re:Quinnvent is trying to kill me but I’m still here. Next up, the AWS hit squad will get their turn. If you’re going to be at re:Invent in person, be sure to hit that link for details on what I’ll be up to; my annual Expo Hall Nature Walk is absolutely not to be missed!
From the Community
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Benchmarking the stock Nginx container image with AWS Lambda leads to way better performance characteristics than I would have guessed.
I don’t think I’ve ever written a post that was as evenly divided in the responses than The Unfulfilled Promise of Serverless. Half of them say I’m onto something, while the other half claim I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about. I’ll take it!
Acquirely is a marketing company in Australia. “Acquirely is Australian for data breach” is apparently true, as they’ve exposed hundreds of thousands of people thanks to their S3 Bucket Negligence Award.
Jobs
If you’ve got an interesting job for this newsletter’s eminently employable subscribers, get in touch!
The Duckbill Group is hiring a Senior Cloud Economist! If you’ve got software development, software operations, or DevOps in your blood, you’ll love this role – it’s all the architecture discussions without the on-call. You’ll spend your days consulting with clients to help them better understand and manage their horrifying AWS bill. Plus, it’s fully remote!
AWS is the #1 place for you to run containers and 80% of all containers in the cloud run on AWS. Customers such as Samsung, Expedia, GoDaddy, and Snap choose to run their containers on AWS because of our security, reliability, and scalability. AWS container services are deeply integrated with AWS by design. This allows your container applications to leverage the breadth and depth of the AWS cloud from networking, security, to monitoring.
Truss is a distributed-first, software consultancy that cares about communication, inclusivity, and modern software development practices. We push the envelope on building efficient technology that improves people’s lives. Currently, we’re seeking stellar Infrastructure Engineers and Sr. Infrastructure Engineers to help us with commercial and government contracts.
As a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) you will be working on the Sendcloud platform. That platform is used by our software development teams to build, test, deploy and run software themselves. Currently, we have 9 development teams and we will grow to 20 next year.The platform consists of a cloud infrastructure on AWS, the application platform on top of that (e.g. observability solutions) and the building blocks (e.g. CI templates). As a part of the SRE team your goal is to make the product development teams fully independent with a self-service, scalable platform. You will co-work with the Backend Engineers from development teams, making sure they know how to use the platform, and taking their feedback into account for further improvements.
Choice Cuts
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Amazon Athena adds cost details to query execution plans – You can now get cost information from an EXPLAIN ANALYZE query. This will help when your CFO sends you an EXPLAIN JUSTIFY query.
Amazon DevOps Guru now Supports Multi-Account Insight Aggregation with AWS Organizations – Another silo broken down by the DevOps Guru. Picture a superhero that spends more time talking on stage than writing code, and trips over their own cape when I say this.
Amazon EC2 Fleet and Spot Fleet now support automatic instance termination with Capacity Rebalancing – It’s sad for the AWS service teams when the party comes to an end, and they have to make things that automatically spin up new nodes also turn them off afterwards.
Amazon ECS now adds container instance health information – It still fails to provide same-day insight into the current health of your AWS bill for the ECS cluster, of course.
Amazon EKS adds support for additional cluster configuration options using AWS CloudFormation – I’m not sure what the current state of the art is for configuring and managing Kubernetes, but I’m pretty damned sure that it’s not CloudFormation (motto: “It’s free because it sucks!”).
Amazon Lex launches support for Austrian German – Ja, ist fur Scheißenposten!
Amazon Nimble Studio launches the ability to test launch profile configurations via the Nimble Studio console. – Being able to answer “will this profile work” before testing it in production (and learning the answer is “nope!”) is exactly the kind of feature I’d expect from a service with the word “Nimble” in its name.
AWS Batch introduces fair-share scheduling – Any Amazon release with “fair share” in the title is just an open invitation for people to dunk on them on Twitter.
AWS CloudTrail announces ErrorRate Insights – CloudTrail Insights will now charge you more, but in return it will tell you exactly how crappy your application is. This is, contrary to popular opinion, incredibly helpful. I approve. Good job, CloudTrail team! Your ErrorRate has decreased in my eyes.
AWS Marketplace announces enhancements to change requests submission experience – It’s only a matter of time before this thing starts shilling NFTs, isn’t it…
Introducing 34 new resource types in the CloudFormation Registry – Ah, lovely! One new resource type for each way I’ve discussed to run containers on AWS.
In The Works – AWS Canada West (Calgary) Region – I’m more than a little scared that Calgary is referred to as “Canada West,” and absolutely scared that the region map that I saw when this was announced put the pending region east of the existing “Central” region.
Measure and Improve Your Application Resilience with AWS Resilience Hub – The new “Resilience Hub” is a new naming scheme for AWS: oxymorons. Centralized hubs are in fact less resilient than distributed systems as a general rule.
New – EC2 Instances (G5) with NVIDIA A10G Tensor Core GPUs – We’re just one generation away from me being able to reprise the Far East Movement hit song “Like a G6.”
Implementing Auto Scaling for EC2 Mac Instances – You’d really think that this would mention that Mac instances have a minimum 24 hour billing period to comply with Apple licensing requirements. Seems to me that this is a great way to set a giant pile of money on fire if you’re unaware of that fun bit of trivia.
Understanding how AWS Lambda scales with Amazon SQS standard queues – I like this post, but I confess that it reads to me as “the SQS – Lambda integration was left half done, and the fact that this behavior requires a full blog post to explain is testament to that fact.”
Introducing Amazon ECS Exec to access your Windows containers on Amazon EC2 – Amazon ECS Exec Deepak Singh (VP, Containers) could not be reached for comment on this release.
A Conversation on the Best Practices to Maximize Business Value from the Cloud – This is for customers, not the cloud providers themselves. “Milk our customers like they’re fat luscious cattle with Managed NAT Gateway charges” is on that second list.
Techniques for Managing Strategic Risk – This gives a bunch of strategic risk examples; they dance around “Amazon enters your market.” Before any of my AWS friends whack reply to tell me that this leads to better outcomes for customers, I want you to look long and hard at your data egress pricing compared to what it costs in on-premise environments.
Know Before You Go: Retail Attendee Guide for re:