Good Morning!
re:Invent / re:Quinnvent is now safely behind us; my thanks to the various companies who helped me somehow pull it off yet again. If you’d like to get caught up on it all, check out the videos over on the YouTube channel.
Most notably, Couchbase was the Swag Holder of record on the re:Invent show floor, passing out my data transfer cost stickers and new holographic stickers featuring my dumb face, while Fortinet was the base camp for our fearsome expedition / nature walk through the expo floor, an experience that was reportedly considered not only informative but also "objectively hilarious" and "how on earth has AWS not ejected you by now?"
As you might expect, this is a thinner issue than in previous weeks; you can expect the release pace to drop off throughout the rest of the month. Even Amazonians take vacation, after all. Not me, though; I’m here to bother you all throughout the rest of the holiday season. Onward!
From the Community
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Dev environments in the cloud are a half-baked solution. Yeah. Seems to me the big problem a lot of providers here are trying to solve is "they don’t get paid when I write code on my laptop."
Jobs
The Pinecone vector database makes it easy to build high-performance vector search applications. At Pinecone you would have the opportunity to work with world-class scientists and engineers who have built large scale ML applications and platforms at leading companies and cloud providers. We have several engineering opportunities open in New York and Tel Aviv – visit www.pinecone.io/careers/ to find out more.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: re:Invent 2022 Retrospective: Releases & Opinions
Last Week In AWS: The Unfulfilled Promise of Serverless
Screaming in the Cloud: Making Sense of Data with Harry Perks
Screaming in the Cloud: Multi-Cloud in Sanity with Simen Svale Skogsrud
Screaming in the Cloud: The Rapid Rise of Vector Databases with Ram Sriharsha
Choice Cuts
Tired of the vulnerabilities, costs and slow recoveries when using snapshots to protect your AWS data? Check out Veeam for secure, zero-fuss AWS backup that won’t leave you high and dry when it’s time to restore.
Amazon VPC IP Address Manager (IPAM) is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions – Good for GovCloud. Y’know, IPAM was one of those things that I wrote off when it was released, since the problem it solved with Google Sheets was simply "it’s not expensive enough." Somehow, at re:Invent the service came up in conversations I had no fewer than four times. The piece I missed wasn’t that it’s hard to track this stuff in a spreadsheet, it’s the part where you’ve gotta communicate that effectively across very disjointed organizations. I should give this thing a second look…
AWS CloudShell is now System and Organization Controls (SOC) compliant – Wait. Wait wait wait. You’re telling me that until now, the "shows up by default in the AWS console, gives you a place to run the CLI as your user with its attendant permissions, and has never to my knowledge been explicitly disabled by any customer" service wasn’t SOC compliant until now? I kinda suspect I’m not the only person that one’s gonna come as a shock to…
Email delta cost usage report in a multi-account organization using AWS Lambda – Yeah, this misses the part where "if the delta doesn’t exceed some threshold, don’t send the email" and instead turns into a daily report. How many daily email reports do you pay attention to past the first week? Exactly.
AWS re:Invent 2022 CEO Keynote through the Cloud Financial Management lens – "Top AWS salesperson says the best way to optimize your cloud spending is to use more cloud" is only part of the story. He then circled the point to death like the ancient persistence hunters until his prey collapsed of terminal exhaustion. Put slightly more charitably: there was nothing of substance said in the keynote around optimizing cloud spend. I know; I was listening for it.
Build a robust text-based toxicity predictor – Good luck with that. When I start writing these article summaries, even I don’t know until the end whether it’s going to be devastatingly snarky, moderately snarky, or suspiciously non-snarky. I suppose without my good intentions, that’s pretty close to a semantic analysis of toxicity…
Amazon Joins the Open Invention Network – Good. This is just flat out good. If any company with a crapload of patterns wanted to be a bully about it, Amazon would be one of the best positioned. Their explicit commitment to not do exactly that speaks well of them.
Tools
Feeling overwhelmed by WAF alerts and updates? Here’s a little magic to kick off your week: Fortinet Managed Rules for AWS WAF, powered by threat intelligence from the cybersecurity experts at FortiGuard Labs, lets you boost your WAF with the latest threat protection in mere minutes.
I’m not sure how useful it is for everyone, but I rather like this project chronicling the growth of AWS IP address ranges.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
