Good Morning!
Good Morning!
With re:Quinnvent wrapped for the year, I just spent 59 hours sleeping. (Call me Rip Van Quinnkle.)
Before we dive into all the latest news from AWS, a few highlights from re:Quinnvent (and the past week) that I’d like to call out:
- re:Quinnvent Videos. You can find links to watch the video coverage of re:Quinnvent over at http://requinnvent.com or on our YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDuckbillGroup/). My personal favorite? The Sponsor Floor Guided Nature Walk ()
- AWS Hambone & 826 National. You all helped us raise $7,400+ for 826 National with our swag celebrating the meatiest AWS service. (If you bought an AWS Hambone mug, keep your eyes open for a message from me/CustomInk with the next step for you for the February private virtual event.)
- D’oh! Memeing about DevOps with @SimpsonsOps. I sat down with Jordan and Richard — the brains behind Simpsons Against DevOps — on Screaming in the Cloud. Check out the episode to hear the benefits of pseudo-anonymity, the genesis of @SimpsonsOps, what Jordan and Richard’s approach to memeing looks like, and more. https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/d-oh-memeing-about-devops-with-simpsonsops/
From the Community
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Forrest Brazeal is a constant spur to be better at writing things, because he puts out pieces like this about how AWS Lambda is winning, but first it had to die and makes me wish I’d written it.
A Serverless Payment Workflow featuring Lambda and the CDK is awesome as a demo, but “play with things that charge people money so you can learn” is definitely a bold approach.
Jobs
If you’ve got an interesting job for this newsletter’s eminently employable subscribers, get in touch!
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.
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
Announcing Amazon Route 53 support for DNSSEC – I’ve been saying for a while that Route 53 is a database. Now, ten years after the first request for this feature, it becomes a secure database.
Announcing AWS IoT SiteWise Edge (Preview), a new capability of AWS IoT SiteWise to collect, process, and monitor industrial equipment data on-premises – A welcome enhancement for those folks whose industrial equipment doesn’t yet live inside of an AWS data center.
Announcing FreeRTOS Long Term Support – Two years is PLENTY of time to go from “release” to “end of life” for an operating system embedded in equipment that you ship to customers, right?
Announcing Unified Search in the AWS Management Console – This is a great UX enhancement to the AWS console. I particularly like the ads for third party software in the AWS Marketplace. Call me, AWS ad sales team!
AWS announces Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus for container monitoring – They also offered the same thing for Grafana too, in partnership with Grafana Labs. My “partnership” with Grafana Labs is basically restricted to dear friend and constant foil of mine, Richard Hartmann. He’s their director of community, and the nature of our “partnership” is he and I sending each other an escalating series of prank gifts. He’s also on the Prometheus core team, so if you have a prank idea sparked by this item, please hit reply and help me ruin his January.
AWS Lambda launches checkpointing for Amazon Kinesis and Amazon DynamoDB Streams – You can now tear out a bunch of sidecar code that was solving this problem for you, and scream at your account rep if you just wrote that code last week.
AWS Lambda now supports self-managed Apache Kafka as an event source – I need to look into this because it seems nuts. How does a software package you run yourself serve as an event source? I’m eager to learn more.
AWS Personal Health Dashboard now supports organization-wide event aggregation – I’m sad that I’ll never again experience the joy of having to click through 50 AWS accounts to ensure I’m seeing all of the maintenance events.
Cost & Usage Report Now Available to Member (Linked) Accounts – Enhancements like this are (for certain customer personas) a big win. Frankly, anything that updates the CUR access model is a win in my book. I’m weird like that.
Enhanced error handling capabilities in AWS IoT Analytics data processing pipelines – This is awesome but will be widely ignored by SaaS folks who reasonably conclude from the “IoT” branding that it’s not for them.
Introducing AWS CloudShell – I love this feature so much. Google came out with their Cloud Shell 5 years and 2 months ago, and since then AWS has been beaten to this feature by Azure, Oracle, OpenStack, and IBM “Cloud.” But they finally caught up.
Introducing AWS Systems Manager Fleet Manager – It’s a certainty I won’t make fun of this service name, nor the names of the new Systems Manager Change Manager or Systems Manager Application Manager services.
Introducing Distributed Load Testing v1.2 – It’s called “three weeks of streaming re:Invent videos to hundreds of thousands of people” and credit where due: it succeeded.
Software providers on AWS Marketplace can now use the self-service management portal to update their Container products – Wait what the hell did they have to do before this release?!
Announcing General Availability of AWS Cost Anomaly Detection – This is great–it’s free, so turn it on. It’ll tell you when there’s a sharp spend spike before your boss does, so you can get a head start on finding a new job.
Amazon Location – Add Maps and Location Awareness to Your Applications – You can consider this to be basically identical to the Google Maps API except Amazon is nowhere near as good at suddenly raising the price a few orders of magnitude.
New – FreeRTOS Long Term Support to Provide Years of Feature Stability – Specifically “two.” Two years. Any less and they would have to say “year” instead.
Join Zoom meetings with Alexa to stay connected with colleagues and friends – On the one hand, this frees up a screen for my Soom meetings. On the other I’m now rethinking my decision to put an Echo Show 8 in the guest bathroom. Yes, it also supports this with Chime but I’m not giving two links for the same feature. Sorry, Amazon.
AWS joins Blender Development fund – I’m not sure what the Blender Fund is, but I think it’s shaping up to be the most epically expensive fruit smoothie in the history of the universe.
Tools
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
In the world of querying databases, digaws spits out region and other information for AWS-owned IP addresses.
I’m excited about this. consoleme is a multi-account AWS Swiss Army knife that’s extensible. Flag this one to look into next year.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
