Good Morning!
Thursday. I’ll be hosting drinks at Highline in Arlington, Virgina at 7PM on Thursday of this week. I knew there was a part of that I forgot to include in my last email to you folks. If you’re around, come say hello.
From the Community
If you’ve ever had to recover a specific set of data, you get why customers choose Clumio backup as a service. Recovery doesn’t have to suck. When you know, you Clumio.
I found myself quoted in an article about how AWS’s free tier account structure is a travesty. It really is.
This article on How To Migrate Your AWS Account Into an Organization is a good idea if you’ve not done it yet. It buys you a lot and has effectively no downsides.
Lydia Leong writes that cloud adoption will fail because of the skills gap. If technology holds still, yes; I think the future instead looks a lot more like the cloud becoming far easier to use.
This post is a good breakdown of how you might go about putting Amazon’s PR/FAQ process into practice without actually working there.
Oh good, joint statements between companies (in this case floragunn GmbH, Amazon, and Elastic) settling litigation are always fun reading.
Aidan Steele has a Twitter thread on the design patterns he’s picked up over fifteen years of using AWS. It’s worth a skim.
It’s true; I did indeed find Google Cloud Functions to be Surprisingly Delightful.
Jobs
Enabling code changes to be deployed faster than ever before, DevCycle is looking for feature flag developers to help keep software innovation flowing. With a streamlined workflow for resolving any issues that may arise in production, DevCycle is the perfect place for those passionate about code to make a real impact. Join a company on the cutting edge of software development and help engineering teams shorten release timelines from months to days.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: AWS Deft Punk
Last Week In AWS: Google Cloud Functions Is Surprisingly Delightful
Last Week In AWS: Naming Things Accurately
Screaming in the Cloud: The Ever-Changing World of Cloud Native Observability with Ian Smith
Screaming in the Cloud: The Future of Serverless with Allen Helton
Choice Cuts
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.
Amazon SWF launches new console experience – …is it called Step Functions Workflow Studio? Because even the marketing pages for Amazon SWF strongly suggest looking into Step Functions instead.
AppFlow now supports deleting records in Salesforce – Put this one on the pile of "wait, you mean it didn’t do that before?"
AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) announces CDK Construct tree view in the AWS CloudFormation console – Oh, so THAT explains why my CloudFormation stacks suddenly seemed a lot more understandable! Nice change, this.
AWS Config announces a price reduction up to 58% for conformance packs – Config’s pricing is still high, surprises people when they aren’t expecting it to be high, and penalizes dynamic configurations that take advantage of cloud far more than it does steady-state instances. In short, Config’s pricing needs a rethink, because at the moment I’m tempted to rip the whole thing out of my environment.
AWS Enterprise Support launches AWS Incident Detection and Response – If you find your site keeps going down, you can pay AWS to help with your on-call rotation. Either you’re going to fix your app, or they’re going to eventually snap and fire you as a client. This’ll set you back ~2% of your AWS bill on top of Enterprise Support as the current pricing page stands.
AWS at VMware Explore US 2022 Recap: 5 Years of Joint Innovations – Remember RDS on VMware? No, you don’t. AWS has memory holed that product, and if you know what’s good for you, you’ll never mention it again–capisce?
Understand and Optimize AWS Data Transfer Charges for Splunk Cloud on AWS Ingestion – This feels a smidgen like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic with regard to relative spend levels.
Choosing the AWS pricing strategy that fits your business – I assume this is aimed at internal AWS services. "How surprised do you want your customers to be at the end of the month?" is a key consideration.
Does your team understand what is running in your cloud environments? Teams commonly don’t understand 20% or more of what is running! Download this free white paper on The 5 Fundamentals of Cloud Security – a comprehensive guide for formulating cloud security strategies. Check it out now!
DevOps with serverless Jenkins and AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) – "Jenkins meets the CDK" sounds like step 1, and step 2 is "I meet the bartender at 9:30 in the morning because it’s about to be one of Those Days."
Building Great Brands Consumers Love – I’m unconvinced that Amazon knows anything whatsoever about this in 2022.
AWS Control Tower releases API, pre-defined controls to your organizational units – This is a dark day for ClickOps, as Control Tower was one of the last bastions of "I don’t have a choice, here…"
How Kyndryl used AWS Service Management Connector, AWS Config and AWS Systems Manager to achieve lifecycle management of AWS resources through ServiceNow – Oof. Their AWS Config charges were so expensive that by the end Kyndryl couldn’t even afford to buy a vowel.
How to evaluate your Cloud Environment in a well-architected manner – If you wake up, hit the gym, get breakfast, start a Terraform deploy, go back to the gym, have a protein shake for lunch, answer some emails, go back to the gym and begrudgingly admit it’s leg day, then return to work long enough to log out for the day? Well, that’s how you evaluate your cloud environment in a Swole Architected manner.
Enabling HTTPS Offloading for WordPress Blog Posts in AWS GovCloud – I sometimes joke that if technology outpaces you, go work in GovCloud and enjoy the technology world as it was a decade ago. At least, I thought it was a joke.
Announcing a research alliance between AWS and Harvard University – The back-and-forth humble-bragging between "I work at AWS" / "I’m at Harvard" must be incredibly tedious.
Amazon WorkDocs adds support for Apple Silicon MacBooks – Apple Silicon was announced in June of 2020. WorkDocs getting support for them over two years later demonstrates just how low of a priority WorkDocs is for anyone.
Tools
Presumably for legal reasons, Retool can’t describe what they do as “Visual Basic for internal apps,” but that’s how I think of them. I’ve been a long-time customer, and they remain the only low-code tool I’ve encountered that actually lives up to the hype. To learn more visit retool.com.
Jeremy Daly has authored a simple set of tools for working with DynamoDB; he calls them the dynamodb toolbox.
MerLoc is a live AWS Lambda function development and debugging tool. MerLoc allows you to run AWS Lambda functions locally, but still have them keep their place inside of AWS. Seems interesting…
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
