Good Morning!
A lot of useful incremental improvements hit last week, only several of them horrifying. Wonderful!
From the Community
This Ars article describes what I’ve done myself: left Google’s search in favor of Kagi. Highly recommend it just based on the incessant drumbeat of AI being stuffed into every corner of every Google product.
AWS European Sovereign Cloud to be operated by EU citizens – Okay, I’m not sure what they’re trying to solve or who they think they’re fooling with a passport check here, because nothing says "immune to government pressure" like having the right language on your ID card. This theatrical performance completely ignores that governments have plenty of ways to compel compliance beyond citizenship (from economic leverage to good old-fashioned legal jurisdiction) while conveniently sidestepping the fact that dual US / EU citizens like me apparently exist in a quantum state of loyalties. It’s almost as if AWS thinks European regulators are too distracted by the pageantry of "EU-only staff" to notice they’re still fundamentally dependent on an American company that’s legally obligated to comply with U.S. government requests, regardless of who’s manning the servers.
An article about Amazon killing a user’s account blew up, but is clearly written to drive engagement as evidenced by the small “by the way Amazon later restored the entire thing” at the bottom of the original post, hence my linking to coverage of it instead. I have little sympathy. The user in question had a different company as the payer account, that company stopped paying, and eventually AWS suspended the account for nonpayment. There was a bit of confusion given how many players were involved here, but it did get sorted out. If anything, this is a great example of why you don’t want third parties coming between you and Amazon.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: EC2 Fractional GPUs Can’t, Lambda Still Whines
Screaming in the Cloud: AI’s Security Crisis: Why Your Assistant Might Betray You
Choice Cuts
Mountpoint for Amazon S3 CSI driver v2: Accelerated performance and improved resource usage for Kubernetes workloads – Oh good, we can now mount S3 as a filesystem within KubernetesOH MY GOD I hate everything about this sentence. It sounds like a nesting doll of poor decisions.
Streamlining outbound emails with Amazon SES Mail Manager – If you’d previously streamlined your outbound emails with Amazon Pinpoint, you probably got an email last week telling you that it’s being sunset. Surprise! Try this instead.
AWS Lambda now supports GitHub Actions to simplify function deployment – This is kind of a huge deal, as I suddenly find myself caring far, far less about the CDK.
Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.1 now in Amazon Bedrock – With no pricing changes or interface changes, it makes me wish for an opus@latest option so I don’t have to go and update things to take advantage of this.
Amazon CloudWatch introduces organization-wide VPC flow logs enablement – This may be the single most expensive toggle switch you’ll ever see. VPC Flow Logs are the only way to diagnose some things, but they can be terrifying expensive if you were to say, enable them for every VPC across your entire organization.
Understanding and Remediating Cold Starts: An AWS Lambda Perspective – It’s been a while since I’ve seen a good post on Lambda cold starts. This one qualifies.
Amazon SQS increases maximum message payload size to 1 MiB – What, do they think my message payloads now need to contain tracking JavaScript or something?
OpenAI open weight models now available on AWS – AWS is very excited to sort-of work with OpenAI for the first time.
Best practices for analyzing AWS Config recording frequencies – You may want to pay attention to this for cost purposes, lest in highly dynamic environments you find your Config bill rising up the Expensive AWS Service Leaderboard.
Amazon EKS adds safety control to prevent accidental cluster deletion – I can only imagine what nightmare scenario led to this feature being developed. Oof.
AWS Console Mobile App now offers access to AWS Support – Ooh, now I can text my dumb questions to the hardest working people in cloud.
Amazon EC2 now supports force terminate for EC2 instances – "When I said I wanted this EC2 instance gone, I wasn’t asking" is a great feature enhancement. If I’m killing the ephemeral VM, what do I care that it didn’t shut down cleanly?
Amazon DynamoDB adds support for Console-to-Code – I was happy when Console to Code was launched, promptly forgot about it, and this is the first thing I’ve seen mentioning it ever since. Y’know, if you wanted to know how this service’s adoption has been going.
Using generative AI for building AWS networks – Yeah this tracks; I’ve seen a lot of corporate networks that look like they were designed by ChatGPT.
Simplify network connectivity using Tailscale with Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes – I’ve simplified my entire network structure via Tailscale, and I’m not just talking AWS. This stuff is magic.
Cost tracking multi-tenant model inference on Amazon Bedrock – This is absurdly complex to solve for a very basic "how much is this thing costing me per user" question. Two decades in, and AWS still apparently doesn’t get that you’ve gotta build this stuff in from the ground up.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
