| Good morning!Welcome to issue number 108 of Last Week in AWS.I’m in Seattle for Microsoft Build (“re:Invent for Azure, but in a city you probably want to visit”) this week. If you’re curious what Microsoft is announcing, I will be aggressively livetweetingthroughout the show’s announcements.Is your company in Seattle? Want to talk AWS billing? I’d love to come chat with your team for an hour about your bill and ways to make it stop hurting. Send me a note and let’s get something set up. (Spots are limited, since, you know, there’s only so much time in the day–and I do have a conference to attend!) |
| This week’s issue is sponsored in part by Site24x7. This issue is sponsored in part by Site24x7, Zoho’s cloud monitoring solution. Site24x7’s powerful AI-driven monitoring solution offers complete monitoring right from end-user experience to application performance enabling you to get insights into what’s happening in your AWS environment, all from a single console for just 1 dollar per resource. Give it a spin Learn More |
| From the Community |
| I didn’t see an announcement about Amazon IQ, but it looks to be a learning community for AWS experts. If you’re AWS Certified, you can register now to offer your services to the lowest bidder.AWS periodically has breaking changes. Instead of gathering them in one place for us, they bury them in places like “the AWS forum.” Fortunately, there’s now a third-party GitHub repository so folks who track this can do volunteer work for a ~$1 trillion company. Check out the latest S3 deprecation. I bet that’s going to smart!I love that Clay Smith bothered to create an Amazon Cloudwatch Logs implementation of TCP/IP. That’s right–he actually built TCP/IP over Amazon Cloudwatch Logs.A glorious and whimsical tale of how a large bank’s atrociously locked-down desktops can be made to work with AWS services, ideally before the best developers rage-quit to go work somewhere they can install their own text editor.A sobering reminder that not all uses of facial-recognition AI are created equal. |
| This week’s issue is sponsored in part by N2WS. As a Systems Engineer, you’ve got one impossible challenge: to protect the applications running on AWS with the same level of scrutiny as you had when they were running on-prem. (Oh…and you need to retain backups for 7 years, which becomes prohibitively expensive with the amount of data flowing through your enterprise workloads.) But allow me to magically wave my digital wand over your AWS cloud and erase all of those worries! That’s essentially what N2WS Backup & Recovery does for your AWS cloud. N2WS allows you to cycle backups through different storage tiers so you can migrate critical apps and achieve not just the same but even better SLAs, while keeping costs lower than on-premises solutions —try it free today! Learn More |
| Jobs |
| If you’ve got an interesting job for this newsletter’s emminently employable subscribers, get in touch!It can often feel like keeping up with AWS is like drinking from a firehose. Why not work on an actual firehose? Kinesis Firehose (and other Kinesis teams) are solving hard problems around ingesting massive quantities of data at huge scale. With roles in Seattle, Palo Alto, and Cambridge (the one in the U.K.; they were banned from the one in Boston due to their insistence on pronouncing MIT as “mitt”), they’re a fascinating team with wonderful challenges. For more information, check out their open roles. For a lot more information, implement Kinesis Data Streams in your environment. |
| This week’s issue is sponsored in part by GoCD. Your CI/CD pipeline is broken. How do I know? Either I’m Nostradamus, or this is a very common problem. This week’s issue is sponsored by GoCD, from ThoughtWorks. It’s free and open-source, integrates natively with the most popular cloud infrastructures, and has both a broad community and enterprise support options for those of you who’re into either end of that very broad spectrum. Tools don’t solve issues, but GoCD eases your continuous delivery pains. Thanks to GoCD for their support. Learn More |
| Choice Cuts |
| Developers, start your engines! The AWS DeepRacer Virtual League kicks off today. – I’m mystified by the attention this has gotten, but it seems to be a hit. Go, team.Amazon S3 Introduces S3 Batch Operations for Object Management – Batch Operations have gone GA. “Run an operation on all of the objects in this bucket” sounds trivial until you realize that there are buckets with billions of objects.Amazon Aurora Serverless Supports Capacity of 1 Unit and a New Scaling Option – An absolute unit of a service is now an option, and there’s a new scaling model that’ll trash your users’ current connections and force a scaling event. Rejoice!AWS Amplify launches an online community for fullstack serverless app developers – I didn’t realize Amazon was about to acquire Stack Overflow.AWS Certificate Manager Private Certificate Authority Increases Certificate Limit To One Million – “Let me get this straight–your organization needs a million certificates?” “You must understand, our environment is terrifyingly awful.” “Approved!”AWS Security Token Service (STS) now supports enabling the global STS endpoint to issue session tokens compatible with all AWS Regions – Only one week late to avoid breaking things for the Hong Kong regional deployment. Oof.AWS Snowball Edge adds block storage – Amazon Web Services – You can now mount entire block volumes from the wildly-inappropriately named service that ships a box of drives to your doorstep.Announcing AWS X-Ray Analytics – An Interactive approach to Trace Analysis – This is a neat feature, albeit one that takes a bit of explaining before people intuitively grasp it.Elastic Fabric Adapter Is Now Generally Available – This is a critical prerequisite for a service I’m hoping gets released at reInvent: AWS Elastic Underpants.Amazon Managed Blockchain – Proving that there’s no bandwagon too obnoxious to jump aboard in the name of customer obsession, I’m saddened to report that Managed Blockchain is now somehow generally available.Migrate Your AWS Site-to-Site VPN Connections from a Virtual Private Gateway to an AWS Transit Gateway – “Unwind the terrible mess we forced you to build with our new less terrible mess!”Amazon EMR announces Support for Reconfiguring Applications on Running EMR Clusters – From the “I didn’t even realize that was a limitation” file…Amazon FSx for Windows File Server Adds Support for File System Monitoring with Amazon CloudWatch – “CloudWatch does what it says it will on the tin!” seems to be an evergreen service announcement.AWS Amplify Console adds support for Incoming Webhooks – I SAID THAT THE CONSOLE NOW SUPPORTS INCOMING–oh, wait. You mean Amplify the AWS service, not to get louder. Whoops, my mistake.Getting started with the AWS Cloud Development Kit and Python | AWS Developer Blog – A shockingly detailed blog post on how to use the CDK with Python, Mitch Garnaat (author of the boto library) emerges from slumber to take everyone to Cloud School.AWS Global Cloud Infrastructure – A glorious map of the AWS datacenters is now yours for the downloading! |
| Tools |
| Another way of exporting AWS profiles to your shell environment. |
| … and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS |
