Good Morning!
re:Invent is nigh, and as a result they’ve been slamming out feature enhancements for the past week, to the point where it all kinda runs together and nobody can focus on any one thing that’s come out. 11 months of basically nothing big coming out, one month of frenzy. This is increasingly not serving AWS super well; as a customer it’s starting to feel remarkably uneven in terms of product enhancements.
Also nigh is re:Quinnvent, and it’s going to be fun. Don’t miss our Wednesday night drinkup at Atomic Liquors or the Nature Walk!
From the Community
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Cloudonaut hits it out of the park with this foray into the worldwide availability of EC2 instance types. It is a freaking mess.
This is a novel approach to using Bedrock via Lambda. Personally, I just hit the OpenAI API endpoints for my GenAI experimentation. It’s super easy, has a way simplier security model, doesn’t require arcane Marketplace subscriptions to get access to models, has a consistent API that doesn’t vary between models, and costs basically nothing.
Amazon is now having to change a whole bunch of Service Catalog stuff to reflect Terraform’s license change.
In an effort to be more transparent with the stuff we work on at my day job, we’ve made our Cloud Cost Compass: Duckbill’s FinOps Maturity Assessment public.
Choice Cuts
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Janice, please speak to Jeremy about wrapping this in the sponsor tag as part of the tag test.
Amazon CloudWatch Logs announces regular expression filter pattern support for Live Tail – This is grep. You’ve built grep as a service. I am not complaining any; grep is awesome! I just wanted to make sure we were both clear regarding exactly what you’ve done. Carry on…
Amazon EBS announces Snapshot Lock to protect snapshots from inadvertent or malicious deletions – This is an absolutely amazing feature. Not because it’s useful (though it is for a bunch of regulated customers), but because you can use this to force an AWS customer to pay for a giant pile of snapshots every month for the next century with zero recourse if they leave their access keys lying around unprotected. This is a gift from the future, in much the same way that the Star Trek dermal regenerator is a stocking stuffer you could theoretically use to seal someone’s butt closed while they were sleeping.
Amazon MSK Serverless now supports all programming languages – This is marketing hyperbole run amok. It supports five programming languages, out of hundreds if not thousands. AWS has (to its credit) shied away from being overly bombastic in what it says, meaning that when they do it it comes across as extremely unpracticed and hence sounds ridiculous.
Amazon Time Sync Service now supports microsecond-accurate time – Congratulations to the one extremely stubborn, extremely specific customer who clearly demanded this as a sticking point, because the service is currently only available in the Tokyo region, and only on R7G instances.
AWS CloudTrail Lake announces new pricing option optimized for flexible retention – Holy god, read that monstrosity. New pricing option for CloudTrail lake, which I love (both the pricing and the service itself, to be clear). The service is amazing, and this will save me money. But look at how they want you to figure out what it’ll cost you. Maybe build a damn Party Rock app that embeds into the console to serve as a dynamic calculator? As an added annoyance, as of this writing the post is incorrect; the actual dashboard metric stanza should read "SORT(SEARCH(‘{AWS/CloudTrail,"Event data store ID","Lake Metrics"} MetricName="TotalStorageBytes" NOT "Lake Metrics"="IngestionMetrics"’,"Sum"),SUM, DESC)" rather than the version they have with multiple errors in it. Lastly, if you have to go through this many convolutions in order to figure out what something’s going to cost you, the pricing folks biffed it.
AWS Cost Explorer now provides more historical and granular data – You certainly haven’t forgotten that big bill whoopsie you made a few years ago. Now Cost Explorer hasn’t either. Up to 38 months of history for free, but you’ve gotta opt in. You should do that. This might be my favorite release of the year.
AWS announces IPv6 tiered VPCs and subnets – Okay, I guess. I mean, was anyone filling up their IPv6 subnets? Or even coming within an order of magnitude of having done so?
AWS Lambda console now features a single pane view of metrics, logs, and traces – Now instead of a tab to click to see the logs, you get to scroll through three screenfuls of CloudWatch metrics graphs. This feels like a regression to me.
Announcing Research and Engineering Studio on AWS – I don’t understand why this doesn’t leverage Amazon Workspaces, instead opting for rebuilding the service on top of EC2 instances.
Announcing PartyRock, an Amazon Bedrock Playground – I couldn’t use this for the first day it was out because the "pig" portion of "Quinnypig" apparently tripped last week’s Comprehend Toxicity detection and wouldn’t let me register the name until Day 2. I’m beginning to suspect that someone at AWS is beginning to feel sorry for PartyRocking.
Amazon Bedrock now provides access to Meta’s Llama 2 Chat 13B model – This is interesting to me–the pricing on this undercuts Amazon’s still-in-preview Titan offering as best I can tell. Llama 2 is definitely a great LLM option based upon my own experiments with it.
Happy anniversary, Amazon CloudFront: 15 years of evolution and internet advancements – Wow, fifteen years now? That’s almost enough time to update a distribution twice. Yes, I know, it’s gotten a lot faster lately and it wants to be globally consistent before it returns–but it blocks CloudFormation when it does that, and that means my iterative deployments really slow things down.
New – Multi-account search in AWS Resource Explorer – Finally. FINALLY. An answer to "which freaking account did I stick that S3 bucket / Route 53 zone into" is at hand.
Introducing instance maintenance policy for Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling – You’re treating your instances like pets if this is useful to you. Be careful lest you wind up somewhere unfortunate by treading this path.
The serverless attendee’s guide to AWS re:Invent 2023 – Yeah, the guide should say "we have no idea what Serverless is supposed to mean so we just use it now to mean ‘managed service;’ if you aren’t on board with this, prepare for yet another year of heartbreak."
Amazon EKS and Kubernetes sessions at AWS re:Invent 2023 – If they don’t pack people into the sessions efficiently it means that the talk content is lying to you.
Optimize AZ traffic costs using Amazon EKS, Karpenter, and Istio Editorial – This is a big problem, and I’m depressed by just what it takes to even begin to tackle it. Kubernetes really feels like it’s "Cloud Native" only in the general sense of "Cloud;" when it gets to a specific provider it’s an anti-pattern more often than not.
Join us for a week of AWS Amplify launches – Amplify has come out with a lot of stuff; so far none of it has made me angry it wasn’t released earlier to help build the thing I’ll be unveiling to you all this Wednesday.
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Whenever AWS releases a second version of a pricing thing, you know it’s going to be a complexity disaster. Thankfully, Ian McKay has released codepipeline-cost-compare to compare the costs of v1 vs. v2 CodePipelines based upon your historic usage. Me? I just use GitHub Actions because of how straightforward it is.
CodeSnap – Visual Studio Marketplace is new to me–it’s improved my VS Code screenshots.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
