Good Morning!
We begin with a note! The Last Week in AWS swag store is live at store.lastweekinaws.com. More goodies to come, but the first is a branded “Last Week in AWS” t-shirt that we just released; it’s available in two colors. We of course also sell coffee mugs, swag packs, and YOUR SUGGESTION GOES HERE.
From the Community
Are you like the many companies today who are using Elasticsearch but longing to switch to a modern, more effective approach to log data management and analytics? The ChaosSearch Data Lake Platform is the first viable alternative that solves the underlying cost, scalability, and architecture complexity problems inherent in an elasticsearch-based approach. Join us for a ChaosSearch product tour on Wednesday August 18th. In just 30 minutes, you’ll get a high-level tour of the ChaosSearch Data Lake Platform from Paul Wolmering, our VP of Worldwide Sales Engineering, and we’ll also answer any questions that you might have! Thanks, and we hope to see you at the ChaosSearch live product tour at Noon ET on Wednesday August 18th. Sponsored
Just released! The ChaosSearch 2021 Benchmark Report on Log Data Management and Analytics. Recognizing the need for a broader view on how companies are managing their log data, we recently surveyed a wide group of organizations that make heavy use of log data in their day-to-day operations. The result is the ChaosSearch 2021 Log Management and Analytics Benchmark Report – now available for free. Learn key insights and findings on how companies are using log data management today to drive their operations, including: best practices for log data management, performance assessment; real-life customer use cases; top challenges; key investment areas, and a few surprising use cases! Get your copy of the ChaosSearch 2021 Log Management & Analytics Benchmark Report today! Sponsored
Ben Kehoe lays out a more cohesive vision for a new service than 95% of AWS service launch announcements do. This one is what AWS should build in lieu of extending the AWS Lambda timeout past its current 15 minutes. On the one hand I agree with him; on the other, if you can stretch Lambda to 20 minutes then it can run for the entire tenure of your AWS account manager’s rotation serving your account.
We come full circle and now explain once again how to make AWS S3 bucket files public.
The first tweet that I can recall seeing suggesting that I should keynote re:Invent has surfaced. I’m certainly not opposed to making a fool out of myself on stage in front of tens of thousands of people. Your move, AWS. What’s the process here, a petition or something?
Colin Percival has a series of benchmarks on EC2 boot times.
We have a post on The Duckbill Group’s blog about how Storytelling Can Shape Your Cloud Cost Management Strategy.
Millions of senior citizens had their data exposed by Senior Advisor, which is (incredibly) not an AWS service. It’s enough to score the company an S3 Bucket Negligence Award.
My post on re:Imagining AWS re:Invent is continuing to gain favor in various places. Apparently I wasn’t the only person disappointed by AWS’s lackluster approach to virtual events.
The end of an era: Charlie Bell has left Amazon after 23 years. Words can’t really express how significant he was to the operational fabric of AWS. Those are some impossible shoes to fill.
Jobs
If you’ve got an interesting job for this newsletter’s eminently employable subscribers, get in touch!
Choice Cuts
Cribl LogStream is an observability pipeline that lets you collect, reduce, transform, and route machine data from anywhere, to anywhere. It helps you not only improve visibility into what’s going on, but also helps you save money. See for yourself what LogStream can do for your data. Go to Sandboxes > Sponsored
Intezer is your go-to stop for runtime cloud workload protection. Imagine a world in which you could protect your VMs and containers from the code contained within–without a performance penalty. Sound too good to be true? Talk to Intezer to make the dream a reality. Sponsored
Amazon CodeGuru Profiler adds recommendation support for Python applications – This is an upgrade. The previous recommendations were all “we recommend that you rewrite this in Java so we can profile it for you.”
Amazon RDS Proxy can now be created in a shared Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) – We don’t talk nearly enough about the RDS Proxy…
AWS Glue DataBrew now supports logical conditions as transformations – Just for you AWS Glue DataBrew does booleans too.
Now enable auto-approval of change requests and expedite changes with AWS Systems Manager Change Manager – Like a naive fool, I would have solved this by “not using Change Manager.”
New AWS Solutions Implementation: AWS Innovation Sandbox – This provides a bunch of guardrails and controls around a sandbox account in your AWS org. When it comes to controlling for surprise bills, there’s no mention of it; in that sense this is more of an AWS Innovation Litterbox.
Gain 3x Higher Oracle RAC Database Performance on Amazon EC2 with R5b Instances and gp3 Storage – I’ve read this article twice and I still don’t know what it’s 3X faster than. It’s either “previous generation EC2 / EBS configurations” or “what hardware we imagine you’re running in your crappy data center.”
Chaos Testing with AWS Fault Injection Simulator and AWS CodePipeline – This is a great way to integrate an AWS service that actively and intentionally breaks your environment with the Fault Injection Simulator.
Building a real time customer sentiment email notification system using Contact Lens for Amazon Connect, Amazon EventBridge and Amazon Simple Notification System – Someone really needs to send my newsletters through an email sentiment analyzer and report back.
A deep dive into Bottlerocket ECS Updater – This seems nifty, but the prerequisites keep Bottlerocket perennially on my “someday” pile.
Implement Oracle GoldenGate high availability in the AWS Cloud – Remember: Oracle is terrible and you should never use it, but if you do use it you should absolutely use it on AWS, where it’s a first-class citizen. Is that it? Is that the talking point?
Filtering internet traffic from Amazon WorkSpaces – Ooh. I can use this to keep my Amazon WorkSpaces users from emailing me!
How to configure Amazon WorkSpaces with Windows and Docker – “Windows!” “Docker!” “AWS!” When your powers combine, I am a sitewide outage that will take DAYS to resolve!
Using AppStream 2.0 as a hardened and auto-scaled bastion host – This is incredibly novel as far as AWS content hacks go. It’s a link to their Desktop and Application Streaming blog. The post is a single paragraph pointing to a “recently published post on the AWS Security Blog.” And the post it links to is thirteen months old. Look, I adore the idea of resurfacing older content; everything is new to someone! I just have to imagine that there are more effective ways to do it than whatever the hell this is supposed to be. Then again, I am writing about it…
Introducing public builds for AWS CodeBuild – This is a key feature that brings something that has been missing from CodeBuild’s build runs: public ridicule for your terrible code.
Executives as Pilots – This kind of explains why so many quarterly earnings calls are the financial equivalent of slamming into the side of a mountain.
Zero performance compromise: Gearbox Entertainment goes remote with AWS and Perforce – Gearbox is now the second reference customer for Perforce – the first of course being friend of the newsletter J. Paul Reed. Seriously – despite both living in San Francisco, we first met years ago at DevOps Days Tel Aviv. I was giving a talk on git, and he was sitting in the front row angrily toying with his Perforce branded water bottle.
Attendee matchmaking at virtual events with Amazon Personalize | AWS Machine Learning Blog – Useful information from a company that apparently views expensive strategic conferences as being “in-person or bust.” AWS needs to spend a bit more time gargling its own champagne on this one.
Celebrate 15 Years of Amazon EC2 with Twitch Livestream Events – When are these events? Why, on the same days as re:Inforce was scheduled for. You probably already knew that that was coming…
Keeping clients of OpenSearch and Elasticsearch compatible with open source | AWS Open Source Blog – It’s very hard not to side with AWS here. If keeping users from accidentally experiencing breaking changes was the actual goal Elastic was focusing on, there would be an override parameter to let those users proceed at their own risk. Whatever Elasticsearch was, it’s clearly no longer open source as we understand it.
Register to experience the AWS Summit Online – Americas on August 24-26, 2021 – Attend the AWS Online Summit, which has been scheduled for months to be on the same days as re:Inforce was. But yes, it was just COVID that led to the re:Inforce cancellation; it had nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that their “Security is Job Zero” conference was clearly not a strategic priority.
Tools
The forecast is showing clouds so make sure you’re prepared with simple, secure, and cost-effective cloud data protection from Veeam. Take advantage of this exclusive Veeam offer that includes: unlimited AWS backup FREE for 30 days, $250 AWS credits, and 3 months free when you buy. Veeam has you covered – check it out! Sponsored
Not super cloudy and I don’t even care: zoxide is a smarter cd command for your shell. How have I not heard of this before?!
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
