Good Morning!
This AWS Purity Test greatly amuses me, though I suspect it’s guerilla marketing for a vendor contained within the test. No matter! If your score is lower than mine (23), please reach out so I can host you on the "Screaming in the Cloud" podcast. I should like to talk to you about a wide variety of things!
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!
Amazon Begs Employees Not to Leak Corporate Secrets to ChatGPT. Secrets like "we are very bad at naming," "we have yet to release a single product with a good user interface," "we are coming ever-closer to being dangerously out of good ideas," and "when our stock is flat it is extremely hard for us to hire people given our compensation philosophy."
A $35 billion commitment in Virgina means that us-east-1 is about to become even us-eastier.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: 1000 Access Points of Light
Last Week In AWS: Aspirational Audit Logs
Screaming in the Cloud: Saving the World though Cloud Sustainability with Aerin Booth
Screaming in the Cloud: Solving for Cloud Security at Scale with Chris Farris
Choice Cuts
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.
Amazon Detective adds Amazon VPC Flow Logs visualizations for Amazon EKS workloads – This is great except for the part where visualizing network traffic is oh so very much more than a security problem. This needs to be part of Flow Logs, not a downstream security service.
AWS Elemental MediaLive adds timecode burn-in – Meanwhile with layoffs (oof; if you’re impacted let me know if I can help) combined with Forté season wrapping up, AWS also adds to employee burn-out. I’m feeling the winter doldrums myself as well; it always gets better in another month or so, friends.
AWS Pricing Calculator now supports optimized pricing estimation for EC2 Dedicated Hosts – I wish that the pricing calculator’s ergonomics worked out better for much more rapid estimation of generally sized workloads; right now it’s clearly heavily biasing for correctness over speed, when the overwhelming majority of the time people are trying to get a ballpark order of magnitude about what a theoretical workload would cost.
Announcing Porting Advisor for Graviton – I’m somewhat skeptical of this thing’s utility (all of the supported languages are, 95% of the time, trivial to port to Arm) but okay; I’m more skeptical of the decision to not include a packaged release, opting instead to have users jump through a bunch of Python commands and build scripts themselves.
Now Open — AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region in Australia – ap-southeast-4 has arrived to once again destroy several of your management bash scripts that weren’t expecting a fourth region in that geo.
Get a handle on cloud sprawl! Empower teams to deliver better insights, faster. CloudQuery is a high-performance data integration platform for security and infrastructure teams. Sync your configuration data from any cloud or SaaS application to any destination/database to build your asset-inventory, CSPMs with standard data and visualization tools.
Amazon OpenSearch Serverless is now generally available! – If your version of Serverless includes "scales down to the low low price of $700 per month per instance at minimum" then you are going to love this service. The rest of us kinda expect better from the Wizards of AWS.
AWS Lambda: Resilience under-the-hood – This post really describes AWS’s operational excellence at its best. Lambda is deceptively simple (I know, I know; bear with me here) compared to the incredible depths of engineering complexity that it abstracts away. That, in turn, is what AWS needs to "next level" on to abstract many of their public services away in favor of providing a delightful experience to the next generation of builders.
Introducing AWS Lambda runtime management controls – Let me "yes, and" this one. I like the granularity and control very much. That said, I would love an option to automatically update the Lambda runtime from, say, Python 3.8 to 3.9. Yes, there may be breaking changes; I’d prefer to find and fix those as opposed to the current problem of "I have 200 Lambda functions scattered throughout my accounts and I forget where I stuffed most of the CDK, Serverless Framework, CloudFormation, Terraform, and ClickOps stacks that created some of them."
VPC Routing Enhancements and GWLB Deployment Patterns – This explains a fair bit to me about the murky GWLB offering; I feel like I understand it better now. That said, I still need further convincing that it’s not simply a way to get a bunch of box vendors to now have a way to drop their data center era appliances into your AWS environment and not change to become more "cloudy."
Tools
POV: You’re the little piggy who built a wolf-resistant house, and Piggy Town wants a neighborhood with your design. Can you scale quickly? Now imagine your high-transactional app is poised for massive growth. And you’re hit with a big bad traffic spike. Are you prepared?
O’Reilly’s Foundations of Scalable Systems features tips for designing scalable solutions, including replication, state management, load balancing, and caching. Get your three free chapters from Cockroach Labs — and avoid the wolves.
dynamodb-shell is exactly what it sounds like; a shell to interact dynamically with DynamoDB. I’ve wanted something like this for years.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
