Good Morning!
That was a slow week for everyone I think. I was under the weather for most of it, the releases AWS put out were less exciting than usual. Ah well–that’s what this week is for. Onward!
From the Community
The various concepts with AWS’s various cloud cryptography offerings have been helpfully demystified..
Man, I want to see more people tackle their recommendations like this one: (Almost) Every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret after 4 years running infrastructure at a startup.
This high level comparison of Cloud Data Egress Costs between more providers than you can shake a stick at is helpful for reasoning about where a particular egress-heavy workload might want to live.
How I write HTTP services in Go after 13 years comes to us from Grafana Labs. My answer would be "blind drunk" because I hate writing full services, but there’s so much of sense contained within here that it felt almost criminal not to pass it on.
Are Aurora Performance Claims True? Good question! The reason I don’t do benchmarks is because if I published such things, AWS PR would either A) trumpet my findings from the rooftops, or B) discredit me and everything I do. There is no third option; one company loves the benchmark results, the other folks tested criticize everything about how they were conducted. So, better this site than me.
nginx has forked. The guy driving this is effectively the driving force behind nginx historically; this one’s worth tracking.
The fine folks at Fathom went on this deep dive into reducing their AWS bill by $100,000. I spoke with their CEO about their thinking on "Screaming in the Cloud;" expect that episode to come out soon.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: A Nuanced Logging Optimization Point
Screaming in the Cloud: A Conversation on Cloud WAN with Kris Gillespie
Screaming in the Cloud: Understanding the Future of Cloud Technology with Anthony Esper
Choice Cuts
Amazon Bedrock console gets a modern look-and-feel – Okay, so why did this overly hyped-to-death service that was launched less than a year ago ever have anything other than a modern look-and-feel? Oh, because AWS was so desperate to appear at the forefront of a space that they’re woefully behind in that all other considerations went out the window? That tracks.
AWS Control Tower introduces APIs to register Organizational Units – Once again, AWS Organizations presupposes that anyone managing it has enough directory experience to instinctively know what an OU is, what the implications of using one are and even to recognize it as being a specific term of art. That’s not really who Control Tower’s marketing has historically been aimed at. There’s a misalignment here something fierce.
Build generative AI chatbots using prompt engineering with Amazon Redshift and Amazon Bedrock – Look, I’ve gotta level with you: given the sorry state that is Amazon Q, AWS has no credibility whatsoever in the "how to build Generative AI Chatbot" space. It makes up answers, it lies with a straight face, it soaks up GPUs from customers who would otherwise pay handsomely for access to them, and it has yet to generate a single "wow, that was super helpful" from any customer I’ve ever spoken to about the topic.
How to enforce creation of roles in a specific path: Use IAM role naming in hierarchy models – Credit where due, this is a good hack. And it is a hack, to be clear; you’ve gotta make a lot of changes to your entire permissions model before outliers stop pecking you to death–but it’s clever, I’ll grant that. If you’re starting greenfield this starts to look like a pretty good idea.
Tools
Ooh, the terrible orange website discusses a bunch of git tips and tricks that are mostly new to me.
I’m going to incorporate this digital photocopier into my document signature flows just to get some of the more odious corporate policy folks off of my metaphorical back.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
