Good Morning!
Tired of periodic accusations of shilling for one cloud company or another, I’ve launched a Disclosures Page that explicitly calls out my conflicts of interest, in the wan hope that people will at least take the time to insult me more accurately. This will be updated as needed; come at me!
From the Community
You’ve heard of March Madness – now experience March Chaos as ChaosSearch brings you three great March events, including a chance to win $1000 – whoohoo! Join us, along with Constellation Research’s Doug Henschen, for our March 8th webinar: Choosing the Right Cloud Data Platform. Put your Kibana skills to the test and join us for the Kibana Challenge on March 9th. This 1-hour online event will allow you to test out your application troubleshooting and anomaly detection skills as you hunt through ChaosSearch’s data lake platform. Multiple Visa gift cards will be awarded! Join us for our virtual AWS Immersion Day on March 23rd for a hands-on instructor-led workshop that will show you how to rapidly process and analyze logs, enabling data-driven decisions.
I found this article that gives a fascinating dive into what it’s like Inside Amazon’s Engineering Culture.
I just learned a hell of a lot more about what VPC endpoints are and their inherent limitations in their current state.
"Has anything really changed with the AWS status page?" This article suggests that it has not.
A third party was nice enough to gather examples of what a whole mess of AWS Lambda Events look like. I sure wish, y’know. The company that charged us to run Lambda functions could have bothered to do this.
Cory Doctorow has a post about how Amazon’s $31 ad business is very much not. Honestly, I think that the ads on their site are killing the utility of the platform for me. It’s degraded virtually every aspect of the shopping experience.
AWS has added a long-needed clause to its Terms and Conditions in section 1.19: we will not use Individualized Usage Data or Your Content to compete with your products and services.. For some odd reason, I have never had to worry about this sort of thing with any other company with whom I’ve done business.
This Twitter thread shows the murder mystery solving style required to find and fix a Lambda performance issue.
My article on the new AWS Status Page, Status Paging You, also got into the nuts and bolts of how challenging it really is to run a large scale status page for a service.
Reuters has noticed that Amazon is defying the break-up wave sweeping conglomerates, and points out the obvious spinoff of AWS as the seam along which they’d divide the company. I believe that to be inevitable; it’s just a question of when it happens and whose choice it will be.
Jobs
Aptible is building a multi-cloud PaaS with powerful security and compliance guardrails baked in. Our platform is used every day by thousands of developers across hundreds of startups in order to ship complex architectures without needing to stop and think about security, compliance, or IaaS best practices. Help us build the future of cloud deployment! We’re hiring principal and senior software engineers, DevRel, and more. (Psst: we target 90th percentile salaries and post total comp directly in the job description.)
AWS Worldwide Revenue Operations (WWRO) is a diverse team that enables AWS to be the world’s most efficient and effective selling organization. We deliver innovative sales solutions, reliable data, and actionable insights to improve customer experience and enable AWS to be the world’s most efficient and effective selling organization. Our innovative, inclusive, fun team is comprised of roles ranging in expertise from Product Managers to Software Development Engineers to Operation Analysts. Take a look through our open roles to see how your skillset may be the perfect fit. We’re looking forward to hearing from you if you are obsessed with solving problems for customers, thrive in fast-moving, ever-evolving environments, and bring creativity and passion to simplifying the complex.
At Modern Treasury, we are building payments infrastructure to power $750 trillion in bank transfers every year. Before Modern Treasury there has never been a universal API into the global banking system. Our ambition is to be the de facto standard for money movement for the world’s most innovative and fastest growing companies. Our customers use our APIs to automate payouts, direct debits, balance tracking and other payments use cases at scale. Join our engineering team at Modern Treasury to help build the new foundation of business and finance.
Choice Cuts
While AWS doesn’t like to talk about it, this multi-cloud thing is…well a thing. This is where MinIO comes in. MinIO’s high performance, Kubernetes-native object store works on every cloud – literally all of them from AWS to Zayo. This means you can build S3-like data infrastructure anywhere. The world’s fastest object store with READ/WRITE speeds in excess of 325 GiB/sec/165 GiB/sec respectively, MinIO can handle any workload – from modern databases to AI/ML and advanced analytics. Couple that with a suite of enterprise features for ILM, IAM, security and resilience and organization can architect consistency for their data persistency – across and between clouds. Don’t take our word for it, see for yourself at min.io/download.
AWS enhances Chinese Yuan payments experience for China based customers. – This is extremely confusing. It updates an announcement from four days ago launching Yuan payments, but doesn’t tell us what changed. Does anyone know?
Amazon Fault Injection Simulator now supports logging to Amazon CloudWatch Logs and Amazon S3 – Typical. First AWS undercuts the market by making cloud outages cost only 10¢ a minute so you get hooked, then they steadily find ways to make those outages more expensive.
Amazon Kendra adds spell checker for queries – It immediately segfaults upon reading a list of AWS service names.
Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports ALLOW_WEAK_CRYPTO* parameters for the Oracle Native Network Encryption (NNE) option – It was significantly after its launch that Neptune supported TLS at all, so I think we can say that Oracle is the company with the superior security posture here, no?
New Amazon RDS for MySQL & PostgreSQL Multi-AZ Deployment Option: Improved Write Performance & Faster Failover – A subhead here is "Introducing the New Amazon RDS Multi-AZ Deployment Option With Two Readable Standby Instances." AWS has finally learned that they’re so bad at naming things that they have decided to experiment with not giving things any name whatsoever and simply describing them instead.
Let Your IPv6-only Workloads Connect to IPv4 Services – This came out in a few regions last year, but as of now the Managed NAT Gateways in all regions have an additional functionality to support their usurious charges.
New – Additional Checksum Algorithms for Amazon S3 – Sure would be nice if someone explained which of these algorithms are superior for which use cases rather than leaving it as an exercise to the reader. I’m past the point where I can effectively memorize stuff like this!
New – Customer Carbon Footprint Tool – Three months delayed in the data it shows, remarkably poor granularity, and none of the data needed to make meaningful decisions ("Move this workload to another region!" "Store that data on S3 instead of EBS!" "Scale your EC2 instances down at night!")? This is definitely a Day 1 AWS release.
Amazon Timestream: 2021 in review – Compared to the two years between its announcement and release to customers, doing a "year in review" post three months into the following year is underpants outside the pants superhero style fast for Timestream.
Experimenting with Bitcoin Blockchain on AWS – AWS has to balance a lot of different customers and their respective concerns. This blog post addresses the portion of their customer base that’s grown worried that AWS might not have complete clowns driving some of their decisions.
Learning about AWS service health with the new AWS Health Dashboard – There’s a new AWS status page in town and it’s not reflected any incidents all week yet. Please break something so we know it’s working, AWS.
Tools
Configuring a VPN server is hard due to their complexity and vast knowledge of certificate and networking required. You can spend the next 6 months setting up an OpenVPN server and fine tuning it. Or you can just use our solution and be up and running within 3 min. Not to mention that we have built in reliability into the product – it mimics the Serverless ideology. 0x4447 VPN Server using OpenVPN® on the AWS Marketplace
This nifty S3 game teaches concepts in a fun and entertaining way. More like this, please!
One of our clients turned our onboarding repository into a terraform provider. I swear, it’s like they’re just ignoring the power of ClickOps!
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
