--- title: "S3 Files and an AI-Powered Singing Rat Trap" id: "15332" type: "newsletter" slug: "s3-files-and-an-ai-powered-singing-rat-trap" published_at: "2026-04-13T13:30:00+00:00" modified_at: "2026-04-13T13:30:00+00:00" url: "https://www.lastweekinaws.com/newsletter/s3-files-and-an-ai-powered-singing-rat-trap/" markdown_url: "https://www.lastweekinaws.com/newsletter/s3-files-and-an-ai-powered-singing-rat-trap.md" excerpt: "We're getting close to conference season again; I'll be at the NY and LA AWS summits, as well as FinOps X. What're you folks going to be attending this summer? Hit reply and let me know. If you (well, not..." --- About the Author Corey is the Chief Cloud Economist at Duckbill, where he specializes in helping companies improve their AWS bills by making them smaller and less horrifying. He also hosts the "Screaming in the Cloud" and "AWS Morning Brief" podcasts; and curates "Last Week in AWS," a weekly newsletter summarizing the latest in AWS news, blogs, and tools, sprinkled with snark and thoughtful analysis in roughly equal measure. Sign up for the Newsletter Stay up to date on the latest AWS news, opinions, and tools, all lovingly sprinkled with a bit of snark. "*" indicates required fields ## [Good Morning](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/coquinn_ratsissimo-ai-powered-singing-rat-trap-activity-7448143921534115841-gdud) ! We’re getting close to conference season again; I’ll be at the NY and LA AWS summits, as well as FinOps X. What’re you folks going to be attending this summer? Hit reply and let me know. If you (well, not *you*, but probably the saddest looking person on your finance team) are tracking commitments in spreadsheets and hoping your discount strategy still makes sense, you’re not alone. Most teams are cobbling together strategies/tools that weren’t designed for the scale and complexity of modern cloud environments. That’s why we’re building Skyway over at [Duckbill](https://www.duckbillhq.com) —to take you away from all that. Now the exclusive sponsor of Last Week in AWS, and also the company I co-founded. Cloud contract issues? Get in touch. ## Things I Found on the Internet Stephen O’Grady’s [analysis of Valkey at two years old](https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2026/04/06/valkey-at-two/) is a measured, data-driven look at how the Redis fork is holding up. Spoiler: it’s not following the typical fork decay curve. The commit velocity and contributor diversity numbers tell an interesting story about what happens when a relicensing bet doesn’t play out as planned. Fantastic debugging war story. Lambda’s connection pooling quietly holds open InnoDB transactions, ballooning the undo log until your database freezes solid. The fix is surprisingly simple: switch to READ-COMMITTED isolation. If you run Lambda against MySQL or MariaDB, [this writeup from Shattered Silicon](https://shatteredsilicon.net/the-aws-lambda-kiss-of-death/) might save you a 3 AM page. **Sponsored** *I need to be transparent with you: this week’s sponsor, [Ratsissimo, the AI-Powered Singing Rat Trap](https://shitposting.ai/ratsissimo/) , is my fault. I built an AI-powered rat trap that sings opera when it catches a rat, put it on the internet, and now I’m sponsoring my own newsletter with it because the idea of paying myself to advertise a product that doesn’t exist was too funny to pass up. The trap has no mute button. I held a meeting about this. The meeting got heated. The $799 Ensemble tier includes three traps that harmonize across rooms during simultaneous catches. A feature nobody asked for that emerged during testing and that we were, frankly, too impressed to remove. Y Exterminator backed us at Demo Day after the prototype sang Puccini in the auditorium and three partners wept. I don’t know what that says about the state of venture capital in 2026, but I know what it says about the state of me. As an added bonus, turn your volume all the way up and listen to the arias on the site. They are deeply moving.* Training AI models on content you don’t own is one of those things that seems obviously problematic until you’re the company doing it. [Amazon’s latest AI video scraping lawsuit](https://world.infonasional.com/amazon-lawsuit-ai-video-scraping) raises familiar questions about where the line sits between “publicly available” and “fair game.” Spoiler: courts are starting to have opinions. I’ve spent a decade saying S3 isn’t a filesystem. AWS apparently took that personally. [This breakdown](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/s3-is-not-a-filesystem-but-now-theres-one-in-front-of-it/) covers what they actually built with S3 Files, why the pricing tells you it’s secretly EFS in a trenchcoat, and where those 32 KB metering minimums will quietly destroy your budget on metadata-heavy workloads. Then I did a [deeper dive](https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/09/aws_s3_files_stress_test_corey_quinn/) for The Register, replete with data, torture tests, and a conversation with the S3 team. Matt Garman saying AI is *underhyped* while running the largest cloud infrastructure business on the planet is peak “asking the barber if you need a haircut.” Still, [The Register’s coverage](https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/07/aws_garman_humanx_ai_underhyped/?td=rt-3a) captures some genuinely interesting tension between the hype and the conference organizer basically quoting Rod Serling. Worth the read. Apparently AWS [still does not have approvals configured on IAM code pushes](https://x.com/0xdabbad00/status/2042257658653311214?s=12) . Oof. ## What AWS Has For Us This Time [AWS Certificate Manager now supports native certificate search](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2026/03/aws-certificate-manager-search/) It’s 2026 and ACM finally lets you search your certificates. Previously, the workflow was apparently “scroll and pray.” The fact that finding a cert by domain name is a *feature announcement* tells you everything you need to know about how low the bar is for managed service consoles. [Amazon S3 Lifecycle pauses actions on objects that are unable to replicate](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2026/03/s3-lifecycle-pauses-actions-on-objects/) – S3 Lifecycle will now refuse to delete objects that failed replication, which is genuinely good. Previously, a misconfigured permission could mean your data got expired before it replicated, and you’d discover this at the worst possible moment. The fact this wasn’t always the behavior is the scary part. [Amazon Bedrock now offers Claude Mythos Preview (Gated Research