Good Morning!
It’s my turn: I will teach you how to re:Invent properly!
Today is also the last day that the 2022 Last Week in AWS charity t-shirt is available for purchase. Remember, all proceeds benefit our friends at 826 National. Dig deep; if I’ve saved you money on your AWS bill with any of my tips, toss it to those folks by way of thank-you.
From the Community
Push your code when it’s ready, launch it when you are ready, and most importantly: log off you’re ready and not worry about your coworkers calling you at 3AM and screaming you the songs of their people, specifically "Rage in D Minor." Take control of your launches with AWS AppConfig Feature Flags, and stop causing problems for other people on purpose.
Jeremy Daly absolutely hits it out of the park with this satirical piece, Why we’re leaving the electric grid.
It’s always fun to read workups like this one: Modeling & Analyzing Lambda vs. Fargate Breakeven.
My post on The Real Reason Cloud IDE Adoption Is Lagging seems to have struck a nerve. I’ve gotten almost as much email about this as I do whenever I mention Kubernetes…
This handy set of tricks to Reduce AWS Lambda Latencies with Keep-Alive in Python are definitely going to be something I explore on my next dive into Python Lambda work…
Increasingly the AWS Marketplace is inserting itself into every industry transaction. Over a billion dollars in revenue passed through it last year; this is worth keeping an eye on.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: Giving a Shirt about S3
Last Week In AWS: The Real Reason Cloud IDE Adoption Is Lagging
Screaming in the Cloud: The Infinite Possibilities of Amazon S3 with Kevin Miller
Screaming in the Cloud: The Man Behind the Curtain at Zoph with Victor Grenu
Choice Cuts
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Amazon Aurora supports cluster export to S3 – Meanwhile, Aurora customers are in some cases beginning to consider cluster export to on-prem.
Amazon Cognito now provides user pool deletion protection – A footgun is frantically slapped out of your hand before you can accidentally the entire userbase.
Amazon Connect adds real-time schedule adherence – Within the real-time metrics page, contact center supervisors can identify when agents deviate from their planned schedule, enabling supervisors to quickly take action and agents to realize that they’re working for the goddamned devil who views them as whiny meat robots.
Amazon EC2 enables easier patching of guest operating system and applications with Replace Root Volume – Okay this is awesome for a number of use cases. Sadly, it requires the instance reboot quickly, but other than that it’s way more streamlined. Some people are going to hate this because it’s treating an instance as a pet instead of cattle, but… well, my development instance is a pet just as your laptop probably is to you.
Amazon Neptune Serverless is now generally available – This isn’t "Serverless" the way that we hope it would be; you’ve still gotta have some baseline level of capacity running at all times, and it feels like so much of what AWS is doing lately in the serverless space is falling into hype…
Introducing the Amazon OpenSearch Service delivery program – Also one for EKS, and yet another for Control Tower. "This stuff is hard, pay a partner to help you with it" is honestly not the worst idea–but the idea the customers are going to pay for these things for every service is just ludicrous. They’re going to bring partners in for more holistic solutions I suspect…
Amazon SageMaker Canvas supports tags to track and allocate costs incurred by users – Having been bitten myself by Canvas’s $1.90 an hour session charge, I have a hard time imagining how this won’t be used to fire some poor unsuspecting schmuck who didn’t understand the predatory pricing model that SageMaker Canvas uses.
AWS Console Mobile Application adds support for AWS CloudShell – I wish it would add support for hardware security keys for federated SSO login, personally.
AWS Fault Injection Simulator now supports network connectivity disruption – One of the first launches of pre:Invent is apparently AWS Comcast.
AWS Nitro Enclaves is now supported on AWS Graviton – Graviton is great, and so are Nitro Enclaves. It’s wild to me that they didn’t work together until now, but that got fixed.
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AWS Organizations console now allows users to centrally manage primary contact information on AWS accounts – Of course; a couple of months after I built a horrible shell script to do all of this for me, it can now be done via ClickOps instead.
AWS Private Certificate Authority introduces a mode for short-lived certificates – These short-lived certificates can now be provisioned for 7 days or less, meaning that they may well expire before your EKS cluster finishes coming online.
Announcing dark mode support in the AWS Management Console – Finally, at long last–AWS comes into its own. This is the pinnacle of cloud.
EC2 High Memory instances with 18TiB and 24TiB of memory are now available with On-Demand and Savings Plan purchase options – That 24TB instance goes for $263.47 an hour, in case you were curious–but on balance, you can run Chrome and Slack at the same time.
How to take advantage of the AWS Free Tier – Yeah, that’s not the problem here. The real answers lie in "how to make sure the AWS Free Tier doesn’t take advantage of you."
Introducing Amazon Neptune Serverless – A Fully Managed Graph Database that Adjusts Capacity for Your Workloads – Finally! This is a terrific advancement for customers, because in the modern era you need neither servers nor whatever the hell a giraffe database is.
Goldman Sachs, a legacy financial services firm, transforms its operations on AWS – Hey Goldman Sachs friends: do you get more annoyed when people call you "a legacy financial services firm," or "a credit card company?" (The title has since been updated to "an established financial services firm," but I cannot understand how it was allowed to go out in its original form…)
Reduce food waste to improve sustainability and financial results in retail with Amazon Forecast – AWS is doing its part by cancelling the Midnight Madness re:Invent event this year, which featured a chicken-wing eating contest and other feats of gluttony.
Cost Optimization recommendations for AWS Config – This is an absolutely massive pain in the ass should you be running AWS Control Tower. There are convoluted ways around the SCP preventing you from making these changes, but the real fix is "stop gouging customers every time their resource configurations change, because you want them using the highly dynamic nature of the cloud."
Optimize your Amazon EC2 instances cost at scale by migrating from Intel to AMD using AWS Systems Manager Automation – AMD is a Diamond tier re:Invent sponsor this year, while Intel is an Emerald sponsor. I had no idea that that was the "beat the absolute shit out of me in public" tier.
Tools
Datadog’s full-stack observability platform allows you to get deep visibility into cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments during cloud migrations.
Read our AWS cloud-scale monitoring eBook and learn about the benefits and complexities of migrating workloads to AWS, how to plan and track every stage of your migration, how to get deep visibility into serverless and containerized applications with Datadog, and more!
I’ve been using asdf for a few years now to manage concurrent versions of a few languages; I’m curious if anyone has any tips or tricks they’ve discovered to make it a bit less… unwieldy.
mirrord is an approach to rethinking cloud development by making local and remote effectively the same thing.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
