Good Morning!
Lattice has gone GA, Supply Chain has gone GA, and they’re both very expensive.
I’ll be hosting a panel at the AWS Container Day (colocated with KubeCon EU), which you might enjoy…
And of course, the jobs.lastweekinaws.com job board continues to delight; check it out if you’re hiring or looking to be hired.
From the Community
When it costs more money and time to observe your environment than it does to build it, there’s a problem. Learn how Chronosphere can help you shape and transform observability data to only store the useful data you need.
A quick comparison of the egress charges for various cloud providers; only Alibaba Cloud is more expensive than AWS is.
This "one weird trick" on how to save thousands of dollars on AWS WAF is a bit counterintuitive: start spending $36K a year on Shield Advanced, and the WAF charges go away. Obviously this tip is not for everyone…
FinOps can be a big waste of money says Lydia Leong. She is most certainly correct.
Ever wonder what the AWS console actually does? Y’know, besides frustrating you in new and exciting ways when you’re trying to get work done…
Coiled has a post comparing burstable vs non-burstable AWS instance types for data engineering workloads and finally puts data to something I’ve viscerally sensed for a while: T3 instances are underperforming most of the time.
Ian McKay’s exploration of VPC Lattice highlights the pricing concerns I started off with; it does seem like a nice service if you want an AWS version of Tailscale…
AWS Amplify Is A Grift says this article. Let me "yes, and" it: yes, and data egress is significantly more expensive when using AWS Amplify vs the egress fee for virtually any other AWS service in the same region.
The trouble with saying that Graviton instances lower costs for Spark on EMR on AWS is that you’re targeting data scientists. These people like to respond with y’know… data.
AWS has made clear that Elastic Inference is being deprecated. Yes yes, they’re not turning it off for existing customers, but you have a few days to spin it up before that option is no longer available to you.
3 common myths about sustainability and cloud computing . A fourth is that customers care about this at a deep level worthy of investment; they all claim they do, but "saving money on AWS bills" is infinitely more interesting than doing the same actions for cost reasons.
I think I missed this when it happened: the amount of downtime required to upgrade Aurora is deeply troubling to many of its customers.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: A Repository of AWS Customer Breaches
Last Week In AWS: Friendship Started with Microservices
Screaming in the Cloud: Improving the Developer Experience with Aja Hammerly
Screaming in the Cloud: The Rise of Generative AI with Raj Bala
Choice Cuts
Console Toolbar is now generally available for AWS CloudShell – Okay, this is nice, and one of my favorite aspects of Google Cloud Shell’s implementation: being able to pull it up without leaving your current console page. Sure, I don’t care when I’m on my desktop (screen real estate is cheap on a 5K monitor), but it’s super nice when I’m traveling with my iPad, like I am this week.
AWS Supply Chain is now generally available – At 40¢ per SKU per location per month this thing is a money pit for any sizable company rolling it out.
Announcing CSV Export for AWS Resource Explorer Search Results – This is handy. Remember, if you save this file in Microsoft Excel it will trash some of the data fields. Much like some of the most awkward men on the internet, Excel will inappropriately conclude that something is a date.
Announcing Utilization Notifications for EC2 On-Demand Capacity Reservations – "You bought a thing that you’re not using" notification is one of those obvious customer wins. More like this, please.
Everything you need to know about AWS Billing Conductor’s new pricing model – This is a good change. We can quibble about the per-AWS account charge, but it corrects the inherent inanity of having non-predictable pricing for a service designed to simply internal accounting around AWS bills.
How to use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor Amazon DynamoDB table size and item count metrics – I kinda wish I could use DynamoDB for this directly; having to check a different service just feels like a leaky abstraction.
Implement resource counters with Amazon DynamoDB – And just like that, Sesame Street’s Count von Count finds his job at risk due to automation.
AWS Organizations, moving an organization member account to another organization: Part 3 – The fact that this is a three part series kinda suggests that it’s currently way, way too complicated to do this.
Build secure multi-account multi-VPC connectivity for your applications with Amazon VPC Lattice – Lattice is finally out and for some strange reason this post doesn’t talk about the biggest reason not to use it: the pricing. At 2.5¢ per hour per service, plus another 2.5¢ per GB transferred (on top of the usual data transfer pricing, not instead of), plus another charge per request to the service incurred, I’m really struggling to understand why you’d use this instead of Tailscale unless you just hate the idea of not paying AWS more money.
Higher education cloud financial planning: A former CFO’s perspective – I wasn’t aware they were offering degrees in the AWS bill, but here we are.
How the Think Big for Small Business program helps small businesses win big contracts – This was bold to put out the same day that Amazon started passing out Small Business labels to giant companies. I’d have probably held this post back a few days if it were me…
Perfect imperfections: how AWS is innovating on diamond materials for quantum communication with Element Six – AWS is apparently using diamonds for some of their networking approaches that extend beyond simply treating them as a Managed NAT Gateway pricing benchmark.
Tools
Haven’t seen this before; the AWS Missing Tools haven’t been updated in a while, but I wonder if there are some gems still adding value in here…
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
