Welcome to issue number 98 of Last Week in AWS.
A relatively slow week in AWS news, but that’s okay; I’m sure they’ll announce a new CloudFront Edge location in Maui or something early next month, as that product seems to be following some higher up’s vacation plans.
This week I guest appeared on Jeff Barr’s excellent “What’s New With AWS” video series. Watch me mock new EC2 instances and EFS Infrequent Access:
This week’s issue is sponsored in part by N2WS. They’ve got a $100 AWS coupon with your name on it. Be one of the first 200 people to install a free trial of N2WS Backup & Recovery and they’ll email you the $100 coupon code. And, btw, if you think you don’t need AWS backup any more, here are 8 reasons to think again.
Community Contributions
Forrest Brazeal has a wonderful article that posits IAM Is The Real Cloud Lock-In. I did some thinking for a day or so and came up with a twitter thread taking another view–that the real lock-in is familiarity with a platform among the people you’d like to hire.
A guide through the still-in-preview AWS S3 Batch Operations; this is a great glimpse into something a lot of us are going to be using soon.
A tale of building a $50 FireStick into a frontend for Amazon Workspaces. I like the idea a lot more than I do the idea of the FireStick…
Jerry Hargrove does it again– a visual service summary of AWS Backup.
A fun discussion of the current state of capital expenditures among the big three cloud providers. Be forewarned that my version of “fun” may not align with yours.
This week I caught up with Elana Hashman in Screaming in the Cloud Episode 49: Open Source Software: Slipping Beneath the Surface of Awareness.
I was a guest on this week’s episode of The Cloud Pod; the hosts’ direction of “be as snarky as possible” was immediately followed by “okay, let us bound that a bit.”
Jobs
Hold on to your butts: this week’s issue is sponsored in part by AWS Recruiting. Some folks believe that eventually AI will render all of our jobs obsolete. If you’re one of them, consider getting on our future computer overlords’ good side by helping build them in the first place. The AWS AI team is hiring smart people to help build the future. When the robot uprising comes, you won’t be able to hide anywhere; consequently this team is hiring worldwide. My thanks to AWS Recruiting for suspending their better judgement and sponsoring this ridiculous newsletter.
If you have a job ad you’d like to see posted here, please get in touch! With almost 12,000 readers around the world, the odds are terrific that your ideal candidates are already reading this newsletter–and thanks to AWS’s support, this is now a recurring segment of the newsletter.
Choice Cuts From the AWS Blog
This week’s newsletter is also sponsored by DigitalOcean – the cloud platform that makes complicated things like deploying Kubernetes so simple, a baby could do it. Speaking of making things simple, they just released Managed Databases for PostgreSQL which features free backups and a pricing model that you won’t need to hire me to help you figure out. Support for MySQL and Redis are up next. Thanks again to DigitalOcean for their ongoing support of this fine newsletter.
Amazon EC2 Fleet Now Lets You Increase Target Capacity Limits – This is worded cagily enough that I’m not sure what it’s telling me, yet I’m already suspicious of what it’s trying to hide.
Amazon EFS Now Supports Tag-on-Create – “EFS does a thing now that it didn’t before and was absolutely infuriating.” I love the positive upbeat spin attempt on this one, but there’s no denying that the lack of tag-on-create is one of the most maddening aspects of any service that doesn’t currently have it.
Amazon RDS for MySQL and MariaDB Now Support T3 Instance Types – I’ve never quite understood the lengthy lead time between EC2 getting a new instance and other services getting them, but I’m glad the wait is over for this one.
Announcing Updated Professional-Level AWS Certification Exams – The new updated cert exams are… already out of date with this week’s releases. Sorry, folks.
Get to know the newest AWS Heroes – Winter 2019 | AWS News Blog – It’s time once again for us to sit on the curb and clap as the latest crop of AWS Heroes goes by. These are great folks who’ve contributed a lot to the larger AWS community; they deserve the clapping.
How to visualize Amazon GuardDuty findings: serverless edition | AWS Security Blog – “This is like our other blog post on how to do a thing, but now with serverless, because that’s a lot trendier than admitting that a lot of folks find our ElasticSearch implementation to be expensive nonsense.”
This newsletter is sponsored in part by GoCD. “Wait, isn’t that the thing that’s like Jenkins?” Yes, it is–and this week, they’ve got a comparison as to what separates them from Jenkins, and what use cases each is a better fit for. My thanks to them for their continued support.
Tools
A visual editor for AWS State Machines called Step Easy.
A programmatically generated AWS Glossary; I like this idea!
If you want to automatically generate ssh config files for cloud instances, this tool has you covered.
Do you know what a Storage Area Network is? Me neither, which is why I assume it’s something similar to pingfs, which stores data in the internet itself. If you need more storage, pick hosts that are further away. This differs from a traditional SAN, which requires you to install longer cables in your datacenter.
If you want to spin up an EC2 instance quickly, take a look at fastec2; I like what’s going on here…
…and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
