Good Morning!
As always, hitting “reply” to this newsletter hits my inbox. Don’t be shy; feedback from readers is always treasured once I stop being angry about it. Alternately if you don’t trust email, I’m available on Signal at 833-AWS-BILL because of course I am.
From the Community
Ah… the ELK Stack – so much initial promise, yet ultimately so unstable at scale – not to mention the unending time and opportunity costs of maintaining the beast! For those of you still shepherding an ELK Stack along – I can’t urge you strongly enough to put down your Advil, and take a look at ChaosSearch today. They’ve really engineered something amazing – a fully managed data analytics platform, with NO ElasticSearch under the hood, that leverages your own Amazon S3 as a data store. Imagine no more data movement, no more data retention limits and all at a fraction of the cost of running your ELK Stack. Definitely check out ChaosSearch today – you won’t be sorry! Sponsored
This AWS Developer Forum post is a decade old. It asks for a “cap the bill” usage model for S3. In 2021 we’re still waiting.
Airbnb is a good example of a company that’s fairly mature in their cloud economics posture.
Cloud Carbon Footprint is an open source tool to measure and analyze cloud carbon emissions.
An AWS employee spends his spare time launching an open source platform to help save children with rare diseases–including his son.
I love Heroku; I use it for a few things here and there, and recommend it to folks. But that’s waned lately; apparently others share this opinion.
Jobs
If you’ve got an interesting job for this newsletter’s eminently employable subscribers, get in touch!
Chronosphere — which provides cloud-native monitoring that SCALES and gives you back control to keep cost and data growth reasonable — is hiring like mad. This week we’re highlighting their Senior Platform Engineer opening. In this role, you will implement core back-end services of their industrial-scale software-as-a-service observability platform, and help shape the direction of their platform service architecture. Chronosphere is a critical component of their customers’ availability, and you will be working on the types of hard problems that directly affect how their customers work with the product.
AWS is building something new and refreshingly different–and may I say, it’s certainly ambitious! It’s still very, very early days–and the service needs to get from where it is today all the way to general availability, otherwise I won’t get to make fun of it. Help me entertain you– if you’re a senior engineering manager with a penchant for assembling really large engineering teams in a very early stage product, you want to talk to AWS about this “manager of managers” role.
Choice Cuts
If your mean time to WTF for a security alert is more than a minute, it’s time to look at Lacework. Lacework will help you get your security act together for everything from compliant service configurations to container app topologies, all without the need for PhDs in AWS to write the rules. If you’re building a secure business on AWS with compliance requirements, you don’t really have time to choose between antivirus or firewall companies to help you secure your stack. That’s why Lacework is built from the ground up for the Cloud: low effort, high visibility and detection. To learn more, visit lacework.com/LastWeekInAWS. Sponsored
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling introduces Warm Pools to accelerate scale out while saving money – Hot on the heels of Amazon’s unforced error regarding warehouse workers having to urinate in bottles, AWS releases a service that clearly evokes people peeing in places they aren’t supposed to. It’s increasingly hard to accept that someone in their messaging org isn’t doing this for the attention.
AWS CloudFormation Command Line Interface (CFN-CLI) now supports TypeScript – Every time I’m reminded that there’s a CloudFormation command line tool, my brain makes me forget it as a safeguard for what little remains of my sanity. Whoops, there it goes again. What were we talking about?
AWS Step Functions adds new data flow simulator for modelling input and output processing – AWS Step Functions gains better usability. At this rate “AWS Step Functions” may one day be the more accurate name than my suggestion of “AWS Black Box.”
AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store now supports removal of parameter labels – Today I learned what Parameter Store labels are. To save you from several clicks, “someone redesigned tags from first principles without the cost allocation parts.”
New AWS Solutions Implementation: Amazon S3 Glacier Re:Freezer – With a name that sounds like an AWS conference and a hilariously complicated architecture to effectively copy the contents of a Glacier vault to an S3 bucket, this post clearly exists to troll everybody.
Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer Updates: New Predictable Pricing Model Up To 90% Lower and Python Support Moves to GA – After the preview period, AWS was shocked to discover that customers prefer predictable pricing that doesn’t mean the intern is one bad pull request away from sending the bill into “Guam’s GDP” territory. In turn, I’m shocked that they fixed the pricing with a better outcome for everyone instead of pretending the problem didn’t exist.
Migrate data into Amazon ES using remote reindex – While the blog post talks about using this feature to migrate into Amazon ES, the documentation clarifies that it does indeed support getting data the hell out of that nightmare service as well.
Best practices for migrating PostgreSQL databases to Amazon RDS and Amazon Aurora – “Here’s a whole bunch of technical detail on how to migrate a database, and only in the conclusion will I mention in passing that ‘AWS Database Migration Service’ is another option you could use” feels pretty on-brand for AWS.
Export and import data from Amazon S3 to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL – This distills down to “Amazon Athena with deterministic query performance.”
AWS and Verizon Expand 5G Collaboration with Private MEC Solution – This is neat–an Outpost plus a 5G microcell site on your factory floor is what I take away from this. I wonder if I can borrow one for testing?
Ten Steps to Deploy a Multi-Region Ecommerce Strategy – Step 11 is “Amazon crushes you into the dirt.”
Acoustic anomaly detection using Amazon Lookout for Equipment – This is complete nonsense; the service isn’t named after a “Listen for Equipment!” sign on the factory floor.
Edge caching on AWS Wavelength – Wavelength hasn’t been clear on what it is or how it solves customer problems yet. It feels vaguely promising, but this post makes it feel like a complicated, expensive, and somewhat limited CDN equivalent. I don’t believe that does the service justice.
IAM Access Analyzer makes it easier to implement least privilege permissions by generating IAM policies based on access activity – This is awesome. Overscope an IAM role (intentionally, for once!), it looks at CloudTrail after the log messages get delivered via pony “express,” and it constructs a scoped down policy for you that just allows the observed actions. Now I want an option to do this automatically.
Tools
Honeycomb’s approach to observability helps you resolve incidents faster, make your services performant, and reliably ship features quickly. Gain confidence in your code by clearly seeing and understanding all the dark hidden corners of production.
To learn how it works, join our Weekly Live Demo and ask our real live humans. Or schedule Observability Office Hours for 1:1 advice on tackling the specific problems most relevant to you. Stop guessing. Start knowing. Sponsored
A Visual Query Builder for DynamoDB, built into a website.
I discovered age this week. It lets you encrypt files for delivery to specific people based upon their public SSH keys (easily found via GitHub and others). It sounds similar to GPG in some ways except that the user interface wasn’t designed by people who hate you.
EKS undergoes the latest sign of broad acceptance of an AWS service: third parties design baseline templates to make it usable.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
