in realtime falls flat. 10,000 seconds at 1GB of RAM costs you 1¢.
I’m not sure I like the methodology isitfit uses to validate what percentage of your EC2 fleet is idle, but it’s a useful quick diagnostic. So’s the new stuff in Cost Explorer, though…
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
