Good Morning!
I’m in New York this week; if you’re here for the summit, or alternately are just here, come by Vol de Nuit at 8PM tomorrow (Tuesday) and let me buy you a beer or two. You do me the service of reading my musings on AWS, the least I can do is buy a few rounds in return.
From the Community
A very handy dive into understanding the nuances of AWS Lambda Proactive Initialization.
Red Hat continues its IBM-ification, and even Oracle comes out looking like the better party. That is just wild to me.
The Register asks a great question around the data center buildouts in Phoenix, AZ.
Microsoft has decided to rename Azure AD to "Entra ID," of course overlooking just how much internal automation and documentation its customers have to change, all in the service of some unimaginative PM getting promoted.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: GitHub Actions Done Smartly
Last Week In AWS: It’s Extremely Likely You Should Not Use GovCloud
Last Week In AWS: The Logging Tax Auditor
Screaming in the Cloud: Elevating the SaaS Application Development Experience with Salman Paracha
Screaming in the Cloud: Unpacking the Costs and Value of Observability with Martin Mao
Choice Cuts
Amazon CodeCatalyst now supports workflows triggered by GitHub pull requests – Once again CodeCatalyst is a glorious salmon swimming upstream against the "Code*" suite of disappointing Amazon offerings.
Amazon S3 Inventory can include ACLs as object metadata in inventory reports – This is a nice enhancement to a sadly critical offering. I wish there were better ways to figure out what lurked where in S3.
Amazon SNS can now deliver mobile push notifications in twelve new regions – This is a perfect example of what I mean when I say that AWS services are not the same in all regions. There was nowhere to go to get a list of which regions SNS push notifications worked within and there still isn’t–you get to try it and see if your application works or not in a given region after deploying it.
Introducing Analytics on Amazon Lex – The Lex product owner snort-startles themself awake and realizes that wait a second–from a certain point of view, it could be considered a Generative AI play. AWS is clearly passing out bonuses to services that can tell that story, and thus the moribund service suddenly gets an update.
AWS Mainframe Modernization service is now PCI DSS Compliant – This is awesome except for that fact that when mainframes were installed, a transaction was defined as exchanging eight chickens for a goat.
Best Practices for Developing an AWS Co-Sell Program – Another reminder that the overriding and possibly only purpose of the AWS Partner Program is to sell you things.
Amazon Route 53 Resolver Now Available on AWS Outposts Rack – At long last, you too can run a DNS resolver on-premises. I suppose you’ve found ways to do that already, or else your on-premises network would just be an elaborate series of space heaters.
Reimagine Software Development With CodeWhisperer as Your AI Coding Companion – AWS has tried to sell you everything else, now they’re attempting to sell you a friend to share it with. For some reason that friend keeps suggesting some very expensive AWS configurations; oh well, I’m sure it’s fine.
Orca Security’s journey to a petabyte-scale data lake with Apache Iceberg and AWS Analytics – Orcas have been attacking yachts and now also icebergs apparently.
Capture clickstream data using AWS serverless services – This is a great example of AWS’s great weakness: basically every web presence at one point or another wants clickstream data, and AWS’s solution is to tell you to build it your damn self. Why is there not an AWS endpoint I can have my web property hurl the data towards, and AWS handles the heavy lifting of aggregating, displaying, and surfacing useful insights? Because that’s not how AWS operates, and why it’ll in the fullness of time become an infrastructure player that nobody really pays much attention to, while others reap the rewards (by which I mean mindshare and margin) of offering complete solutions.
Amazon Simple Email Service adds email delivery features to revised free tier – The SES Free Tier is being revamped, but sadly not in the way that all of the AWS Free Tier needs to be revamped. It becomes a one year free tier instead of perpetual, which means that if you’ve been using the SES free tier, it’s about to start costing you money. Fear not; it’s a theoretical maximum of a bit over $6 a month that you’ll have to pay. On the other side, you get to play with a fun new capability for free, assuming email deilverability is your jam.
Service Quota Observability Across Regions and Accounts – I would love to know why this isn’t just a default display in the organization management account.
Removing Unassociated Elastic IPs – IPv4 addresses are an increasingly scarce resource; either use them or let them be free.
Navigating common use cases spanning AWS GovCloud (US) and standard AWS – My post on "don’t use GovCloud" would have been better if this post had existed before I published it; this is a tacit acknowledgement that even if you have a workload that needs GovCloud, you need not put every workload there.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
