The AWS Morning show you never knew you wanted

AWS Morning Brief for the week of June 8, 2020.

Join me as I continue the Whiteboard Confessional series with a look at the time I almost built a standalone email service but shrewdly decided against it. In this podcast, I touch upon my experiences with various email marketing platforms and how they led me and my co-founder to essentially whiteboard an email service that already existed, why you should never write any code that you’re unwilling to maintain, why building a tool you can find elsewhere distracts you from your core competencies, how focus is the number one things companies tend to run out of, and more.

AWS Morning Brief for the week of June 1, 2020

Join me as I continue the Whiteboard Confessional series with a vignette that highlights the core problem in cloud economics that touches upon how CloudFront is basically a CDN only worse in every way, why I’m a big believer in having every bucket tagged with a bucket name option, how Cost Explorer is free but with an asterisk, how traditional network constraints have evolved to budgetary constraints in the cloud world, simple ideas for how AWS can improve its customer service offerings to create better experiences for everyone, how a 30-minute phone call delighted a company in the adult entertainment business, and more.

AWS Morning Brief for the week of May 25, 2020.

Join me as I continue the Whiteboard Confessional series with a look the importance of owning your own domain names while touching upon what split-horizon DNS is and why companies use it, what the Route 53 Resolver is actually designed to do, why it is imperative that you own all of your testing domains, development domains, and production domains, regardless of whether they are internal or external, or even whether they even exist, how Google purchased the .prod and .dev domains and why that should concern you, how data breaches cost way more than domains, and more.

AWS Morning Brief for the week of May 18, 2020.

Join me as I continue the Whiteboard Confessional series with a look at time and the role it plays in the context of computers. I touch upon how a single tweet from AWS Cloud Twitter caused a rant of mine to go semi-viral, why I believe that your databases and servers should always be in UTC at all times, how incorrect time configurations can cause decade-long headaches for organizations, the various reasons why time zones other than UTC are not reliable, how computers do more than just tell you what time it is, and more.

AWS Morning Brief for the week of May 11, 2020.

Join me as I continue a series called Whiteboard Confessional with a look at the time Slackbot caused a company to experience a severity one incident which knocked their systems offline in an embarrassingly public way. Have a listen to learn how a nifty feature in Slack caused the issue, how things were working fine for four years before this problem reared its ugly head, why that’s a common occurrence, what you can do to avoid a similar fate, how this whole story should give you pause about hopping on the ChatOps bandwagon, what CloudTrail’s actual purpose is, and more.

AWS Morning Brief for the week of May 4, 2020.

Join me as I continue a new series called Whiteboard Confessional by exploring the time I sent out a newsletter to 18,000 people filled with broken links (yep, it was the other day)—and what I did to fix them without sending out an updated version. In this podcast, I also talk about what my email newsletter architecture looks like, how I use analytics to continuously optimize Last Week in AWS, why not all data is good data, what I am not interested in knowing about my readers, what I did to answer questions that my email marketing platform didn’t answer for me, how that ended up breaking things briefly, how I fixed what was broken, and more.