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
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: Holiday Replay Edition – Burnout Isn’t a Sign of Weakness with Dr. Christina Maslach, PhD
Screaming in the Cloud: Holiday Replay Edition – Inside the Mind of a DevOps Novelist with Gene Kim
Choice Cuts
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.
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
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.
