Good Morning!
In a display of what I can only describe as customer experience arson, the AWS Security Hub team has achieved the impossible: they’ve taken a service with a good name, Security Hub, and made it actively worse by renaming it to… Security Hub.
Let me explain before I start bleeding from my eyes.
The original Security Hub? Now called Security Hub CSPM. The new service, a totally different thing with totally different behavior, is called… Security Hub again. It’s like if AWS released a new S3 and called it "Amazon S3" while retroactively renaming the original to "Amazon S3 Classic Glacier Lite." And yes, the documentation URL still betrays the original, far less confusing name that some poor soul clearly fought for and lost: Security Hub Advanced.
That said—credit where it’s due—the new service is in preview, and I actually really like the direction it’s heading. There’s clearly good work happening under the hood. But… reusing a name? Really? This is like the time I had to execute a diving save on someone’s résumé because the hiring manager didn’t realize "Azure DevOps" was a product and not just résumé word salad.
Let me be blunt: the north star of product naming should be "your product should not damage your customers’ careers." This naming choice? It absolutely risks doing just that.
From the Community
This article about a freaking enormous Amazon data center complex built exclusively for Anthropic really opens up a ton of questions about what the hell the return on investment story is supposed to be. Because I’m not seeing it.
Amazon just let go of its AWS generative AI maestro, Vasi Philomin, the guy who helped birth Titan and shape Bedrock. He jumped ship in June to "another company," because apparently AWS is a great place to launch your career away from AWS. His duties were shuffled to a storage VP (who’s a great guy–but nothing says "generative AI strategy" like having EBS folks running your brain models).
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: One UI Gets Fixed, Another Falls
Screaming in the Cloud: See Why GenAI Workloads Are Breaking Observability with Wayne Segar
Choice Cuts
AWS Local Zones Features – AWS – The Last Week in AWS Slack community stumbled across this gem last week: the AWS Local Zones continue their proud tradition of geographical fiction: Minneapolis reports to Virginia, Houston apparently seceded back to us-east-1, and Lima, Peru–on the Pacific coast–is now considered "East." New York’s zone lives in New Jersey like it’s the Statue of Liberty, and Las Vegas is somehow Oregon’s problem. "Local," in this case, means "wherever the latency math cries softly into a spreadsheet."
Amazon VPC raises default Route Table capacity – I was told there was only supposed to be a single default route, which is why you really want to be more careful crafting headlines like this.
Announcing Intelligent Search for re:Post and re:Post Private – Now you can ask questions in plain English and it hallucinates answers–er, synthesizes results–from community threads, docs, and who-knows-what-else, all in one go. This sounds a lot like "there’s a growing backlash to Generative AI, so how about we describe it without using those words?" Good idea to test it out on re:Post, a service basically nobody uses despite the AWS Support account’s entreaties in Reddit comment threads.
How to Set Up Automated Alerts for Newly Purchased AWS Savings Plans – AWS now gives you a pre-canned FinOps nag: deploy a CloudFormation + Step Functions + EventBridge + SNS stack that auto-detects under-utilized Savings Plans bought in the past week and emails you so you can return them. Because apparently discovering poor planning organically is too much fun.
Introducing AWS Lambda native support for Avro and Protobuf formatted Apache Kafka events – Because apparently "parse the message yourself" was too much fun for everyone and had to be ruined with convenience and standards. Good feature that I’m excited to try out.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
