Good Morning!
Today I’m hosting a drink-up at 6PM in Seattle at Outer Planet Brewing. If you’re reading this and in town / free, come on by; let me buy you a beer as thanks for reading my nonsense.
Later this week I’ll be hosting an AMA on 9/27 @ noon PDT over on YouTube. Bring questions!
From the Community
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Found a post saying in seriousness what I’ve been saying in jest for a while: XML is better than YAML.
It turns out that AWS is sitting on a veritable gold mine of IPv4 addresses.
This parody of "Yesterday" came across my desk and aligned with my sense of humor, as well as my thoughts on backups…
Redmonk’s Dr. Kate has a great post about companies eating their own dogfood–though AWS would correct it and then I would modify it to say that that particular company gargles its own champagne.
This delight hack is probably not a good idea in production: Static IP for Lambda–ingress, egress and bypassing the dreaded NAT Gateway .
Fascinating news about a new Ohio tax break for Amazon data centers; apparently "at least six facilities" ends up creating a grand total of "roughly 100 full time jobs." These facilities are clearly not people-intensive.
I’ve had problems with CodeWhisperer remembering my login token, but apparently it can remember other people’s secrets and share them with us.
Choice Cuts
Accenture Extends Generative AI Capabilities to Accelerate Adoption and Value on AWS – They’re "helping clients leverage Amazon Bedrock" and excuse me, what? Bedrock is in private preview! The APIs can change! The pricing model can pivot wildly! If you use a service like that in production, you’re playing with fire–and AWS service teams always advise customers not to use preview services in production for these and other excellent reasons. What is AWS doing with Bedrock, exactly?
New – Amazon EC2 M2 Pro Mac Instances Built on Apple Silicon M2 Pro Mac Mini Computers – Man, my M1 Mac Studio still feels new; it’s sad to learn I’ve once again been outpaced by technology.
How Chime Financial uses AWS to build a serverless stream analytics platform and defeat fraudsters – Chime is excellent at using technology to defeat fraudsters; remember that they’re the folks who created alterNAT to defeat usurious Managed NAT Gateway charges.
Centralizing management of AWS Lambda layers across multiple AWS Accounts – I’d like to be able to do something like this within a single account, betwixt regions. Honestly, so much of my work is remembering exactly where I parked something.
Handle traffic spikes with Amazon DynamoDB provisioned capacity – It’s always good to read posts like this just to validate that there aren’t changes to our collective assumptions about how DynamoDB handles spiky workloads / scaling on the backend.
Streamline interstate Department of Motor Vehicles collaboration with Private Blockchain – "There’s no way governments are using blockchain for this…" So I read the article, inexplicably on the Database blog rather than AWS’s blockchain blog where it belongs. And of course, nobody is doing this; the entire post is how it could solve a problem. That’s blockchain’s whole thing; it’s a neat technology that’s been trying for over a decade to find a problem to which it’s a solution–and failing.
How to host your Unreal Engine game for under $1 per player with Amazon GameLift – Oof. So Unity changed their pricing model a week or so ago and led to a giant kerfuffle; they attempted to retroactively change their pricing to charge a per-install fee, which spooked the entire industry. So what does AWS do? They reframe their (reasonable!) GameLift pricing model, which is based upon instance hours, and in the headline they make it sound like they’re charging per player–which they absolutely are not! Amazon, please, stay away from the footguns in your messaging.
How United Airlines built a cost-efficient Optical Character Recognition active learning pipeline – As someone who spends a lot of time flying on United (case in point: I’m in Seattle today) it’s neat to see how technology empowers the backend of getting me safely from point to point at nearly the speed of sound, while I complain about minor inconveniences.
How VirtuSwap accelerates their pandas (Corey’s note: I stopped reading the headline here)-based trading simulations with an Amazon SageMaker Studio custom container and AWS GPU instances – I am emphatically and vocally in support of learning as much as I can about VirtuSwap’s panda accelerator. I want to see those big furry bastards launched into low earth orbit if possible…
Provision sandbox accounts with budget limits to reduce costs using AWS Control Tower – This is a bit misleading; I want iron-clad assurances that when I say a sandbox account can’t spend more than some amount of money in a cycle, it’ll be enforced. AWS simply cannot offer that today, and it desperately needs to.
From Massage Therapist to Cloud Associate with AWS Academy – Something about this career arc rubs me the wrong way. 🥁🐍
Reducing the Scope of Impact with Cell-Based Architecture – Reducing the Scope of Impact with Cell-Based Architecture – AWS has another whitepaper out; these are fantastic reading and you should make the time to absorb this one
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As mentioned above, alterNAT runs NAT instances for you and fails back to the Managed NAT Gateway; all of the reliability, without the 4.5¢ data processing fee charged on every gigabyte.
it’s been a while since I’d thought of this one–recall Volkswagen’s regulatory issues half a decade ago, when it came to light that their diesel engines detected that they were undergoing EPA benchmarks and thus changed their behavior to pass the tests? Similarly, the auchenberg/volkswagen: :see_no_evil: Volkswagen open source tool detects when your tests are being run in a CI server, and makes them pass.
Since AWS’s is generally poorly implemented, the community always steps up; here’s this year’s Re:Invent 2023 Schedule planner.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
