Good Morning!
I’m off to Washington DC tomorrow for the Public Sector summit, wherein I’ll be spinning up my "Ministry of Shitposting" GovCloud account to see how the folks with actual responsibilities beyond those of "Twitter For Pets" experience the AWS cloud.
If you’re in town, I’m hosting a drinkup at Highline RxR at 6PM-8PM tomorrow (Tuesday) evening. Let me buy you a drink!
After that I’ll be skittering off to London and Belgium for the next week, so expect some potential disruptions to the usual programming.
This week also kicks off my annual reader survey. This survey is one of the ways I check in with all of you to see how I’m doing and what you want more or less of. It’s also open season for your best dunks on me! I’d really appreciate you taking the time to go through it–it’ll take about five minutes.
From the Community
Rachel by the bay’s venerable website has migrated to a new provider after discovering that IBM has completely destroyed Softlayer’s once mighty value proposition. I just want to be very clear here: I’ve been reading Rachel’s blog for well over a decade now, and she remains one of the best voices I’ve ever heard in the systems operation space. If she says something, you can save an awful lot of time by assuming it is in fact true by default.
How I Use OpenAI’s GPT-4 To Stay In Touch With My Mum More Consistently is a great idea. Some week I’ll try to have ChatGPT (pronounced "Chat-Gippety) write this newsletter and see who notices.
If you have too much money, consider Sending AWS Lambda Logs to an Observability Service Like Datadog or New Relic. Sure, sure, that’s not the point of the article and it’s a good idea, but the first time someone does this naively, "oops" is the reaction inspired by the monthly bill coming due.
Red Hat has finally given CentOS 7 users a Cloud Upgrade plan. Mine was to migrate to Ubuntu after Red Hat kneecapped its own users by pulling a "just kidding" on a previous ten year support commitment.
Bloomberg has a list of Amazon projects that have been killed. They’re missing a goodly number of AWS offerings over the years, too.
Amazon Ring gave employees unfettered access to customer videos, and is settling with the FTC over it. I wonder how many employees at AWS had unfettered access to customer S3 buckets during that timeframe. Before AWS freaks out and starts yelling at me for that being an unfair characterization, let me apologize in advance for daring to suggest that spying on people during intimate moments in their homes is anywhere near as big an invasion of privacy as rifling through corporate data stored in a company account. Someone who’ll do the former is absolutely not going to have a moral issue with the latter.
Amazon is knocking down some office buildings in Virginia to build more data centers.
AWS VP Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec has a post on moving from a batch processing to stream processing culture. This is a trend I’m seeing industry-wide and I’m very much hear for it. I wish the AWS billing system would follow suit; it’d solve a number of very real customer-facing problems.
Reddit has now pivoted to telling its third party developer ecosystem to go screw itself.
Google calls out Microsoft’s cloud software licensing tax. Google is completely correct.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: Batman’s Customer Testimonials
Last Week In AWS: The Wages of TLS
Screaming in the Cloud: A Renaissance Man in Cloud Security with Rich Mogull
Screaming in the Cloud: Creating A Resilient Security Strategy Through Chaos Engineering with Kelly Shortridge
Choice Cuts
AWS Pricing Calculator now offers visibility of point in time cost estimations – And estimates only stick around for a year now as part of this. Sorry, but I’ve gotta ask: just how many pricing changes in a given twelve months is AWS planning on making in the next few years?
Invoice Summary is now available – This gives you the option to not have detailed breakdowns for each member account as part of your monthly invoice. Please Consider the Environment before printing your AWS bills.
Optimize your x86-based Amazon EC2 Workloads – Of course this article has a plug for Graviton featured within it; why wouldn’t it?
New – AWS DMS Serverless: Automatically Provisions and Scales Capacity for Migration and Data Replication – It charges per hour rather than per transaction and doesn’t scale to zero, demonstrating that once again Amazon has completely lost the plot of what the word "Serverless" means to its customers. This is DMS autoscaling, not Serverless.
Build hypothetical indexes in Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL with HypoPG – Most of my databases are indeed hypothetical, and are rated R for ridiculousness.
Version 1 of the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) has reached end-of-support – Thank goodness; I don’t have to see incompatible answers to documentation queries anymore by default.
The Retail Race: A Roadmap for Implementing a Smart Store Strategy – This from Amazon, who’s currently abandoning its retail store ambitions and shuttering a bunch of retail outlets? Well okay then.
Get ready for AWS IPv6 day – This is hosted on Amazon’s Twitch subsidiary, which you can only reach via IPv4 as of this writing.
Introducing a cost control solution for Amazon Braket – This is very simple to achieve: don’t use Braket unless you have a business problem whose solution requires a quantum computer. Boom, done.
Tools
This analysis shows the cost effectiveness for a host of different providers in varying configurations for purchasing instances that contain GPUs. Spoiler: AWS doesn’t come out super well economically.
llama is a CLI for outsourcing computation to AWS Lambda, including what’s effectively a drop-in replacement for some uses of GCC.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
