Good Morning!
First up, Happy Monday! That screaming sound coming at you bright and early from the direction of the Finance team means someone just looked at February’s AWS bill and saw the effects of the new per-address IPv4 charge. If they’re making it your problem, please reach out and see if maybe I can’t help with some of that.
I’ll be hosting a webinar about network management next week; I intend to more or less make my friends at Kentik answer the hard questions, then turn my networking frustrations on you–the audience. Drop by and see what shade we can throw around…
And later that week I’ll be at (SCaLE](https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/21x) next week to give my brand new "Terrible Ideas in Kubernetes" talk; if you still want to attend feel free to use code ‘DUCK’ to drop the ticket price down to $45. This remains one of my very favorite conferences, and the first tech conference I ever attended oh so many years ago. Come to Pasadena!
From the Community
The Answers for AWS survey results are out. Yup–GitHub Actions basically swept the CI/CD section, as expected. Thanks to those of you who filled it out.
We see a lot of stories about folks going from running VPS style boxes to implementing Serverless; this article on Ditching Serverless for AWS Lightsail + CodePipeline talks about a salmon swimming upstream against the trend. It makes a lot of sense.
I found out today that the AWS Key ID has the AWS account ID encoded within it and WHAT THE DAMN HELL how did I not know this before?! I can figure out what account a credential belongs to now!
this article – "If someone asked, ‘How does this picture make you feel?’ and presented the following image, I would respond something like: the company running the world’s infrastructure can’t make a responsive website" is how link starts, and it just gets better from there. It shows how to rewrite AWS visualizations in vanilla JavaScript.
ServerlessHorrors (not my site) is starting to collect a pile of Surprise Cloud Bill horror stories. If you’ve got one or know of one, please submit it.
How to find the AWS Account ID of any S3 Bucket is potentially a security issue, yes, yes, but I’m much more interested in its ability to finally help me track down just which account a bucket lives within.
This is super nifty: click a button and Watch AWS Lambda scale. Note that it’s shared; someone else may be doing the same thing at the same time.
It’s very hard to get an AWS representative to give you an on-the-record quote. It’s slightly easier to get them to update their documentation, which Jason Kao did with a dive into the encryption state of Amazon QLDB. Well done!
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: S3: Jetsons Era Technology, Flintstones Era Billing Transparency
Screaming in the Cloud: The Complexities of Cloud Networking with William Collins
Screaming in the Cloud: The Hidden Costs of Cloud Computing with Jack Ellis
Choice Cuts
Amazon CloudFront announces availability of Embedded Points of Presence – I’m very interested to know the economics of the ISP side of the deal. "Reach out and ask us about hosting an embedded POP." Okay–does money change hands? If so, in which direction? Anyhoo, it’s an interesting approach to getting assets as close as physically possible to your end user.
Amazon CloudWatch Logs now supports IPv6 – Some Amazonians have advanced the position that charging for IPv4 addresses is not meant to drive IPv6 adoption. This is patently absurd. When you start charging for a thing, the free alternatives to that thing get implemented a fair bit more; when your own support for those free alternatives is flagging, then folks are absolutely going to get salty about it.
Amazon Data Firehose adds message extraction feature for decompressed CloudWatch Logs – This is economically interesting; so much log data is frankly boilerplate that isn’t needed. If you can reduce the noise in favor of signal, your observability bills will potentially go down by a lot.
Amazon EC2 m7i.metal-24xl instance is now generally available for VMware Cloud on AWS – You won’t care about the cost once Broadcom “adjusts” its pricing for VMware Cloud on AWS whenever their existing contract with AWS comes up for renewal. This would be an excellent time to build an exodus plan; every VMware renewal story I’ve been hearing from customers is an expensive bloodbath.
Amazon EKS announces support for Amazon Linux 2023 – See, the problem with tying version names to calendar years is that this launch already feels like AWS is behind the times. I’m not entirely kidding here; there’s a strong psychological element at play here.
AWS announces Amazon Neptune I/O-Optimized – If you need a graph database (you don’t) and are using Neptune in that capacity (you probably shouldn’t), this gets rid of the IO charge in favor of boosting the instance price, much like Aurora did last year. This is worth running the numbers on if you’re either of the customers running Amazon Neptune.
AWS Batch now offers multi-container jobs – It took them a few years, but AWS Batch has finally responded to my "17 ways to run containers on AWS" bit by now supporting multiple containers. Well, I guess I’ve been told.
New AWS Region in Mexico is in the works – Pricing should be interesting; it may well offer some relief to folks suffering from the Sao Paulo telco monopoly that drives data transfer costs to stratospheric heights usually not seen even by AWS’s lofty standards.
Engage online sports fans with live event commentary using generative AI on Amazon Bedrock – This, as so many generative AI use cases do, fails to answer a very poignant question: "if you don’t care enough to write the words yourself, why should anyone else care enough to read them?" You’re basically flooding the zone with noise; it’s not respectful to your users / customers / audience.
Delivering Business Value with Cloud Platform Teams – Does AWS themselves have a "Cloud Platform Team" as described in this post? No, they absolutely do not, which is why I like this post so much. So often the narrative from big tech is "here’s what we do, you should act like us." Yeah, that’s not gonna go well for you. This is what they’ve seen work with customers, and it may well work for more of us. I prefer stories like this to "here’s how we do things at AWS, please cargo cult it into your organization" narratives. Well done, AWS team.
The Power of Cloud Storage for Small and Medium Businesses: Unlocking Efficiency and Security – Okay, I was gearing up to nitpick this to death, but I just can’t–click the link and look at the hilarious uncaptioned picture with zero context. "This is what we think a small business environment might look like," and boom–one of the most depressing open plan office environments you can imagine, complete with seagull manager hovering over someone’s shoulder "helping" them work. This is unintentionally hilarious.
Tools
I love LetsEncrypt but I’ve had a couple of "fun" issues where an appliance would renew the cert but not apply it. Being able to see that expiry issue in my RSS reader? I love this free service. Note that the cert needs to be publicly available for this to work, but it’s okay if it’s self-signed.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
