Good Morning!

Ah, finally re:Invent is over and we’re back to a more reasonable release cadence.

I wound up announcing the launch of DuckTools, our new SaaS offering of AWS billing “power tools” that grew out of our internal bill-fixing tool suite. Curious to hear what folks think about it.

From the Community

What do HubSpot, Klarna, Alert Logic and Armor all have in common? They all use the ChaosSearch Data Platform to connect and index data in their own AWS S3 environments, rendering their data fully searchable and available for analysis with their existing data tools. With unlimited scale, industry-leading resiliency, and massive cost savings, ChaosSearch is an ideal replacement for the ELK stack (which we all know tends to flop over at scale)! Now perform scalable log analytics on your AWS S3, using the familiar ElasticSearch API for queries, and Kibana for log analytics and visualizations, while reducing costs and improving analytical capabilities! Want to learn more? Schedule a demo (easily pick a day and time that works for you), or start a free trial today! Sponsored

A list of EC2 instances and their benefits seems like it’d come from AWS, but no. It falls to the community do perform volunteer work for a trillion dollar company once again.

This Interview with an Anonymous Amazonian is really something. It directionally aligns with my understanding of AWS culture–and many things said leave AWS looking surprisingly good.

Jobs

If you’ve got an interesting job for this newsletter’s eminently employable subscribers, get in touch!

Do you hold a US Security Clearance? Do you want to build exciting things? Protect exciting secrets? Make big trouble for Moose and Squirrel? Check out the AWS Cleared Jobs and see if AWS might have a role that’s up your alley. Many restrictions apply; see page for details.

Choice Cuts

6Connex saved 50%. Onriva saved 35%. And Uber saved 15% in the first 30 days. Typical AWS cost savings using nOps cloud management. Yup, typical savings. nOps was built for DevOps teams, and provides auto-discovery of high-risk issues, dashboards with instant drill-down to the resource level for root cause analysis, and aligns with AWS Well-Architected. Get a free trial. Start saving with nOps Sponsored

Amazon Connect now supports sharing attachments in chat – Amazon Chime and Amazon Connect are engaged in a slapfight to the death over .04% of the enterprise chat market.

Amazon Managed Blockchain now supports Ethereum (Preview) – Surprised they didn’t announce this at re:Invent during their Other Nonsense keynote. (Which keynote covered Other Nonsense is left as a joke opportunity for you, dear reader.)

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Now supports Tag on Create for Elastic IP addresses – Depressing but somehow expected that we’re still getting baseline features like this as enhancements so many years after they should have arrived.

Announcing the first AWS Wavelength Zone in South Korea – Now South Korea can get COVID-19 as well, according to some idiots on Facebook.

Announcing the availability of AWS Outposts Private Connectivity – Sometimes you only learn about AWS service limitations after they get fixed. In this case, “wait, you mean my on-premises only data was processed by a thing that couldn’t speak privately to my AWS resources?!”

AWS App2Container now supports remote execution of containerization workflows – I had to read the article to validate that this was a new feature, not a security vulnerability disclosure cleverly disguised.

AWS Artifact makes compliance documents easy to download and share – I figure we’re about to get the Facebook/Twitter/Reddit/Hacker News icons on a share bar in the AWS console.

AWS Database Migration Service now supports Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) as a source – DMS has of course supported actual-MongoDB itself for years now.

AWS Glue launches AWS Glue Custom Connectors – In the physical world, “glue” is in fact a custom connector all its own–right next to the duct tape.

AWS Pricing Calculator now supports Windows Server and SQL Server workload cost estimates – “Should we expand coverage to the things that materially move the customer’s bill?” “No, let’s instead focus on stories where we stomp on our cloud competition. Lest you forget, the calculator is first and foremost a sales tool.”

AWS Snow Family now supports the Amazon Linux 2 operating system – Now that CentOS 8 has decided to pull a Google and break its promise about long term support, even AWS has to get in gear to compensate with the relatively-inferior Amazon Linux 2 option.

New AWS Solutions Consulting Offer – High-Governance Foundation with AWS Control Tower – Control Tower remains such an unfulfilled promise that AWS is now actively pushing third party consultancies to help make sense of the chaos.

New IAM condition keys for Amazon S3 limit requests to buckets owned by specific AWS accounts, and to specific TLS versions – Oh good, more S3 permissions possibilities. This won’t confuse anyone, will it?

Service Quotas now supports tagging and Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) – Could we maybe instead get Service Quotas to, y’know. Tell us how much of our existing service quotas we’re currently using?

Scheduling SQL queries on your Amazon Redshift data warehouse – This post says you can now schedule SQL queries “without having to use scripting and a scheduler like cron.” Instead you use EventBridge scheduled events (which feature cron syntax) and the RedShift Data API (which will make you long for your shell scripts), so explain to me again what the point of this is?

Automating mutual TLS setup for Amazon API Gateway – I was super excited for blessing given devices of mine to access things without bothering me to log in (give it a client certificate and let it go), but these dreams were dashed by Safari having… opinions, about TLS authentication.

Optimizing AWS Lambda cost and performance using AWS Compute Optimizer – I swear, it’s like nobody at AWS paid attention to the Lambda power tuning step function machine. There’s no way the Optimizer is going to be able to get this level of insight.

2020: The year in review for Amazon DynamoDB – Unfortunately the Year in Review for MongoDB post was lost due to a database issue.

HTTP keep-alive is on by default in modular AWS SDK for JavaScript – Whenever an entire article is written about an otherwise innocuous feature decision, you can tell it’s beset with sharp edges all around.

Integrating EC2 macOS workers with EKS and Jenkins – Now that Mac EC2 instances are available, the first stories of using them are coming out, primarily by people who don’t have to pay the bill themselves.

Tools

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Seeing a per-instance breakdown of recent network tests is super handy; I’m glad EC2Throughput did it so I didn’t have to.

Converting AWS secrets to environment variables was useful to me last week. You’ll find out why in a couple of days.

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

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