Good Morning!
Welcome to 2023! I’ve been spending a fair bit of time on Mastodon lately and it has a lot of "early Twitter" vibes to it. We’ll see how that plays out.
A bit of a slow start to the year content-wise; early indicators are that it’s likely to pick up shortly. Let’s get to it.
From the Community
So… how do you truly solve the challenges of today’s ever-growing big data analytics needs? To help answer that, I, Corey Quinn, am incredibly excited to share ChaosSearch’s newly-launched video series focused on the seven deadly (ie. costly & complex) challenges of big data analytics! Check it out: The Data Journey – 7 Challenges of Big Data Analytics. During this 7 episode series, ChaosSearch’s CTO & Founder, Thomas Hazel, delves deep into the technical challenges (and solutions) around: Data Pipelining, Prep, Destination, Governance, Platforms, Analytics and Lifecycle! Each episode is about 10 minutes long, easy to consume, and designed specifically to help you supercharge your insights from your data! And now, without further ado, grab some popcorn, tell them that the esteemed Corey Quinn sent you, and enjoy the show!
I read stories like what it took for the cirl maintainer to get a machine with an Arm-based m1 for his development work and can’t help but feel that all of the cloud companies are somehow missing the plot. They all depend upon his work, but for some reason haven’t found a way to reasonably sponsor him and people like him. Their current scattershot approach of hurling credits in various directions is clearly not sufficient.
Maciej Cegłowski (the owner of Pinboard) returns from his yearlong hiatus with a blog post titled Why Not Mars. It’s worth reading almost everything he writes; save this in your Pinboard account and read it at your leisure.
A cost breakdown of what a user is spending to run a single-user Mastodon server on AWS.
The Register has an opinion piece titled Alexa and Gmail: Big Tech’s billion dollar curse of the free. The allusions between Alexa and Google Cloud are interesting to me; I don’t think I fully agree, but I found it thought provoking. Perhaps you will as well.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: Holiday Replay: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer
Last Week In AWS: LastStrawPass
Last Week In AWS: Soaking the US Navy
Screaming in the Cloud: Building Trust in the World of DevRel with Taylor Barnett
Screaming in the Cloud: Life of a Fellow Niche Internet Micro Celebrity with Matt Margolis
Choice Cuts
Ask me to rank which cloud provider has the best developer experience, and I’ll be hard pressed to choose a platform that isn’t Google Cloud. Their developer experience is unparalleled, and in the early stages of building something great, that translates directly into velocity. Try it yourself with the Google for Startups Cloud Program, giving up to $100k for each of the first two years in Google Cloud credits for companies ranging from bootstrapped companies all the way to Series A. Go build something, then tell me about it.
Amazon CloudFront now supports the removal of response headers – "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." Antoine de Saint-Exupery, who died at the age of 44 waiting for his CloudFront distribution to update.
Amazon SageMaker is now available in AWS Middle East (UAE) Region – Yet more strife, woe, and surprise bills are going to afflict the Middle East in 2023 I see.
Amazon Neptune announces graph-explorer, an open-source visual exploration tool for low-code users – You can now visualize a database that nobody needs nor understands.
Cloud native just means you’ve got more components or microservices than anyone (even a mythical 10x engineer) can keep track of. You had an accurate inventory in a spreadsheet once, but when was the last time it got updated? With OpsLevel, you can build a service catalog in minutes and ditch the spreadsheet once and for all.
An elastic deployment of Stable Diffusion with Discord on AWS – Having run a fair bit of Stable Diffusion on my home desktop (machine name: "us-shitpost-1"), I can only imagine the sense of dread as every prompt feels like inserting another quarter to continue the AWS game…
Measure the Business Impact of Personalize Recommendations – Honestly, given how craptastic a lot of the Amazon retail recommendations are (and this is notably where Personalize came from), combined with the Amazon stock being down as far as it is? I’m not sure right now is the time to encourage customers to measure its business impact. Ahem.
How Heineken’s Connected Brewery Ecosystem fuels automation – I’m more interested in how copious amounts of Heineken’s beer empowers a number of otherwise baffling decisions that AWS makes; they’re clearly not the work of sober minds.
Tools
The LAN was a magical place to learn about computers. You could do things that would be unthinkable on today’s internet: permission-less file sharing, experimental servers with no security, shared software where one machine could easily bring down the network, and surly network admins who somehow didn’t get ejected from companies due to their toxic attitudes. Can we have a 90’s LAN-like experience again, along with the best parts of the 21st-century internet? Tailscale thinks we can, and I’m inclined to agree with them. Try now – it’s free forever for personal use with up to 20 devices. I’ve been using it for over a year personally, and am moderately annoyed that they haven’t attempted to charge me for what’s become an essential-to-my-workflow service.
If you’re on Google Cloud, janus lets you grab credentials for an AWS IAM role securely.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
