Good Morning!
The days between my spouse’s birthday and mine are known as the Festival of Quinns. This has begun in earnest–see pinned tweet thread.
Separately, I won’t be attending re:Inforce this year, and have cancelled my breakout session. My apologies if you were hoping to catch me there.
From the Community
The best way to get someone to completely ignore you is to alert them about things that are completely irrelevant. (This is clearly news to the AWS Marketing team that handles feature announcements.) DisruptOps helps you find and fix cloud security issues rapidly by filtering out the noise so you just get the alerts you want to receive. DisruptOps gives security and DevOps teams prioritized findings and routes relevant alerts to Slack, Microsoft Teams, or JIRA — with automated response options that save you both time and your own rapidly decaying patience. Finally, security is inside your workflow, instead of in your way. Get to know DisruptOps, and tell them I sent you for a free 30-day trial. Sponsored
This article on getting partial AWS account IDs from CloudFront doesn’t resonate for me; AWS themselves have repeatedly said that AWS account IDs are not considered sensitive information.
A tale from someone who abused Lambda and SQS to process 558k Transactions in 5 Minutes.
Blackboard used the Amazon Chime SDK to showcase their next generation technology. Don’t confuse the excellent Chime SDK with the Chime chat app, which is significantly less impressive.
A teardown of Amazon’s new Leadership Principles by a former Amazonian. This speaks to the heart of a problem I wasn’t able to quite articulate.
Forrest Brazeal writes about why he’s been writing so many songs lately.
Ten steps to take to secure your cloud environment.
We have a guest post up explaining what Data Retention is.
Jobs
If you’ve got an interesting job for this newsletter’s eminently employable subscribers, get in touch!
Your curiosity of the world drives everything you do. You thrive in a collaborative environment where you get to build software in finance, healthcare, IoT, telecom, home security and automation, or other industries. You’d feel like you are home at Chariot Solutions. We’re a boutique software development firm looking for senior engineers – Java, Python, Node, AWS, React, Angular, iOS, Android. We’re one of top workplaces in the Philadelphia area, and we founded, curate and host Philly ETE, a conference with world-class speakers that’s been running since 2005. Our team sets us apart, including leadership that truly cares and treats you like family. We are committed to continuous learning and improvement, and we pay it forward to the tech community, attend and speak at conferences, and strive for work/life balance. Check out our job listings and apply to join us today.
The AWS User Experience Products & Platform team is responsible for products that enable AWS users to manage their applications and infrastructure on AWS. Our mission is to deliver an effective, efficient, and loved user experience that makes it easy for all users to discover, learn, and build on AWS. Today, we own the AWS Management Console, the AWS Console Mobile App, the AWS Chatbot, as well as the User Experience Platform used by 175+ AWS service teams to develop and deliver their user experience across multiple channels (web, mobile, chat).
Choice Cuts
Governance as Code: The Guardrails for Cloud at Scale (Hosted by Stacklet.io)
Cloud governance as code is a new paradigm that enables organizations to use code to manage and automate various aspects of governance, including cost, operations, security, and compliance. Join Corey Quinn and others to learn more at this virtual event. Sponsored
Just released! The ChaosSearch 2021 Benchmark Report on Log Data Management and Analytics. Recognizing the need for a broader view on how companies are managing their log data, we recently surveyed a wide group of organizations that make heavy use of log data in their day-to-day operations. The result is the ChaosSearch 2021 Log Management and Analytics Benchmark Report – now available for free. Learn key insights and findings on how companies are using log data management today to drive their operations, including: best practices for log data management, performance assessment; real-life customer use cases; top challenges; key investment areas, and a few surprising use cases! Get your copy of the ChaosSearch 2021 Log Management & Analytics Benchmark Report today! Sponsored
Amazon Lightsail now offers object storage for storing static content – It’s a Simpler Serverless Storage Service, or S4.
Amazon EC2 now supports custom time windows for Scheduled Events – This is a window of time in which Scheduled Events can occur. You should definitely have a Lambda function that watches CloudTrail for the creation of custom time windows, deletes them when it sees them, and call the whole thing “Comcast.”
Amazon ECS supports additional configurations for scheduled and event-driven tasks – Finally! “Run this thing twice a day” is no longer a janky thing you have to cobble together yourself from spare parts and duct tape.
AWS Now Allows Customers To Pay For Their Usage in Advance – As mentioned a few weeks ago before the announcement was mysteriously withdrawn, you can now give AWS an interest free loan to cover your AWS bills. I strongly advise that you not do this.
AWS DeepRacer announces DeepRacer LIVE races – AWS’s robot car racing service now works without any robot cars.
AWS Organizations increases quotas for tag policies – You can now overcomplicate your tagging rules yet further.
AWS Shield Advanced no longer requires AWS WAF logging – Just as companies will occasionally stop doing business with other companies, AWS service teams will occasionally stop boosting the revenues of other AWS service teams.
New AWS Solutions Implementation: Simple File Manager for Amazon EFS – This is a great solution, but if you call it “Simple” you’re being disingenuous as to how easy it is to deploy.
Mark individual best practices as not applicable within the AWS Well-Architected Tool – “Disregarding individual best practices” is how we’ve all gotten into this mess in the first place. Carry on.
Quickly launch an Amazon Chime SDK application with AWS Amplify – This is an integration story that makes sense; it explains one service through the context of another. More like this please.
Headless Commerce: What Is It and Why Does It Matter to CPGs? – AWS is all about Serverless, Headless, Directionless, and Pointless things in various ways and times; this is another example of at least one of those things.
Introducing AWS for Health – Accelerating innovation from benchtop to bedside – Aligning services and partner offerings around a customer industry / set of problems is probably the least AWS-like thing Amazon could have done, so I assume that this was highly contentious.
GoPro enhances subscription ecosystem with livestreaming powered by AWS – If you have a video streaming offering, you would be ridiculous not to reach out to GoPro and offer to cut their video streaming bill by probably 90% or so as a first pass.
Resolve DNS names of Network Load Balancer nodes to limit cross-Zone traffic – This sure is a long blog post of what to do in order to make sure AWS isn’t just slapping you with a 2¢ per GB surcharge for funsies. Almost like, I don’t know, the entirety of data transfer billing should be revisited?
How AWS and Redis Labs partner to make a better Redis – This blog post talks about how great the relationship is between AWS and Redis. It’s written by two AWS employees and zero people who work at Redis Labs. I believe that’s called a metaphor.
OpenSearch 1.0 launches – “We understand open source” says AWS. Meanwhile 225 of the 607 words in this post are the screennames of the contributors to the project; nobody will read them all.
Protect public clients for Amazon Cognito by using an Amazon CloudFront proxy – Why do that when you can protect public clients for Amazon Cognito by making the service basically impossible to understand, configure, and use?
Tips for taking an AWS Certification exam with exam labs – A truly disturbing number of words are given over to edge cases around copying and pasting text.
Tools
Clouds are getting… cloudier? I mean, have you tried charting out all the ways a lambda function can assume a role with privilege escalation to access stuff it shouldn’t? Exactly. That’s why Sonrai tells you what’s accessing your data, what could get access & what’s changed – thanks to a graph that monitors every possible relationship between identities and data. Security is everybody’s job these days; take our AWS checklist as a starting point for configuring your identity protection properly. And when you get overwhelmed, we’re here for you. Sponsored
A quick way to handle mail forwarding via AWS and GitHub Actions? That’s maildog.
I wrote some open source code that makes Lambda and Tailscale play well together.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
