Good morning!

Welcome to issue number 51 of Last Week in AWS.

After months of planning, I’m pleased to announce that my new podcast has launched– Screaming in the Cloud. Two episodes are posted so far; Heidi Waterhouse of LaunchDarkly and Chris Short of DevOps’ish are my first two guests. Check them out, and let me know what you think.

Community Contributions

StackOverflow’s annual developer survey cast AWS as a ‘Most-Loved’ Development Platform, proving that Stockholm syndrome is very real.

Another discussion of Is AWS Lambda expensive to run? | cloudncode. Remember that it’s going to be workload dependent.

Cloudonaut returns to discuss managing infrastructure with CloudFormation, Parameter Store and CodePipeline. I’m impressed; this took a lot of work.

Kyle Galbraith chimes in with a counter to alarmist reporting, informing us that the End Of The Cloud Is Not Coming. If you were worried that it was, it may be time to take a break from the internet for a few days.

A nicely curated list of all sorts of things tied to CapitalOne’s cloudcustodian tool.

Finally Jenkins comes out with a modernized workflow. It’s about time; “the Jenkins box” has been the pet in a sea of cattle for many environments for far too long.

Paul Johnson of AWS opines on why Lambda and .zip files are a recipe for success. He’s obviously a shill for Big WinZip.

The Terrible Orange Website asks which Cloud Provider to use. Various terrible posters weigh in.

A fun dive into a concept I highlighted a few months back– Hunting Cybercriminals with AWS Honey Tokens. Picture a bunch of AWS API keys that grant no permissions. Leave them strewn about in various places. When someone attempts to use one of the keys, alarms go off, and you’ve found a breach in the very early stages.

Choice Cuts From the AWS Blog

Amazon Polly releases new SSML Breath feature – This one might need a bit of tweaking; Alexa is currently wheezing through her nose every time she laughs at me.

Amazon Redshift Doubles the Number of Tables You Can Create in a Cluster – With a sudden doubling in table count, Amazon is truly Redshifting without a clutch.

Amazon SageMaker notebook instances now offer lifecycle customization and option to disable internet access – Lifecycle customization is awesome, but sadly AWS has been beaten to the punch by Comcast for disabling internet access.

AWS Cloud9 Supports Local Debugging of AWS Lambda Functions in Python – Once you’ve struggled through the various levels of hoop-jumping that Cloud9 and SAM impose on your workflow, have a few more and debug Lambda functions in Python in this arcane environment too.

AWS CodePipeline Supports Push Events from Amazon S3 – S3 adds “CodePipeline” to the existing list of things it can trigger, which already includes “Lambda Functions” and “Terrifying coverage of your company in various newspapers around the world.”

Introducing the AWS IoT Framework for Automotive Grade Linux – While Automotive work is awesome and important, I feel for the team behind this one. “The same week as the first death involving an autonomous vehicle” was probably not when they wanted to launch.

Lambda@Edge Adds S3 Origin Support for Customizing Content Delivery based on Request Headers – I saw this one an hour or so before the blog post came out, as I was setting up a new project. I thought I was losing my mind– “has that always been there?”

Amazon EC2 Reserved Instance (RI) Purchase Recommendations via the AWS Cost Explorer API – You can now use API calls to get RI recommendations that make no sense for your environment instead of having to use your browser like some relic from the past.

Query your AWS database from your serverless application | AWS Database Blog – This well crafted blog post describes the best possible way to beat your traditional databases to death via Lambda’s herd of elephants.

Honeycomb discusses integrating with CloudTrail of all things.

Tools

Community Hero Lynn Langit has implemented “Hello World” style intros in all of AWS’s data services. This is awesome.

I’m curious about this Spot Market simulator. It purports to play out various bid strategies. Has anyone played with it yet? Hit reply and let me know what you think if so.

Komiser is a single pane of glass that displays a variety of AWS resources, with an eye towards cost optimization.

…and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.

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