Preview)](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2026/04/amazon-bedrock-claude-mythos/) – A model so powerful they won’t actually let you use it. “Gated research preview” with an allow-list where AWS contacts you – basically a velvet rope for cybersecurity AI. Anthropic’s pitch is “find vulnerabilities before the bad guys do,” which is reassuring right up until you remember the bad guys also have API keys. [Amazon OpenSearch Serverless now supports Zstandard (zstd) codec for index compression](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2026/04/amazon-opensearch-serverless-supports-zstandard-index-compression/) – Saving 32% on storage by swapping compression codecs is useful, which makes me suspicious. The catch is you now get to spend a fun afternoon tuning compression levels 1 through 6, trading indexing speed for savings. OpenSearch Serverless: where “serverless” means the server’s still there, it just bills differently, and you still apparently have to manually tune the damn thing. [AWS Secrets Manager console now supports custom input for AWS KMS keys](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2026/04/aws-secrets-manager-console-custom-kms-key-input/) Secrets Manager’s console finally lets you paste in a KMS key ARN from another account instead of being limited to a dropdown. The API could already do this. So congratulations, AWS, on spending however many engineering hours it took to add a text input field to a web form. This is one fewer arrow in my “the AWS console teams hate their customers” quiver. [Amazon Bedrock now supports cost allocation by IAM user and role](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2026/04/bedrock-iam-cost-allocation/) – Bedrock finally lets you see which team is burning through your AI budget. Now you can watch in real time as marketing’s “quick experiment” with Claude costs more than engineering’s entire quarterly allocation. The finger-pointing will be data-driven, at least. And of course, it still is eventually consistent, so realtime troubleshooting is still way easier with Anthropic’s API directly. [Amazon S3 starts rolling out new security best practice to new and existing buckets by default](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2026/04/s3-default-bucket-security-setting/) – Nothing says “security best practice” like waiting until 2026 to disable a feature that let anyone with an encryption key write mystery objects to your buckets. Bold of S3 to quietly fix this across 37 regions and frame it as innovation rather than long-overdue hygiene. You’re welcome, everyone’s compliance team. [Introducing AI-Powered Cost Analysis in AWS Cost Explorer](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws-cloud-financial-management/introducing-ai-powered-cost-analysis-in-aws-cost-explorer/) – They built an AI to help you understand your AWS bill. If that’s not the most damning indictment of how incomprehensible AWS billing has become, I don’t know what is. Powered by Amazon Q, of course, because why miss a chance to upsell one service while explaining the costs of another? [Launching S3 Files, making S3 buckets accessible as file systems](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/launching-s3-files-making-s3-buckets-accessible-as-file-systems/) – Fifteen years of AWS trainers carefully explaining why object storage isn’t a file system, and now S3 just… is one. Under the hood it’s EFS wearing an S3 trenchcoat, which means you get to pay for both services while pretending it’s one. The circle of cloud life. [The future of managing agents at scale: AWS Agent Registry now in preview](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/the-future-of-managing-agents-at-scale-aws-agent-registry-now-in-preview/) – Finally, a registry to track all your AI agents, because “agent sprawl” is the new “serverless sprawl” which was the new “microservice sprawl.” The pattern is familiar: build too many things, lose track, then pay AWS for a service to find them all again. Job security for everyone involved. [Understanding Amazon Bedrock model lifecycle](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/understanding-amazon-bedrock-model-lifecycle/) – Nothing screams “stable foundation for your AI applications” like a lifecycle that ends with your API calls just… failing. Bonus: during the “extended access” period, they might jack up your prices. So it’s like a going-out-of-business sale, but backwards. Plan your migrations accordingly, or don’t – AWS will decide for you. [Introducing OpenTelemetry & PromQL support in Amazon CloudWatch](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/mt/introducing-opentelemetry-promql-support-in-amazon-cloudwatch/) – So CloudWatch now ingests OTLP metrics with 150 labels and PromQL support, which is AWS’s way of saying “please stop running Prometheus just to avoid us.” Honestly? The automatic resource enrichment is genuinely useful. Pricing details are conspicuously absent from this preview announcement, which tells you everything. … and that’s what happened ***Last Week in AWS.*** ## You might also like [More Newsletter Issues](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/newsletter/) Issue No.468 ### [Multicloud Interconnect and the Great CVE Hunt](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/newsletter/multicloud-interconnect-and-the-great-cve-hunt/) [Read More about Multicloud Interconnect and the Great CVE Hunt](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/newsletter/multicloud-interconnect-and-the-great-cve-hunt/) Issue No.466 ### [S3 Gets Vectors, CloudFront Gets SHA-256, You Get the Bill](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/newsletter/s3-gets-vectors-cloudfront-gets-sha-256-you-get-the-bill/) [Read More about S3 Gets Vectors, CloudFront Gets SHA-256, You Get the Bill](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/newsletter/s3-gets-vectors-cloudfront-gets-sha-256-you-get-the-bill/) Issue No.465 ### [Aurora PostgreSQL: Now Free Enough to Be Dangerous](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/newsletter/aurora-postgresql-now-free-enough-to-be-dangerous/) [Read More about Aurora PostgreSQL: Now Free Enough to Be Dangerous](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/newsletter/aurora-postgresql-now-free-enough-to-be-dangerous/) Issue No.464 ### [S3 Turns 20 and SimpleDB Is Still Alive](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/newsletter/s3-turns-20-and-simpledb-is-still-alive/) [Read More about S3 Turns 20 and SimpleDB Is Still Alive](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/newsletter/s3-turns-20-and-simpledb-is-still-alive/)