Good Morning!
Welcome to Week 3 of re:Quinnvent. Here’s what you can look forward to this week:
- Tuesday the 15th: Werner’s Keynote Rebuttal with a special guest (@ 10:00 AM PST)
- Wednesday the 16th: re:Quinnvent Livestream with (@ 12:00 PM PST)
- Wednesday the 16th: re:Invent Sponsor Floor Guided Nature Walk with Mike Julian (@ 2:00 PM PST)
- Friday the 18th: The re:Invent Summary Livestream, with NewRelic (@ 12:00 PM PST)
You can find the re:Quinnvent Livestreams on Twitch (https://twitch.com/lastweekinaws) and the replays on our YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDuckbillGroup/). And now, your Moment of Zen.
From the Community
What do HubSpot, Klarna, Alert Logic and Armor all have in common? They all use the ChaosSearch Data Platform to connect and index data in their own AWS S3 environments, rendering their data fully searchable and available for analysis with their existing data tools. With unlimited scale, industry-leading resiliency, and massive cost savings, ChaosSearch is an ideal replacement for the ELK stack (which we all know tends to flop over at scale)! Now perform scalable log analytics on your AWS S3, using the familiar ElasticSearch API for queries, and Kibana for log analytics and visualizations, while reducing costs and improving analytical capabilities! Want to learn more? Schedule a demo (easily pick a day and time that works for you), or start a free trial today! Sponsored
A Cloud Guru tells us that AWS Proton is Conway’s Law-as-a-Service, which marks the first time that anyone has bothered to tell us coherently what AWS Proton actually is.
What does it mean to package AWS Lambda functions as container images? Let’s find out.
The infamous Cloud Opinion Twitter account has released a 2020 evaluation of cloud providers.
Now that Lambdas can deploy container images, here’s how to get it working with Ruby on Rails.
Clear some time on your calendar to read this nuanced, insightful, deep exploration of why one particular user chooses not to use AWS.
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.
Chime is a challenger bank providing free banking & credit services – our mission is to give people financial peace of mind, we’re tangibly helping people in the real world, and we were recently valued as the #1 most valuable fintech company in the US (with a $14B valuation). We’re looking for AWS/Terraform experts who can help us secure our cloud infrastructure – if you’d like to learn more about it then we’d love to hear from you (for “How did you hear about this job?” please enter “LastWeekInAWS”).
Choice Cuts
6Connex saved 50%. Onriva saved 35%. And Uber saved 15% in the first 30 days. Typical AWS cost savings using nOps cloud management. Yup, typical savings. nOps was built for DevOps teams, and provides auto-discovery of high-risk issues, dashboards with instant drill-down to the resource level for root cause analysis, and aligns with AWS Well-Architected. Get a free trial. Start saving with nOps Sponsored
Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL Integrates with AWS Lambda – Our long national nightmare is over, and our database can now integrate with Lambda functions. Wait, what?
Amazon Braket tensor network simulator supports 50-qubit quantum circuits – …and narrowly averted a warp core breach in the process.
Amazon Redshift launches the ability to easily move clusters between AWS Availability Zones (AZs) – Even Redshift has had enough of AWS’s egregious cross-AZ data transfer pricing.
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) announces Reachability Analyzer to simplify connectivity testing and troubleshooting – I’ve seen this dismissively referred to as “charging ten cents a pop for ping or traceroute” and I think those takes are pretty crappy. Those tools don’t tell you which security group is blocking a connection; this tool does.
Announcing Amazon Forecast Weather Index – automatically include local weather to increase your forecasting model accuracy – Predicting the AWS bill is impossible, so AWS is starting with predicting the weather instead.
Announcing Amazon Lookout for Metrics – As the AWS field fills, service teams are resorting to increasingly unorthodox service names in an attempt to get attention. Just ask Amazon HOLY CRAP RUN IT’S A BEAR for Containers.
AWS announces AWS Audit Manager – I don’t even care what this costs; if I can give it to my auditor and it gets them to leave me alone it’s worth every penny and then some.
AWS IDE Toolkit now available for AWS Cloud9 – You may have forgotten Cloud9, but someone at AWS just remembered it a few days ago.
AWS CloudTrail provides more granular control of data event logging through advanced event selectors – You can now use data event logging in CloudTrail without breaking the entire bank.
AWS introduces Amazon SageMaker Edge Manager – Model Management for Edge Devices – And Data Wrangler and Feature Store and JumpStart and Pipelines and distributed training and Clarify and some enhancements to Model Monitor. All of those terms start with “SageMaker.”
Introducing Amazon HealthLake to make sense of health data – The real purpose of this service is of course to signal to healthcare and other regulated industries that AWS is very much open for their business.
In the Works – AWS Region in Melbourne, Australia – Melbourne gets its own region now that AWS has learned to rack servers upside down.
New – Amazon EMR on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) – EMR can now run on Kubernetes, two technologies you shouldn’t be using except that due to an escalating series of poor decisions you’re locked in.
Tired of juggling the cost of AWS backup and recovery with your SLAs? What about multiple products for your data NOT in AWS? Then quit the circus act and check out Veeam! Veeam unifies AWS backup and recovery with any other platform you need to protect into one easy solution. Better yet, they’ll help cut your cloud costs without compromising the ability to recover what you need, when and where you need to (even across clouds). They’ll be at re:Invent, so check them out! I hear they’re giving out free t-shirts… Sponsored
New for Amazon CodeGuru – Python Support, Security Detectors, and Memory Profiling – I ran some truly terrible Python through this thing and it found no errors. I get that they’ve gotta walk a line between “nagging you to death” and “finding truly egregious errors,” but given that it’s a paid service that returns “LGTM, ship it” in way more time than it would take me to not review pull requests manually… doesn’t feel great. Watch for more on this front.
Introducing Spot Blueprints, a template generator for frameworks like Kubernetes and Apache Spark – They have to call it “Spot Blueprints” because just letting you have the CloudFormation (and Terraform!!!) outputs of things you click in the console is far too radical of a concept for AWS. Huge win across the board; check this out.
Automating Hyperledger Fabric chaincode deployment on Amazon Managed Blockchain using AWS CodePipeline – That sure is a lot of words to say “we will never be trusted with anything even remotely important.”
Amazon EC2 instance-level network performance metrics uncover new insights – Seriously, look at these. They’re a series of metrics to figure out when AWS limits are causing your issues instead of your crappy configuration.
Detecting sensitive data in DynamoDB with Macie – “Ooh, does Macie now support DynamoDB?” Absolutely not. Let me save you a click: you do this by dumping your DynamoDB tables to S3 and analyzing them there.
But wait, there is more! NEW Amazon S3 sessions at AWS re:Invent are coming on Jan 12-14 – Oh my god they’re subjecting us to more reInvent.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
