Good Morning!
Hello from sunny San Diego, where I’m at FinOps X.
Last week Simon Willinson did something very interesting; he launched a paid-for version of his newsletter that only comes out once a month. Instead of drinking from the firehose of his content, he sends out the distilled "this is what I found truly interesting / important over the past month" to his paying subscribers. I love the model.
From the Community
Well I’m super not thrilled to learn that Postman is logging all your secrets and environment variables., and resolve to only use curl for such things going forward.
I was playing around with the "create notification configuration" section of AWS User Notifications (login to AWS console required) and noticed that you’ve gotta set up notifications service by service for ~200 services. I’m kinda wondering if there’s perhaps someone smarter I could speak with? Either this is absurd, or else I’m not understanding how it’s supposed to work because the messaging is horrific.
I opined that Cloud Repatriation is Getting Complicated because it seems fairly obvious at this point, no?
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: Putting My Wife On a PIP
Screaming in the Cloud: The Latest State of IaC with Ido Neeman
Choice Cuts
Amazon ECS increases container exit reason message to 1024 characters – I don’t see the problem with truncation, I mean how important could the message possib
AWS Cost Explorer now offers new Cost Comparison feature – This is a neat early feature that presumably will improve as it ages. It doesn’t really offer a lot of utility just yet for anything but the most basic of analyses…
AWS DataSync simplifies and accelerates cross-cloud data transfers – I like how this is framed purely as "move data from other cloud providers into AWS," as if they simply hadn’t imagined a customer might want to put data somewhere that isn’t AWS.
AWS Secrets Manager announces support for cost allocation tags for secrets – Sadly, there’s never visibility into how much using something like Secrets Manager saves you in terms of "not having your credentials leak embarrassingly in public."
Cost Optimization Hub now supports Savings Plans and reservations preferences – Man, is it gonna be sweet not to have to keep adjusting these to a company’s default settings every time you run an analysis…
Amazon Aurora DSQL, the fastest serverless distributed SQL database is now generally available – Aurora DSQL is now Generally Available. What’s it cost? Nobody knows, especially AWS. You get charged per DPU, which equates in the documentation to "screw you, benchmark your workloads and find out for yourself." Of all the pricing strategies from which to choose, I didn’t expect AWS to pick "completely give up." My Aurora customers are… displeased.
Enhance AI-assisted development with Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS and AWS Serverless MCP server – Oh dear; I’m pessimistic. Even GitHub’s MCP turned into a screaming security disaster, and I’m unconvinced there’s a good way to avoid this as long as prompt injection remains a viable form of attack. This is probably why it’s launched as an open source project: when customers hurt themselves with it (and they will), it doesn’t reflect upon AWS as directly. Hey, as long as Amazon gets to chase the hype, right?
OpenSearch UI: Six months in review – How did I miss that OpenSearch launched a UI? Oh, because they launched it in the run-up to re:Invent, where nothing in particular stands out through the cacophony.
5 steps for building a VMware transition strategy for public sector customers – Even public sector customers are fleeing VMware. Oof. Nice work, Broadcom.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
