Good Morning!
Next Friday I’m keynoting the AWS DMV Community Day (so many words to say “DC area”) at Amazon’s HQ2; the code COREY10 supposedly knock/ the ticket price down to $10.
The week after that I’m in London for Honeycomb’s OllyDay (drinkup details next week), and the week after THAT I’m in Dublin for SREcon EMEA; drinkup details to follow for that as well.
The news caught fire last week with reports that AWS can’t restore data in regions impacted by Iran’s attacks. I mean… yes? Obviously? It’s the rare facility that’s designed to take missile or drone strikes repeatedly, and I don’t think it’s particularly egregious of AWS to not bother rebuilding until peace breaks out. Components are expensive these days even when you’re not just throwing them into a grist mill of destruction.
Things I Found on the Internet
There’ve been no posts I’ve seen about it, but this page on setting spend limits has appeared in the AWS documentation. That’s worth noting!
What AWS Has For Us This Time
AWS Direct Connect announces flat-rate pricing for dedicated connections
This is new! You don’t usually get to see flat rate data transfer from AWS. Curiously, their terms of service talk about “using more than your allotment” which is super odd for a flat rate “use the port’s speed” package; someone’s missing something here.
AWS improves regional resiliency for root user sign-in
CloudTrail ConsoleLogin events now land in whichever Region processed the sign-in, so if you don’t have CloudTrail configured correctly you’re in for a treat, because this isn’t something you get to opt out of.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk introduces Cluster Mode
Exciting: Beanstalk isn’t quite dead yet! This is huge news for folks who are still architecturally in 2012.
AWS reimagines the getting started experience
This is basically an admission that the existing onboarding process for new AWS accounts was stuck in the ancient past. I’m glad they finally took it upon themselves to address the issue.
New low-cost burstable Amazon EC2 T8i instances are generally available
Huh, they just leapt five full generations for these since the last burstable instances. I wonder how long it’ll take for the free tier to admit these things exist?
Reduce time-to-hire for quality candidates with AI-powered Amazon Connect Talent
I had some concerns when this was announced, and now that it’s in GA I see they’ve addressed approximately none of them.
AWS STS simplifies session token size limits and adds session token size monitoring
I can’t wait to see what ancient code winds up breaking from this change. Side bet on whether any of AWS’s own stuff does?
Seven bulletins in one batch, and it seems that AWS has started pulling back CVEs shortly after they hit the RSS feed. Therefore I’ve begun linking to screenshots of them since AWS has done this a couple of dozen times lately; apologies if you went to read the thing and found it missing. Now then! Leading off is the temporary elevated access tool, which handed out somewhat more elevation than advertised, followed by Kubernetes pods sharing identifiers in the EKS network policy agent, so your carefully authored policy now applies to whichever pod it likes best that morning. Then the client-library parade: an XXE in a JDBC plugin, a vulnerability class old enough to rent a car, plus a Go SDK header decoder that folds on bad event stream bytes. That last one obligates every Terraform provider and controller binary in your fleet to cut a release, because static linking means nobody’s distro package is coming to save you. Meanwhile the scaffolding tool that writes files got flagged for writing them in the wrong directory and running commands, which reads less like a bug than a job description. Certificate hostname validation for IoT devices turns out to have been more of a gentle suggestion, a delightful property in hardware bolted to a bridge somewhere. And capping it off, Kiro’s agent editing workspace config to exfiltrate your secrets, so we’ve arrived at the era where the AI writes both the code and the incident report.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
