Good Morning!
The LastWeekatAWS.com job board (note the subtle snarky difference in that URL) has seen significant interest over the past week; if you’re looking to hire or be hired, check it out.
From the Community
When it costs more money and time to observe your environment than it does to build it, there’s a problem. Learn how Chronosphere can help you shape and transform observability data to only store the useful data you need.
The Answers for AWS survey results are out!
Lydia Leong has a point that I’ve been mulling over for a while: GreenOps for sustainability must parallel FinOps for cost. Cloud Economics and sustainability are aligned in a few key ways; that said I’m not sure I entirely agree with her perspective on the tooling aspects. What do you think?
This article titled I want off Mr. Golang’s Wild Ride has a section I’ve direct-linked to, because it resonates; it’s called "Simple is a Lie." I’ve felt this way for a while, and increasingly find myself annoyed when documentation, tutorials, and AWS service names describe anything as "Simple." The unspoken implication is therefore "if you don’t understand it you must be a fool," which is untrue, unfair, and unintended in almost every case. Words matter; this is a poignant reminder of that fact.
Southwest has chosen AWS as its preferred cloud provider. The airline that doesn’t believe in reservations is shortly going to learn a painful lesson about always paying on-demand rates for EC2 instances.
If you’re going to offer people free accounts on your platform, they’ll come to expect those accounts to exist for a while. If you sunset that free offering, people expect legacy free accounts to stick around. If you sunset those too, people expect plenty of notice rather than being given a month to migrate. If you only give thenm a month to migrate, people are gonna be horrified to learn that a month later you’ll be deleting all of their data. Oh Docker, how far you have fallen.
I got some fascinating pushback on my article AWS’s Anti-Competitive Move Hidden in Plain Sight. The feedback from everyone except Amazon employees was universally in support; a bunch of Amazonians reached out to correct my misunderstanding. First, thanks–that’s why I write these things. Secondly: whether my point is correct or incorrect, it’s very clearly a widely held perception, and that means one way or another, AWS has a problem to solve for its customers.
A dive into the Minimal Loveable API: Lambda Invoke.
Ahrefs attempts to compare the cost of cloud to running their own hardware and surmises that they’ll save $400m over three years. This is what I mean when I say that TCOs are post-hoc justifications for what’s already been decided; they’re comparing on-demand prices instead of capacity reservations, assuming retail cloud pricing (which nobody at that scale is going to be paying) vs, their actual large-scale vendor pricing for their existing hardware, and entirely treats the cloud like it’s a data center. Well yes, if you do that you’re going to get the results you were expecting; I just don’t find it particularly compelling or intellectually honest.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: AWS’s Anti-Competitive Move Hidden in Plain Sight
Last Week In AWS: Bored? See the AWS Job Board
Last Week In AWS: The Government Gets It
Screaming in the Cloud: AWS and the Journey to Responsible AI with Diya Wynn
Screaming in the Cloud: Combining Community and Company Employees with Matty Stratton
Choice Cuts
Is the thought of securing your AWS infrastructure giving you nightmares? Don’t worry, Teleport has got your back! Watch our latest episode with Allen Vailliencourt to learn how Teleport can make your life easier by providing complete visibility for regulatory compliance, securing your AWS infrastructure, and increasing developer productivity. No more nightmares, just sweet dreams of security and compliance.
Amazon EC2 M1 Mac instances now support in-place operating system updates – This is no mean feat; take all the complexity of an OS update, then slap on top of that the Nitro integration that AWS has to provide so you can’t, for instance, poison the Mac firmware for the next customer to get the hardware platform you were using. This sounds easy in a headline and almost impossible once you start thinking about it.
Announcing Amazon Linux 2023 – "AL2023 takes a security-by-default approach to help improve your security posture with… SELinux in permissive mode" is sure not to ruffle any feathers. I’m old enough to remember when this was announced as Amazon Linux 2022.
AWS Chatbot now available in Microsoft Teams – That one must have hurt to release…
Announcing cross-account support for Amazon S3 Multi-Region Access Points – This is a big deal. You’ve gotta configure it obviously, but you then wind up with the equivalent of S3 buckets that transcend regions, accounts, and (presumably) the bounds of space and time.
Talk about cloud with a non-cloud audience – GOOD LUCK! You will immediately be the absolute LEAST popular parent at your child’s birthday party. I say this from experience.
New – Use Amazon S3 Object Lambda with Amazon CloudFront to Tailor Content for End Users – I need to think through this one a bit more before I fully grasp the ramifications I think. It’s confusing!
Implementing an event-driven serverless story generation application with ChatGPT and DALL-E – Ooh, good idea. How about you go do that, and see if you can come up with a broader AWS marketing campaign that doesn’t put people to sleep? Alternately keep doing what you’re doing and I’ll never run out of bedtime stories for my kids ever again.
The Future of Mining is in the Cloud – When we say "mining," are we talking about data, cryptocurrency, or minerals?
Tools
MinIO object storage runs everywhere the cloud operating model runs – offering S3 compatible, cloud-native storage to enterprises that value simplicity, scale and performance in a software-defined, self-hosted solution. Learn more at www.min.io and be sure to tell them that Corey sent you.
amazon-s3-tar-tool uses S3 API capabilities to create tarballs of existing objects without removing those objects from S3 first. This is incredibly cool.
For those of us who have been shoving stuff into Lambda left and right, this AWS Lambda Web Adapter makes the job way easier.
Balcony is new to me. It enumerates the AWS API and automatically populates required parameters. It does a bit more, but it’s hard to describe. Check it out and tell me what you think…
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
