Good Morning!
Well that didn’t take long. The morning after I sent out my piece on AWS Transform’s 24 month lock-in, AWS completely removed the requirement from their service terms. This is a good thing! You really don’t want to train customers to have to hunt down submarine requirements buried in terms of service that (almost) nobody reviews regularly. Well done!
From the Community
It turns out that the Valkey community, annoyed by Redis’s attempt to stab them in the back, has gotten Valkey to the point where it’s started outperforming Redis. An awful lot of the "AWS contributes nothing, and makes all the money off of our investment" falls flat when the open source version they do actively invest in starts leaving your more restrictive product in the dust. Maybe you just sucked at community management / allowing features that the community wanted, but would compete with your paid offering? I’m not saying this is easy, but being massive assholes to your community sure as hell didn’t help anything.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: Systems Manager Rip-Off Manager
Screaming in the Cloud: Opening the Managed NAT Gateway with Malith Rajapakse
Choice Cuts
Amazon VPC Reachability Analyzer now supports resource exclusion – This seems super handy for figuring out what fallback routes look like–without taking the primary down as a test, only to learn that NOPE, you got it wrong. And now the customers, they are screaming.
AWS announces new AWS Data Transfer Terminal location in the San Francisco Bay Area – The bar is high, but from the AWS Data Transfer Terminal documentation comes the most batshit insane thing I’ve ever seen AWS publish: "The physical address for the Data Transfer Terminal facility will not be provided. Instead, the Process owner … will receive an email with the searchable public name of the Data Transfer Terminal facility. AWS Data Transfer Terminal uses the same location identification system as AWS Direct Connect so you can search for the public name on the internet to locate the Data Transfer Terminal facility." I’m sorry–WHAT? "Hey, come over to dinner at my place. The address? You can fukken’ Google it," means nobody will be showing up for dinner.
Accelerate CI/CD pipelines with the new AWS CodeBuild Docker Server capability – This thing starts at $77 a month for the smallest instance type. At what point do you just want to go back to running a Jenkins build server for economic reasons? It’s a shame AWS can’t find a way to run an EC2 instance with a thin management layer on top of it at an affordable price-point. Maybe they should work on that.
Accelerate the modernization of Mainframe and VMware workloads with AWS Transform – "AWS Transform" is the rebrand of Amazon Q Developer transformation capabilities, in the hope that customers will actually pay attention if they use the phrase "Amazon Q Developer" slightly less.
New Amazon EC2 P6-B200 instances powered by NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs to accelerate AI innovations – $1562 a day, 1-day minimum, requires ML Capacity Blocks which in turn means that Savings Plans and Reserved Instances aren’t available for these instances. Bring money!
Introducing Amazon Q Developer in Amazon OpenSearch Service – It’s pretty clear that the order of operations has gotten twisted around. At this point, it’s Amazon Q Developer that’s getting support for various AWS services, rather than their framing of including whatever the hell expression of Q Developer a given service has now had foisted upon it.
Amazon CloudWatch Database Insights applied in real scenarios – As opposed to the fake scenarios dreamed up by AWS Marketing once they shoo the engineers who understand the product out of the room.
Cost-effective AI image generation with PixArt-Σ inference on AWS Trainium and AWS Inferentia – Why does every AWS AI image generation example or offering look like the state of the art in 2023? I’m serious–I want an alternative to OpenAI’s image offerings, but I can’t find any that don’t suck.
United Airlines implement enterprise-wide resilience program with AWS – I fly United… a lot. This explains much about why their mobile experience has gotten significantly more durable over the past few years.
Bringing more to the table: How Amazon S3 Tables rapidly delivered new capabilities in the first 5 months – "Bringing more to the table." Someone on the S3 team is entirely too satisfied with that headline, but let’s table that for now. It’s interesting watching the rapid evolution of S3 Tables; I hope to do something with it soon, once I wrap my head around what it does.
Understanding Amazon S3 client-side encryption options – You’re going to need to do this if you want to be certain AWS can’t read the data you stuff into S3. Do you need to worry about that? That’s up to you; I can’t make the determination for you.
Tools
Ooh. Envilder is a CLI tool that quickly converts AWS SSM parameters into .env files
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
