Hi there!!!
Hi there 🤗 I’m Ceora! I’m filling in for Corey this week while he’s on parental leave.
I’m an AWS Community Builder and Technical Writer based in Philadelphia. I’m the creator of #100DaysOfProjects and I LOVE teaching people to code through blog articles, video content, and giving talks.
I’ve been in the AWS space since February of this year and it’s been a rollercoaster 😅 I’ve been working on a series called Learn AWS With Me to help make some fundamental AWS concepts easier to understand. I’m committed to making tech, coding, and Cloud more accessible to people of all backgrounds 🤓 If you want to hear more from me or get in touch with me, hit me up on twitter! (I mostly post memes, talk about puppies, and rant about Hamilton. You’ve been warned!)
Alright, let’s get into it!
From the Community
People might say traces can be used anywhere, but let’s face it: you absolutely need them when you’re dealing with distributed systems and microservices. You probably don’t have them yet because instrumenting your apps to collect them will get you super table-flippy. (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻Until now. Download Distributed Tracing: A Guide to Microservices & More and get the tracing you deserve the easy peasy way. Guess less & know more with Honeycomb. Sponsored
Last Week in AWS 2020 Charity T-Shirt is out now
This year, the LWIA snark machine takes on that most devious shapeshifter: Amazon’s Route 53.
Is it a cloud DNS? Is it a database? Is it whatever you can hack together, to your colleagues’ open-mouthed horror?
Yes, yes, and clearly yes. Check out the shirt here, and learn more about the amazing organization we’re supporting!
I ran into this awesome blog post by Sam Julien on Twitter called Where to Start with AWS as a Developer. It’s one of the best beginner AWS guides I’ve ever read‼️
My good friend Hiro Nishimura has an AMAZING community called Cloud Newbies. It’s a great place for Cloud enthusiast of all levels to hang out and collaborate. I highly recommend you join!
You may not know this but I really like building Twitter bots 😌 Despite this, I’ve had my fair share of struggles building them with AWS Lambda 🙃 Thankfully, I found this Creating a Twitter Bot using AWS Lambda and Go article by George Offley and it’s incredibly helpful!
If you prefer video content over articles and blogs, you HAVE to check out Gwyneth Peña-Siguenza’s YouTube Channel!! Gwyneth covers so many important Cloud topics in both AWS and Azure and SHE EVEN CREATES VIDEOS IN SPANISH!! It doesn’t get any better than that.
Last but definitely not least, JEREMY DALY CREATED A HAMILTON "MY SHOT" PARODY ALL ABOUT AWS LAMBDA!!!!
Jobs
If you’ve got an interesting job for this newsletter’s eminently employable subscribers, get in touch!
If you’ve been working on infrastructure for a while (OK more than a week maybe) you’re sure to have Opinions on how our industry could improve the workflows we put in place to keep systems secure. Come work at Sym to help us build the platform to solve this! We’re looking for a Security & Infrastructure Engineer to lead our security program and improve the safety and reliability of our environment.
Do you hold a US Security Clearance? Do you want to build exciting things? Protect exciting secrets? Make big trouble for Moose and Squirrel? Check out the AWS Cleared Jobs and see if AWS might have a role that’s up your alley. Many restrictions apply; see page for details.
Choice Cuts
Unhappy with your current cloud provider? Are you considering a hybrid or multicloud environment? Founded in 2003 with love for Linux, open-source technologies, and the communities surrounding them, Linode offers virtualized hosting, S3-compatible object storage, Kubernetes, GPUs, and more. Try Linode with $100 in free credit. Create your free account. Sponsored
Amazon Connect launches agent connection time metrics – This is great if you have customers who aren’t willing to wait for it… and by it, I mean customer service 😅
Amazon Connect supports “neural” Text-to-Speech voices in the London, Frankfurt, Singapore, and Tokyo regions – Neural Text-to-Speech Voices are fascinating but also kind of creepy 😅 There are already 60 standard voices available. This is starting to feel like a Sci-Fi movie and I can’t decide whether that’s a good or bad thing 🙃
Amazon EMR now provides up to 76% lower cost and 3.6X improved performance – I’m not sure about you but anything that can reduce cost while still maintaining performance is exciting to me. EMR not only does that but it also IMPROVES performance. What more could you ask for?
Amazon Kendra now supports custom data sources – One thing I love about Amazon Kendra (aside from the name 😆) is that it makes intelligent search powered by machine learning easy to use and implement. I’m already thinking of ways I can use this in projects I’ll probably never finish.
You now can manage access to Amazon Keyspaces by using temporary security credentials for the Python, Go, and Node.js Cassandra drivers – I’m a simple person – I see Python, I click.
Amazon QuickSight adds support for on-sheet filter controls – I loved making graphs in school so I get a little geeked out seeing what QuickSight can do. Data Viz folks, you’re gonna love this one 😉
Amazon RDS for Oracle supports managed disaster recovery (DR) with Oracle Data Guard physical standby database – It’s 2020 – anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. We need as much disaster recovery as we can get.
Amazon Rekognition now detects Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) such as face covers, head covers, and hand covers on persons in images – This is probably the most 2020-esque announcement in this newsletter. Of course, people used PPE before COVID-19 broke out. But I’m positive the current pandemic accelerated the need for a deep-learning service like this 😷
AWS Batch now supports Configurable Job Retries – Configurable Job Retries make it easy to figure out what went wrong and honestly, I wish every service (and coding language I work with 🙃) had this.
AWS CloudFormation now supports increased limits on five service quotas – This is GREAT news 🥳 I’m sure some of you are jumping for joy right now! I have a feeling this is going to make our lives so much easier.
Tools
Definitive Guide to AWS EKS Security – Download eBook
When using Amazon’s Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), you must understand which pieces of the security management role fall on you. Use this 42-page eBook from StackRox to learn about EKS cluster security, including the standard controls and best practices for minimizing the risk around cluster workloads, as well as specific requirements for securing an EKS cluster and its associated infrastructure. Sponsored
When I’m using the AWS CLI, the JSON data that I have to work with and decipher can be a headache. That’s where jq comes in! It’s a command-line JSON processor created to make JSON output easy to understand.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
