Good Morning!
We’re hosting our annual re:Invent drinkup in Las Vegas again; smash the link for a calendar invite. If you’re not going to re:Invent, I am deeply envious. I wish I could stay home.
And now, AWS nonsense:
From the Community
Authress talks about resilience in the face of us-east-1 outages.
I can’t understand why AWS rejected my insane pull request about chaos-2, the forbidden AWS service. The commit messages are a perfect example of descent into paranoid delusion, and the formatting was correct. You have to admire the professional shade they threw in the closure though. You win this time, AWS friends.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: Monetize the Fire, Sell the Extinguisher
Screaming in the Cloud: From Code to Cash: How André Arko Builds Better Tools and Gets Paid for Open Source
Choice Cuts
Custom domain names for VPC Lattice resources – Ah, a solution to the problem AWS created by making VPC Lattice resources addressable only through generated endpoints nobody could remember. The domain verification dance is predictably bureaucratic, but at least they’re not charging extra for the privilege of using your own DNS names. Yet. I’m annoyed because I explicitly requested this at launch and it took them years to implement what seems to me to be a pretty table-stakes feature.
AWS Lambda networking over IPv6 – IPv6 support finally arrives for Lambda, letting you ditch NAT gateways and their hourly charges for egress-only gateways that are free. Took them long enough to solve a problem they created, but at least the savings are real this time.
AWS Control Tower supports automatic enrollment of accounts – Finally automating what should’ve been automatic from day one. Moving accounts between OUs was already nerve-wracking enough without manual re-enrollment adding to the fun. At least now your governance won’t break every time someone reorganizes the org chart?
Amazon Braket Notebook Environments Now Support CUDA-Q Natively – NVIDIA’s quantum SDK comes pre-installed so you can simulate quantum computers on classical hardware before paying AWS to simulate them on different classical hardware. The real quantum leap is AWS finding yet another billable compute path between your budget and their revenue goals.
Amazon MSK Express brokers now support Intelligent Rebalancing for 180 times faster operation performance – MSK Express gets auto-rebalancing "at no additional cost"—which sounds generous until you remember Express brokers already cost more than Standard. They’re giving you faster partition shuffling on the premium tier while conveniently not mentioning what you’re paying for that privilege in the first place.
Amazon Keyspaces now supports logged batches for atomic, multi-statement operations – Atomic writes for Cassandra workloads, great! Except you’re paying double the write capacity units because AWS charges for both the prepare and commit phases. That’s not a feature tax so much as it is creative accounting with extra steps.
Amazon CloudWatch Composite Alarms adds threshold-based alerting – At last, a feature that acknowledges not every hiccup deserves a 3am page. Of course, AWS charges extra for the privilege of filtering your own alerts, because apparently teaching their monitoring service basic logic is a premium service. Your ops team will celebrate; your CFO less so.
Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) now supports Logged Batches – Oh hey, they aadded transactions to a database service launched in 2019. Love how they frame "we now support a core Cassandra feature from 2011" as innovation. At least there’s no surcharge for atomicity. Y’know, this time.
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service gets independent affirmation of its zero operator access design – AWS unable to log into its own service; enlists consultancy to help, but they can’t get in either.
AWS Fault Injection Service (FIS) launches new test scenarios for partial failures – Gray failures are nightmare fuel for on-call engineers, so testing for them makes sense. Of course, AWS will happily charge you to simulate the same degraded performance they occasionally provide for free.
AWS CloudFormation Hooks adds granular invocation details for Hooks invocation summary – You’re kidding me: CloudFormation tells you why it rejected your infrastructure instead of just lighting your deployment on fire and walking away. This should’ve shipped with Hooks from day one, but I guess charging customers to beta test features is the real innovation here.
Introducing structured output for Custom Model Import in Amazon Bedrock – So you brought your own model to Bedrock to avoid vendor lock-in, and now AWS is selling you features that should’ve shipped day one. Structured output is table stakes, and has been for a very long time. Calling it an "announcement" is like bragging about adding cupholders to a car you sold last year.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
