Good Morning!
I spent this past weekend scuba diving in Seattle. I’m writing this before I go diving, so hopefully I lived! If not, please know that I’ve enjoyed these years writing for you all very much.
From the Community
Okay, this is neat- an OpenTofu dingus to create a K3s cluster using Oracle Cloud’s "always free" resources. I’d not trust it to stick around, you understand…
Vibe Coding is for PMs writes my nemesis Rachel Stephens, apparently in an effort to lean into provocative titles that get annoying people upset.
Apparently Amazon has a ‘Project Greenland’ (paywalled) that somehow isn’t about annexing anything.
The CNCF is allegedly besieged by the jackholes trying to do a rugpull on the NATS project. .
Reddit had the most astute assessment of the AWS Marketplace’s purpose I think I’ve ever read.
AWS has always expanded and contracted its colo leases. I think people are trying to make behavior fit a narrative that isn’t necessarily present. They’ve earned the trust that they know what they’re doing vis-a-vis capacity management.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: Mid-cycle Billing Changes are the Stuff of Finance Nightmares
Choice Cuts
Amazon CloudWatch agent now supports Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA) – Oh, one overwrought expensive offering now works with another complicated enterprise-oriented beast. Which is which? Choose your own adventure!
Amazon Cognito now supports refresh token rotation – This is handy. I hate, hate, hate working with key rotation manually.
Amazon Q Developer releases state of the art agent for feature development – In 1961, artist Piero Manzoni took a grumpy into 90 tin cans, in an exhibit titled "Artist’s Shit." This, predictably, shocked the art world and led to a discussion of what exactly constitutes "art." I bring his up because absolutely nothing involving Amazon Q has been artfully done, even by that low standard.
AWS Account Management now supports IAM-based account name updates – At long last, I don’t have to be the root user to change my AWS account name to "Shitposting." How long has that PFR been open?
AWS CodeBuild adds support for specifying EC2 instance type and configurable storage size – So at this point, what, CodeBuild is just an EC2 orchestration system with a marginally better user interface?
AWS Console Mobile Application adds support for Amazon Lightsail – In the latest release of the popular mobile pay-to-lose game, you can now wind up getting your house foreclosed upon because you tapped the wrong thing.
AWS STS global endpoint now serves your requests locally in regions enabled by default – 99% of customers could not possibly care less about this. The remainder care very, very much about this.
AWS Transfer Family introduces Terraform module for deploying SFTP server endpoints – I don’t know as I’ve seen a GitHub repo linked from the "what’s new" feed before. More like this, please!
How Smartsheet reduced latency and optimized costs in their serverless architecture – I’m old enough to remember how AWS sued Smartsheet’s incoming CEO for having the temerity to leave employment at AWS. I guess eight years is enough time to let bygones be bygones?
In the works – New Availability Zone in Maryland for US East (Northern Virginia) Region – So part of the Virginia region is now in Maryland. Will this AZ be named consistently between accounts? I’m just trying to get ahead of the inevitable state data sovereignty laws as soon as legislatures realize they can regulate themselves some AWS investment…
CVE-2025-3857 – Infinite loop condition in Amazon.IonDotnet – I’m told by breathlessly excited marketers that the pre-announced Amazon Trainium3 chips will be so great, they can run that infinite loop in less than 20 minutes.
I annotated Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s 2024 Letter to Shareholders, and it’s about as cutting as you’d hope. I always wanted to do this!
Tools
All the cool kids are using DNS as a filesystem, because having a database backed FS has been a dream since the abortive dreams of WinFS all those years ago.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
