Good Morning!
Before we begin, I’d like to congratulate my podcast producer / HumblePod CEO Chris Hill on the birth of his daughter. Good job, enjoy the lack of sleep, and I’ll expect to hear her crying in the background of my podcast episodes for a while.
From the Community
Observability is critical for managing and improving complex business-critical systems. With observability, any software engineering team can gain a deeper understanding of system performance, so you can perform ongoing maintenance and ship the features your customers need. Preview Honeycomb’s upcoming O’Reilly book to understand the value of observable systems and how to build an observability-driven development practice. Sponsored
GitHub Actions apparently now offers AWS federation so you don’t have to store long-lived credentials. So long, CodeBuild. I will not miss you.
Using Lambda as a search engine sounds ridiculous, but it can be abused into shape.
“Mistakes I’ve Made in AWS” could be a book written by many of us. Here are a few worth considering.
A dive into an Air gapped backup strategy for smaller Aurora AWS databases.
I missed this article from Business Insider (paywalled I think) about how the smaller AWS partners feel they’re getting pushed out. Well… yes.
I haven’t seen this particular Lambda concurrency issue with SQS, but it makes perfect sense.
My post about AWS’s Per Service Margins is on the website if you missed last week’s email but honestly? Who would do that?
Charlie Bell has a LinkedIn post talking about his new role in Microsoft cybersecurity, which this month appears to be something of an oxymoron.
A story on the creation of Amazon Aurora is told in such a shockingly dull way that I had to check, and sure enough! It’s apparently sponsored content from AWS. When even The Register can’t make your story interesting, you might have a messaging problem.
Jobs
If you’ve got an interesting job for this newsletter’s eminently employable subscribers, get in touch!
The Duckbill Group (that’s me!) is hiring a Head of Consulting Services to join the team. We’re looking for someone skilled in managing and leading people, as well as in building and optimizing delivery processes. As a member of the leadership team in a nine-person company, you contributions will be instrumental to our continued growth and success. AWS expertise isn’t required, but it’s certainly a bonus. If you’re interested in a role that’s fully-remote, has big impact, and you want off the VC rollercoaster, come check us out.
Do you enjoy mysteries? Consider applying to work on Amazon Detective! Answer tough questions like “why are they based in Boston?” “When would a customer want to use Amazon Detective vs. Security Hub?” And of course, “who murdered my AWS bill and why was it Amazon Macie?” They have a swath of roles in a fun city that I miss, and horrified-to-see-himself-mentioned-by-name-in-this-newsletter AWS VP Wayne Duso manages the Boston office so you’ll have plenty of opportunity for hijinks. If these roles interest you then consider applying and telling them that I sent you. You’ll notice the line gets very quiet for a minute or so afterwards as they grapple with what that probably implies.
Choice Cuts
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Announcing general availability of Amazon EC2 VT1 instances – the first EC2 instance optimized for video transcoding – I have a really hard time taking these newer EC2 instance families seriously in any way given how increasingly specialized their stated use case is. What’s next, an EC2 instance optimized for Twitter shitposting between the 3am-7am Pacific time hours?
Announcing Amazon MSK Connect: Run serverless, scalable Kafka Connect clusters in Amazon MSK – Of course this is a completely different service from “Amazon Connect” that does things that are worlds removed. Why would you ever think that they’d be anything even slightly alike?
Announcing Amazon Redshift RSQL, a command line client for interacting with Amazon Redshift clusters and databases – AWS flirts ever closer with being able to charge fractions of a penny every time you run a command on your local laptop.
Amazon SES now supports emails with a message size of up to 40MB – Cool, cool. Gmail auto-truncates anything larger than 102KB, and the default Postfix attachment size is 10MB (most people don’t configure this differently until users complain), but go you I suppose.
Announcing Build on AWS for Startups – If there’s one thing startups love, it’s a pile of CloudFormation templates that spin up a sea of random services.
AWS CodeBuild now supports a small ARM machine type – CodeBuild remains my favorite AWS service for launching a containerized job on a schedule. It offers bigger containers than Fargate, simpler management of scheduling the task, and pricing that’s competitive. Now it becomes the first AWS container service to offer a managed Graviton2 experience.
How Palantir Foundry Helps Customers Build and Deploy AI-Powered Decision-Making Applications – Someday AWS is going to realize that not every customer reference is a good customer reference, but that day is apparently not today.
Say Hello to 74 New AWS Competency, Service Delivery, Service Ready, and MSP Partners Added in August – Apparently you can just slap any random word or words you’d like between “AWS” and “Competency” and you stand a decent chance of stumbling over a real one. I have a hard time imagining that most clients would bother to check to see if it was a real thing. (Please do not defraud customers.)
AWS IQ expansion: Connect with Experts and Consulting Firms based in the UK and France – Certified people in the UK and France can now underbid on various projects that unreasonable customers expect to be completed for a tiny fraction of what they should cost.
Connect any Kubernetes cluster to Amazon EKS – Why on earth would someone want to do this? “To manage their Kubernetes cluster via the AWS console” as per this post. How crap-ass is the native Kubernetes management experience if the AWS console is somehow considered an upgrade?
How to Localize Web Content and Detect Customer Sentiment More Effectively with AWS Solutions – Customer sentiment rapidly turns against AWS every time a “build it your damned self” AWS Solution is presented to them, at a guess.
Launch Amazon SageMaker Studio from external applications using presigned URLs – “After untold billions spent on Machine Learning®, SageMaker has now taught us that the AWS console login process is so dismal that we will see serious service adoption uptick via bypassing it.”
Amazon SES configuration for an external SMTP provider with Auth0 – I was really hoping that the delusion levels around how much work customers are willing to do were high enough to justify this being a post about how to integrate SES with Amazon Cognito.
Apple Mail’s iOS15 Privacy Protection Impact to Senders – Good for Apple! We’ve stopped publishing those metrics ourselves, just because it’s not a valuable signal for how the newsletter is performing. The real metric is how many AWS employees get very upset with me after a given issue publishes.
How Ryanair governs their image distribution using EC2 Image Builder – For once Ryanair is the company saying “what the hell is this random surcharge?!”
Visualize and gain insights into your AWS cost and usage with Cloud Intelligence Dashboards using Amazon QuickSight – This blog post is the equivalent of you calling your cell phone provider for help with understanding your cell phone bill, only their response is to send you a text that’s just a picture of a walrus mauling a gazelle. Then on your next bill you get a $40 surcharge for that picture.
Join us for AWS Content Delivery Network Edge Week! – Huh, I could have sworn that Edge Week was supposed to be in November?
AWS Lambda metrics support for Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus now available in AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry – Original AWS thing support for AWS implementation of an open source thing is now available in an open source project for which AWS is the largest / virtually only contributor. Try to contain your excitement.
AWS opens data centre design facility in Croatia – The stated purpose of this facility is a thin veneer over its true project: exploring which Croatian words can be repurposed into future names of AWS services. Amazon Sladostrašće is just a matter of time.
What you need to know about the Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity and how AWS can help – Joe Biden inadvertently finds himself in the running for AWS Salesperson of the Year.
Tools
How do you communicate with your users from your app? In most cases, it’s likely a labyrinth of coded templates and APIs. This doesn’t scale and that’s why we built Courier. The Courier API enables companies like LaunchDarkly and Lattice to deliver complex automated notification experiences quickly and efficiently. Read LaunchDarkly’s story or sign up for free. Sponsored
Cloudash – serverless monitoring. Simplified. is a desktop app that costs $10 a month to display CloudWatch things natively. Gotta admit – I was skeptical here. I installed it, did a livetweet thread of my experience, and came away impressed. They’re not a sponsor, I’m just a happy user and soon-to-be customer.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
