Good Morning!
From the Community
The fact that a lengthy blog post titled What is ACTUALLY Included in the AWS Free Tier? can be penned and still only scratch the surface is a problem.
Cloudonaut talks about self-hosted GitHub runners on AWS; I use CloudSnorkel for this and am quite happy.
This is an older post sir, but it checks out: Yan Cui wrote a couple of years ago that Lambda layers aren’t a package manager, but rather a deployment optimization .
https://twitter.com/ben11kehoe/status/1699805060627128818?s=20 – Ben Kehoe, formerly of iRobot, starts a job at Siemens in Germany early next year. We now have one more reason to go visit Europe.
My post on Why Your CPU-Based Utilisation Metric is Absolute Nonsense demonstrates that people do in fact read what I write; the feedback has been… resounding, and in agreement.
AWS shuts down its first compute and network infrastructure • The Register – AWS turned off the last of its EC2-Classic networking infrastructure. This is how you deprecate something: invisibly.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: AWS Guild Dinner & Tournament
Last Week In AWS: Overscoped Role? No, It’s the Children Who Are Wrong
Last Week In AWS: Why Your CPU-Based Utilization Metric Is Absolute Nonsense
Screaming in the Cloud: Defining a Database with Tony Baer
Screaming in the Cloud: Using Data to Tell Stories with Thomas LaRock
Choice Cuts
Amazon SNS FIFO topics now support message delivery to Amazon SQS Standard queues – How typical: I really could have used this feature a month ago, and had to work around it.
Announcing API Gateway console refresh – Ooh, with any luck this will be less "confusing as the devil" than it currently is.
Cost Anomaly Detection increases custom anomaly monitor limit to 500 – I’m not bored enough to try it, but I wonder what the error message says when you try to create the 501st?
Custom notifications are now available for AWS Chatbot – Ooh, a bit of digging in the documentation reveals that it supports supports markdown content, including emojis and Slack @mentions using user IDs. Excellent; without that it’d be kind of a 🐕💨💩 feature.
How to Integrate Amazon CloudWatch Alarms with Atlassian Confluence Knowledge Articles – This is a truly flabbergasting amount of work to simply annotate an alert with internal context that can assist the person retrieving it.
Building a secure webhook forwarder using an AWS Lambda extension and Tailscale – This is neat, but I think they’re missing a story here: if that “private subnet” in their example speaks IPv6, all tailnet traffic would potentially avoid the Managed NAT Gateway tax by default.
Deploy Generative AI Models on Amazon EKS – This solves the one actual pain point lots of folks have: getting Kubernetes and Generative AI on their resume at the same time.
Troubleshoot networking issues during database migration with the AWS DMS diagnostic support AMI – I’m sorry; “here’s a custom AMI to spin up an instance loaded with diagnostic tools to figure out what’s going on” was state of the art a decade ago. Is the DMS observability story really that unevolved?
Using AWS CloudFormation and AWS Cloud Development Kit to provision multicloud resources – Sorry, does anyone actually do this in reality? "Multicloud resources" has generally meant that you use Terraform, based upon every customer with whom I have ever spoken.
Combining content moderation services with graph databases & analytics to reduce community toxicity – Sorry, but you’re not going to fix "people being assholes" with a graph database.
AWS Private Certificate Authority – Weird title, but this is a blog post talking about the excellent private CA offering; if you need it it’s amazing, if you don’t it seems ridiculous.
Retail Partner Conversations: How Rokt is impacting the future of retail – Usually Amazon’s retail impact leads other companies to get rekt instead.
Simplify access to internal information using Retrieval Augmented Generation and LangChain Agents – Or alternately you can dramatically simplify external access to internal information by screwing up your S3 bucket permissions.
How to view Azure costs using Amazon QuickSight – This is boldly cartoonish, in the same way that Azure offering to help you analyze your AWS bill has been for a while. No, you shouldn’t send one competitor’s invoice to another unless you enjoy giving up negotiating leverage.
Centralized Dashboard for AWS Config and AWS Security Hub – Ooh, it becomes incrementally easier to figure out why my AWS Config bill is skyrocketing for no clear reason.
Benefits of Domain Registration with Amazon Route 53 – Yes, it’s a sales pitch of sorts, but it’s also correct. What other options do you have? Google Domains will sell you to Squarespace, Godaddy will turn your entire domain off if it receives a complaint about user generated content on one of them, and MarkMonitor is too expensive for non-enterprise use.
Use Bring your own IP addresses (BYOIP) and RFC 8805 for localization of Internet content – Holy… I’ve low-key wondered about this exact thing for years now–and the answer shows up in an AWS blog post. More like this, please!
Using NAT Gateways with multiple-Amazon VPCs at scale – Credit where due, this article goes into the cost dangers in some depth. I do wonder about the economic trade-off for applications that can’t be ported to IPv6 easily once AWS starts charging for public IPv4 addresses next year…
Navigating change: From ophthalmologist to AWS Cloud expert – …okay, I can see that.
Tools
Middy is a Node.js middleware engine for Lambda; it would have saved me much grief years ago had it existed.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
