AWS Morning Brief

The AWS Morning show you never knew you wanted


Chief Cloud Economist Corey Quinn goes through the torrent of news about Amazon’s cloud ecosystem and strains out the noise. Then he takes what’s left and gently and lovingly makes fun of it.

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Whiteboard Confessional: The 15-Person Startup with 700 Microservices: A Cautionary Tale

Last Week In AWS
04.17.2020
10 Minutes
Join me as I continue a new series called Whiteboard Confessional with a look at the rise of microservices and some of the reasons why people started breaking apart monoliths in the first place, why microservices can be a great approach to software development, how Hacker News took the wrong lessons from microservices and encouraged devs from 15-person startups to embrace them at their own peril, why Google would argue that its own internal systems shouldn’t look like Google’s internal systems, how microservices make platforms much harder to scale, why you shouldn’t necessarily hop on the latest software development trends just because, and more.

Goldilocks and the Three Elastic Beanstalk Consoles

Last Week In AWS
04.13.2020
12 Minutes
AWS Morning Brief for the week of April 13, 2020.

Whiteboard Confessional: The Rise and Fall of the T-Shaped Engineer

Last Week In AWS
04.10.2020
13 Minutes
Join me as I continue a new series called Whiteboard Confessional with a look at the importance of the T-shaped engineer and how they can drive lots of revenue, where T-shaped engineers fall short, how becoming an expert in one specific tool can be a good thing at first but will almost certainly cause problems down the road (e.g., when you leave the company), how technologies like serverless and Kubernetes are the zeitgeist of today and why that may end up hurting companies tomorrow, who the worst developer Corey’s ever come across is, why you should think twice about pushing your favorite tools on the rest of your team, and more.

Amazon Detective and the Case of the Giant AWS Bill

Last Week In AWS
04.06.2020
11 Minutes
AWS Morning Brief for the week of April 6, 2020.

Whiteboard Confessional: My Metaphor-Spewing Poet Boss & Why I Don’t Like Amazon ElastiCache for Redis

Last Week In AWS
04.03.2020
12 Minutes
Join me as I continue a new series called Whiteboard Confessional by exploring a time in a previous life when Amazon ElastiCache for Redis caused an outage that led to drama, what it was like to work for someone who can be described as a “metaphor-spewing poet,” how every event and issue makes sense in retrospect, why you should never schedule important maintenance on a weekend, how Amazon ElastiCache for Redis works, the four contributing factors that led to the outage in question, why blameless post mortems are only blameless if you have that kind of culture driven from the top, and more.

The “AWS For God’s Sake Leave Me Alone” Service

Last Week In AWS
03.30.2020
12 Minutes
AWS Morning Brief for the week of March 30, 2020.

Whiteboard Confessional: Console Recorder: The Thing AWS Should Have Built

Last Week In AWS
03.27.2020
13 Minutes
Join me as I continue a new series called Whiteboard Confessional by examining the monstrosity that is Console Recorder. In this episode, I discuss why Ian Mckay is a code terrorist, the four tiers of building something in AWS, the ins and outs of Console Recorder, why there are always two versions of a Google project, the story behind Console Recorder, including who built it and why that’s impressive, how GCP has a bit of an advantage over AWS in this arena, why you should give Console Recorder a try, and more.

Watch Your Bill or They’ll CloudWatch It For You

Last Week In AWS
03.23.2020
10 Minutes
AWS Morning Brief for the week of March 23, 2020.

Whiteboard Confessional: Configuration MisManagement

Last Week In AWS
03.20.2020
14 Minutes
Join me as I continue a new series called Whiteboard Confessional by examining the dark underbelly of configuration management: configuration mismanagement. In this episode, I discuss what it was like to be a very early developer on the SaltStack project, the secret to giving exceptional public talks, how tools like Docker have essentially rendered configuration management obsolete, one of my most common career tips, why I no longer talk about configuration management with most people, and more.

The Saddest Kubernetes Hanukkah

Last Week In AWS
03.16.2020
10 Minutes
AWS Morning Brief for the week of March 16, 2020.

Whiteboard Confessional: Everything’s a Database Except SQLite

Last Week In AWS
03.13.2020
11 Minutes
Join me as I continue a new series called Whiteboard Confessional with a look at the awesomeness that is SQLite, including how it wasn’t designed to work in a client-server fashion, when you should use it and when you absolutely shouldn’t, how deciding to use SQLite as a database invariably shifts businesses away from their core competencies, how your life will turn completely into edge cases if you choose this as an architecture, how SQLite as a database means you’ll run into dead-ends and be stuck on your own when you try to figure out the way forward, and more.

Nothing’s Certain but Death and Distinguished Engineers

Last Week In AWS
03.09.2020
11 Minutes
AWS Morning Brief for the week of March 9, 2020.