Good Morning!
As this newsletter issue finalizes, news breaks that Amazon is paying $1.7 billion (or "three Managed NAT Gateways") to purchase iRobot, better known as your friendly local Roomba manufacturer.
I’ve always wanted an Echo to follow me around the house screaming at the top of its lungs, so this is a win for my needs.
From the Community
Observability Leader Honeycomb Releases O’Reilly Book on Observability
Honeycomb helps you sift through billions of events to see your application’s hidden problems so you can quickly debug before users notice. Get your FREE copy of our new O’Reilly book and register for our Authors’ Cut Series to discuss key concepts.
This article is titled "Nobody ever got fired for buying AWS", but I do hope that someone at IBM got fired for buying Red Hat.
Should AWS really be the default go-to option? This article offers up some very fair criticisms.
Matt Rickard has a wonderful piece that I stumbled across and endorse from the rooftops, titled S3 Isn’t Getting Cheaper.
A thorough exploration of AWS’s new Log Anomaly Detection and Recommendations featureset.
Infoworld’s Matt Asay has a piece on the reality of cloud spending. I even agree with most of it!
Jobs
Product Security at DigitalOcean helps solve large challenges while reducing the burden of security on dev teams, whether they’re building serverless function isolation or customer IAM. They believe security should make safe development easy. They’re looking for Senior Product Security Engineers who can collaborate with internal developers to design secure architecture and construct secure-by-default guardrails that empower engineers to make informed security decisions.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: Are AWS account IDs sensitive information?
Last Week In AWS: Crappy Clone of a Fast Database
Last Week In AWS: Single Sign On, Multiple Names
Screaming in the Cloud: Cloud Security and Cost with Anton Chuvakin
Screaming in the Cloud: Empathy Driven Management and Engagement with Tim Banks
Choice Cuts
If you’re like most developers, you have secrets you don’t want getting out… As in keys, tokens, and credentials. That’s why 1Password built 1Password Developer Tools, so you can eliminate plaintext secrets in your code and secure them in vaults that sync across platforms. From there, access your secrets directly within your terminal with a fingerprint or even automate in production.
Amazon CloudWatch metrics increases throughput by 150x – AWS bills brace for meteoric expansion…
Amazon RDS for MySQL now supports enforcing SSL/TLS connections – Another one for the "what the hell was it doing before" file. I hate discovering these things from a company whose CTO’s most notable t-shirt says "Encrypt Everything."
AWS Lambda announces tiered pricing – This complicated addition to Lambda pricing is complete bullshit. Let me explain what I mean. First up, it only affects you once you’re spending five figures a month on Lambda in a single region, in a single Lambda processor architecture. If that’s you, and you don’t have custom Lambda discounting with AWS already, call your account manager and begin screaming–or hit reply and let me do it for you. Next, it makes customer price calculations harder instead of easier. Instead of basic arithmetic, you get to use far more complicated formulas in Excel. Finally, instead of cutting the price of things that affect EVERY customer (like NAT Gateways, or data transfer) they do a cut like this and toss it on the pile of "price reductions we’ve made" and refer to it as part of their long-standing commitment to lower prices for customers. It stinks.
AWS Lookout for Metrics announcing increased quota from 50K to 500K metrics – More like AWS Lookout for Your Freaking Bill if you’re not careful…
AWS Support launches a new AWS Support Center console domain – Not to worry, this domain boots you back to the usual AWS login prompt if you’re not logged in already, so we can ask what the hell the point of this is.
How to track AWS account metadata within your AWS Organizations – I use a Google Sheet, personally. There’s no good native option.
New – AWS Skill Builder Subscriptions – This is almost universally being panned as costing too much money to pay a company for training you how to spend more money with that same company.
How to containerize legacy code into Red Hat OpenShift on AWS (ROSA) – If you’re going to containerize your legacy code, I’d suggest that perhaps you don’t do it onto a legacy container platform–which OpenShift very much is to my admittedly limited understanding. Please feel free to correct me!
Elevate your retail experience with Just Walk Out technology – Curiously, "Just Walk Out" is exactly what Amazon is freaking terrified of their warehouse workers doing en masse, which is why they’re so adamantly anti-union.
Optimal pricing for maximum profit using Amazon SageMaker – Based upon my own surprise billing experience with SageMaker Canvas, I have no trouble whatsoever believing that Sagemaker is indeed priced for maximum profit.
Updated requirements for US toll-free phone numbers – Meanwhile, The Duckbill Group’s phone number is 833-AWS-BILL. I’m not kidding; give it a try. I bet you’ll like the automated phone tree that awaits you…
How to save 45% on licensing costs by migrating and optimizing SQL Server on AWS – I prefer to save 100% on licensing costs by not building atop a database platform that has expensive and capricious licensing terms, but I’m kinda weird like that.
Managing the cost of your experiments in Amazon Braket – "Oh no, my experiments with a freaking quantum computer are a bit too expensive." If this is you, please reach out. I don’t want to sell you anything, I just want to talk.
Serverless Applications Lens – AWS Well-Architected Framework – There have been some extensive updates to this a few weeks ago. Pay attention to these.
Tools
Amazon CTO Werner Vogels says "everything fails, all the time." Your backups shouldn’t be one of them. Get immutable, air-gapped backup as a service with Clumio Protect.
It’s time once again to draw attention to this list of changes announced for AWS that may break existing code. They aren’t common, but they are important!
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
