Good Morning!
Congratulations to former Last Week in AWS sponsor Epsagon on being acquired by Cisco. Cisco reportedly can’t wait until the acquisition closes so that they can begin ruining the product. I’ve been a paying Epsagon customer for a while; the product is incredibly well designed. I’m going to miss it once Cisco does what Cisco always does to companies it acquires.
From the Community
By now, most of you know that I’m a huge fan of ChaosSearch – not because they sponsor my newsletter, but because their revolutionary solution for log analytics actually works! Now, ChaosSearch and The Eckerson Group have just published a new whitepaper called “Log Analytics for CloudOps.” This whitepaper explains why traditional pipelines for log analytics break down, and how CloudOps can streamline or re-architect these pipelines to optimize productivity. You see, the best CloudOps teams stay agile by quickly and accurately responding to events that require speed, scale, or innovation. But this requires a new approach to log analytics pipelines – and I, Corey Quinn, am here to tell you that ChaosSearch is doing that right now, for companies like Klarna, Blackboard, Equifax, Armor and more. So check out the new ChaosSearch whitepaper “Log Analytics for CloudOps” and check out ChaosSearch today – and tell them I sent you! Sponsored
GitLab talks about how to provision 100 AWS Graviton GitLab Spot Runners in 10 Minutes for $2/hour.
Ben Kehoe has an amazing post that I wholeheartedly endorse: AWS Doesn’t Know Who I Am. Here’s Why That’s A Problem.
Postmark tells the story of how they moved to AWS from their colocated data centers.
Elastic is apparently so incensed by OpenSearch that they went ahead and made their product even more open. Specifically, their default lack of security exposed an FBI watchlist.
A walkthrough using Nitro Enclaves to preserve privacy.
No matter how you slice it, Deirdré Straughn quitting is a loss to AWS. My position has remained constant since I first met her many years ago: when Deirdré speaks, I shut up and listen because I’m about to learn something.
We have a guest post on the Last Week in AWS blog talking about 10 Free Cloud Databases You Should Consider (And 1 You Shouldn’t). I endorse this.
I feel like I struck a nerve with my thoughts on The Next Million Cloud Customers.
Jobs
If you’ve got an interesting job for this newsletter’s eminently employable subscribers, get in touch!
Your curiosity of the world drives everything you do. You thrive in a collaborative environment where you get to build software in finance, healthcare, IoT, telecom, home security and automation, or other industries. You’d feel like you are home at Chariot Solutions. We’re a boutique software development firm looking for senior engineers – Java, Python, Node, AWS, React, Angular, iOS, Android. We’re one of top workplaces in the Philadelphia area, and we founded, curate and host Philly ETE, a conference with world-class speakers that’s been running since 2005. Our team sets us apart, including leadership that truly cares and treats you like family. We are committed to continuous learning and improvement, and we pay it forward to the tech community, attend and speak at conferences, and strive for work/life balance. Check out our job listings and apply to join us today.
Want to help customers control and secure access to some of the most sensitive data on the internet? Security is the #1 concern of customers adopting the cloud, and our team defines and enforces the access model for AWS. We run massively-scaled globally-distributed systems that authenticate in every AWS transaction worldwide. We are looking for deeply technical, collaborative people to help grow the AWS business. The AWS Identity team builds the secure identity, access, and resource management foundation for customers to scale in the AWS Cloud. We ensure our customers have flexible identity options to securely migrate existing workloads to the AWS Cloud and to build their new cloud-native applications. By joining the AWS Identity team, you will work on massively scalable, core technologies used for authentication and authorization to all AWS services (such as Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, and Amazon DynamoDB). You’ll work at the intersection of security, optimization, large-scale data, machine learning and UX to form innovative new ways to easily manage access to millions of users and resources.
Choice Cuts
Cribl LogStream is an observability pipeline that lets you collect, reduce, transform, and route machine data from anywhere, to anywhere. It helps you not only improve visibility into what’s going on, but also helps you save money. See for yourself what LogStream can do for your data. Go to Sandboxes > Sponsored
In 2021, ISVs will generate over $3 billion in revenue through the Cloud Marketplaces. Meeting buyers where they have a budget is just part of the reason Marketplace sellers are thriving. The Tackle 2021 Cloud Marketplace Playbook breaks down the key strategies to Marketplace success at every stage, whether you’re getting started or looking to scale and operationalize – all with zero engineering resources required. Complete with expert insights from companies like HashiCorp, CloudZero, CrowdStrike and more – check out the most comprehensive Marketplace Playbook today! Sponsored
Amazon EC2 Hibernation adds support for C5d, M5d, and R5d Instances – Wait a second–you’re telling me that there are still modern era instance types that don’t support this? I feel like some of these announcements from AWS are low-key versions of “oh, and in today’s ‘good news’ report, the wolf that was eating people that we didn’t tell you about has been safely recaptured.”
Amazon WorkSpaces Renews Windows Desktop Experience with Windows Server 2019 bundles and 64-bit Microsoft Office 2019 – Let me save you a click: this very odd use of the word “renews” means that they now offer Windows Server 2019 options. That’s it.
Announcing General Availability of Amazon Redshift Cross-account Data Sharing – Historically the way to share data like this cross-account was to have the good sense to pay Snowflake instead.
AWS Transfer Family expands compatibility for FTPS/FTP clients and increases limit for number of servers – If you read this and wonder why anyone would care about FTPS / FTP in 2021, move on to the next item; this service is very much not for you. For those who still have to deal with it, this release is glorious and very welcome.
AWS Cost Categories introduces Split Charge rules for allocation of shared costs – This change isn’t well thought through in a couple of ways, so I’m going to ignore it to instead highlight AWS Cost Categories. They are a great step forward for AWS cost allocation. You should USE THEM. Please for god’s sake use them.
Preventing Free Trial Abuse with AWS Managed Services – Given that the AWS free tier is universally reviled for surprise bills, Amazon has less than zero credibility to speak on this entire topic. I would not have published such a thing if I were in their shoes, but my understanding of the customer billing experience also ensures that I will never find myself in their shoes to begin with.
Amazon EC2 – 15th Years of Optimizing and Saving Your IT Costs – EC2 ushered in a brand new way of computing. It’s virtually impossible to overstate what it’s done for customers and the industry as a whole. Instead of doing that, AWS credits it with “saving money” which is the absolute last thing that EC2 customers would say about the service. That’s okay! It’s a capability story! But pushing the “it’s cheaper!” narrative does no one any favors.
Introducing Amazon MemoryDB for Redis – A Redis-Compatible, Durable, In-Memory Database Service – Discontent with their original attempt at challenging Redis Inc. with ElastiCache for Redis, AWS takes a second bite at the same apple by releasing this molten pile of garbage. I spun up a cluster in the console myself the day this was released, and it’s a disaster along every axis I care to name. It’s incredibly expensive (a 20¢ per GB ingested fee on top of an instance fee?!), it’s “totally not Redis” but still has Redis in the name, it bolsters the “AWS competes with everyone” arguments, it’s only available in a handful of regions that don’t include most of the ones you’d expect it to, availability in us-east-1 varies by availability zone, the console spin up experience is a throwback to the “guess, check, get yelled at, try again” early days of EC2, provisioning takes a good 15 minutes, and various links to things like “documentation” on the product’s marketing page lead to a 404 error. Lastly, it’s badly named because you should absolutely forget MemoryDB.
Look, I strive mightily to avoid trashing services as they come out because I don’t want people who work at AWS to feel bad about their work. Empathy is important. I stand by that! I have empathy for the people behind the product, but I have no sympathy for releasing a clearly-unready product while expecting people to like it. This service displays what appears to be zero empathy for the customer. It’s actively customer hostile, partner hostile, and brand hostile. The only story that makes sense to me is that this is an amazing act of selfless partnership with Redis Inc, because all Redis has to do is give their prospects a few hundred bucks in AWS credits to try MemoryDB, and then they’ll be drowning in business themselves.
New – Amazon EC2 M6i Instances Powered by the Latest-Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors – Almost four years after the m5 launch, in return for a 15% price/performance gain? As a rule of thumb, might want to avoid anything net new on x86 architectures if you can avoid it…
Python 3.9 runtime now available in AWS Lambda – This is big news for a few weeks from now, once the various tools and frameworks people use to intelligently stand up serverless applications realize that a Python 3.9 runtime exists.
Best practices: Redis clients and Amazon ElastiCache for Redis – This is super helpful / interesting. “Here’s how to configure your client software to make the best use of our managed service” is something I’d love to see more AWS services take a stab at.
Unlocking the Trillion Dollar Value of Cloud – …for AWS. When the first words of the article are “Business Cases for Cloud Migration” it’s really hard to view this as anything else.
Who Pays? Decomplexifying Technology Charges – “How to make costs simple and well understood” as a thesis is directly at odds with the word “decomplexifying” in the title. I should note that my spell checker is throwing a conniption-fit over the word as I write this, and it’s not the only one.
Implementing CloudWatch-centric observability for Kubernetes-native developers in Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service – This reeks of whatever the opposite of “best of breed” technology selection is.
Introducing AWS Security Analytics Bootstrap – “An open source framework” is a pretty lofty description for “a CloudFormation template that spins up a bunch of AWS services that will cost you money.”
How US federal agencies can use AWS to improve logging and log retention – Whatever diagrams or artwork this blog post includes should just be rewritten as a burning dumpster into which US federal agencies may more easily shovel money.
Tools
The forecast is showing clouds so make sure you’re prepared with simple, secure, and cost-effective cloud data protection from Veeam. Take advantage of this exclusive Veeam offer that includes: unlimited AWS backup FREE for 30 days, $250 AWS credits, and 3 months free when you buy. Veeam has you covered – check it out! Sponsored
The AWS Lambda Power Tuner has been updated. If you aren’t using it, take a look at it. It’s wonderful; I wish it was a native service.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
