Good Morning!
Today I’m off, as are lots of folks here in the US for Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Fortunately I wrote this last week for you all.
From the Community
This issue is sponsored in part by my friends at ChaosSearch! As you know, running log analysis with Elasticsearch at scale can be unstable, relentlessly time-sucking and surprisingly expensive. Now try ChaosSearch – a fully managed log analytics platform that delivers the Elasticsearch API you love, with built-in Kibana, but with No ElasticSearch under the hood! ChaosSearch activates your Amazon S3 as a true data lake, for analytics at scale, with no data movement, no data retention limits and savings of up to 80% vs an ELK Stack. In fact with ChaosSearch, you can start with 3 easy steps: Store, Connect & Analyze. So start experiencing insights at scale from ALL of your data (and tell them I sent you)! Sponsored
It galls me that it’s still not native to DynamoDB, and you’re forced to resort to somewhat complex measures just to get Reliable Auto-Incrementing Integers.
Cloudash has a fascinating Intro to Analyzing Log Data with CloudWatch Logs Insights post up. I already know a few things now that I didn’t before reading this article.
The other half of Cloudonaut is leaving for parental leave just as his brother finishes his own. I love normalizing stories like this. I took time off for the birth of both of my kids, and while there will always be AWS services to make fun of, I couldn’t get that time back. I wouldn’t trade those months for anything.
Matt Rickard writes that AWS Is Not a Dumb Pipe. I agree and disagree at the same time. I think I’m going to have to give my own perspective on this Soon.
There were two critical AWS vulnerabilities discovered by Orca Security. I don’t entirely approve of Orca’s approach, but I’ll get into that on Wednesday.
A dive into using the AWS CDK with Go. I don’t really use either, but they’re both popular with you people.
Newsrooms are apparently gearing up to hire ‘Influencer Journalists’ (paywalled). I approve of the model, obviously; else I’d not be doing this even if it isn’t exactly journalism.
It figures that the day after I wrote Azure’s Terrible Security Posture Comes Home to Roost AWS would have its own roughly equivalent issues. I’ve gotta stop tempting fate. Don’t worry, I’ll talk about this on Wednesday.
It’s always wild to me that people care so much about learning the exact locations of AWS data centers, but they do. It’s not like they’re going to let you in for a tour…
It seems that bastion of the insurance world Lloyd’s is moving to AWS via DXC, mainframes and all.
The SEC charged a “decentralized AWS competitor” with scamming investors. I must be old; I think of “decentralized AWS” as being our own data centers.
Jobs
If you’ve got an interesting job for this newsletter’s eminently employable subscribers, get in touch!
Truss is a distributed-first, software consultancy that cares about communication, inclusivity, and modern software development practices. We push the envelope on building efficient technology that improves people’s lives. Currently, we’re seeking stellar Sr. Infrastructure Engineers to help us with commercial and government contracts.
AWS Marketplace is a curated digital catalog that makes it easy for customers to find, buy, deploy, and manage the third-party software, data and machine learning tools they need to build solutions and run their business. Our team’s job is to help customers discover and educate on solutions that fit their use cases, and to provide partners (such as independent software vendors) with an effective and cost-efficient route to market. We are applying Amazon’s e-commerce expertise to fundamentally change how cloud software is discovered and consumed. As part of our team, you’ll play an integral part in inventing new approaches and technologies to aid our customers and partners on this transformational journey.
At TuSimple we’re revolutionizing the way freight is moved through autonomous technologies and addressing a $4 Trillion global freight market. To make transformational change of this magnitude we’re building a team of talented innovators and collaborators interested in taking on the world’s most difficult problems.
Choice Cuts
This one isn’t going to cost you anything. Kubestack is an open source online tool that helps you generate a Kubernetes base platform in Terraform without having to spend months on being responsible about it — or else, having to go back and retrofit code to what you’ve already built through the miracle of ClickOps. It now features a “tell it what you want” configuration wizard around a whole bunch of different variables (cloud providers, whether you want single or multiple clusters, etc.) and spits out Terraform code that’s ready to throw into your environment — faster than you can write it yourself. Check it out and let me know what you think; remember, it doesn’t cost you anything! Sponsored
At TuSimple we develop the world’s most advanced self-driving technologies specifically designed to meet the unique demands of heavy-duty trucks.
Through the development of an industry leading autonomous driving system, purpose-built autonomous trucks with OEMs Navistar and TRATON, and the creation of the TuSimple** Autonomous Freight Network (AFN) we have become the partner of choice for shippers, and carriers.
Together with our strategic partners we are bringing autonomous freight capacity to market that is safer, more efficient, and on-demand. Sponsored
Amazon ElastiCache adds support for streaming and storing Redis engine logs – “We’re giving you more insight into the internal workings of a managed service” feels like something one big customer demanded and the rest of us are going to have to suffer the consequences thereof forevermore.
Amazon Kendra launches support for query language – I like both that AWS decided that a custom query language was the right answer, and that they ceded the field and decided not to give it a name at all rather than a bad one.
AWS Announces New Launch Speed Optimizations for Microsoft Windows Server Instances on Amazon EC2 – It’s now faster to launch Windows instances on AWS. Azure continues to plod along somehow.
Introducing SQL Explorer in EMR Studio – AWS again rips off another successful property, this time with the world’s worst remake of “Dora the Explorer.”
How Experian uses Amazon SageMaker to Deliver Affordability Verification – There’s something very on-brand about using machine learning to figure out which people qualify for loans. Remember, it’s called “Machine Learning®” because “Bias Laundering” didn’t fare as well in test groups.
Using Amazon Aurora Global Database for Low Latency without Application Changes – Just as I ignore nonsense blog posts from AWS when curating what makes it into this newsletter, AWS chose to ignore CAP theorem when constructing this blog post.
A New AWS Console Home Experience – This has a few sharp edges but is largely good. This will of course change for the better as the experience gets more polished, and then sharply for the worse as soon as they start putting ads into widgets.
New – Amazon EC2 Hpc6a Instance Optimized for High Performance Computing – Based upon the name I assume that hpc6a instances are designed to be print servers for all of your LaserJet printers.
Backtest trading strategies with Amazon Kinesis Data Streams long-term retention and Amazon SageMaker – If you’re not into crypto but still want to gamble away your retirement account via day trading, AWS is here to goad you on.
AWS Compute Optimizer supports AWS Graviton migration guidance – “Hey, you should move that workload to a different processor architecture to save money” is exactly what I would expect a cost optimization SaaS tool with zero context to recommend.
Automated Alerting on Amazon WorkSpaces Service Limits – Maybe, and I’m just spitballing here, the Customer Obsessed thing to do would be to alert the customer whenever any service limit for any service is approached rather than waiting for them to be surprised.
Blur faces in videos automatically with Amazon Rekognition Video – I prefer to blur faces in videos automatically by using the potato quality webcam built into the AWS DeepLens.
Introducing the Streaming Media Lens whitepaper for the AWS Well-Architected Framework | Amazon Web Services – This is useful for both of the companies that want to do streaming media but never at a scale that would make AWS’s egress pricing a complete joke for the workload.
Bring Your IPv6 Address Space to Amazon VPC IP Address Manager (IPAM) – See, the danger of pricing things the way IPAM does (20¢ per IP per month) is that if we take an IPv6 subnet with 281 trillion addresses in it I assume based upon the published pricing that my AWS bill will be $56 trillion that month. When I call some service pricing clownshoes, this is the kind of nonsense I’m talking about. I continue to not give the slightest crap about IPAM as a result.
How nonprofits can automate tax-exempt status across AWS accounts – The way I handle this sort of thing is by calling my account manager and making it their problem.
Tools
Still looking for a New Year’s resolution? How about saving big on your cloud bill? Let me tell you a little bit about Vultr, the cloud infrastructure company that delivers performance cloud compute and bare metal at a price that the big tech clouds can’t compete with. Vultr is feature-PACKED, with a one-click marketplace to install the applications and operating systems you need without any of the hassle. Minimize time spent on devops with a developer-friendly API and managed Kubernetes and sleep easy with Vultr’s native DDoS protection. With more than 20 locations around the globe, deploying with Vultr is the easiest way to get close to your users. The best part? Screaming in the Cloud listeners can try Vultr FREE for 2 weeks with $100 in infrastructure credit. Just visit Vultr-dot-com-slash-screaming, that’s v-u-l-t-r-dot-com-slash-screaming to get started today! Sponsored
Usually Aidan Steele is linked here for shitposting, but today it’s because he built a framework for inspecting and editing traffic in AWS VPCs. This is a Big Deal.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
