The AWS Morning show you never knew you wanted

AWS Morning Brief for the week of July 7, 2020.

Join me as I continue the Whiteboard Confessional series by examining IBM Cloud’s recent widespread outage. I talk about why you should never make fun of someone else’s downtime, how IBM’s response to the outage was abysmal, what cloud providers should do whenever their systems go down, how a cloud provider’s status page can never be dependent on things they are personally running, why IBM Cloud deserves the Oxymoron of the Year award, why it’s important to let the broader community learn from your major mistakes, how this fiasco demonstrates that IBM Cloud isn’t ready to properly service the market, and more.

AWS Morning Brief for the week of June 29, 2020.

Join me as I continue the Whiteboard Confessional series by talking about how I log into all of the various AWS accounts I use for work, why using IAM passwords and username pairs is patently ridiculous, how AWS Single Sign-On is supposed to be great but just makes me angry, everything there is to know about aws-vault and why I needed a better solution, a complicated workaround I created for password management that was ridiculously overbuilt but works, and more.

AWS Morning Brief for the week of June 22, 2020.

Join me as I continue the Whiteboard Confessional series with a look at multi-factor authentication (MFA) and the time my business partner Mike Julian lost his MFA device and needed to reset his Amazon MFA token and couldn’t figure out how. Among other things, I discuss why you shouldn’t make decisions or record podcasts when you’re angry, why you shouldn’t store MFA codes in your password manager, why your policies and procedures won’t matter if someone chooses to disregard them, how you should expect people to do the wrong thing and make it easy to do the right thing, why you shouldn’t incentivize people to hide mistakes, and more.

AWS Morning Brief for the week of June 15, 2020

Join me as I continue the Whiteboard Confessional series by reminiscing about the time I got fired and touching upon how worker protections are basically non-existent in the United States, the “tell” to look for if you’re about to get fired, what to expect to experience if you get fired, why you should never sign the severance agreement in the moment, how you should feel right after getting fired, what Corey uses as a “watchtower of last resort,” why every company needs to have a policy that outlines what to do with credentials and access when someone gets fired, and more.

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.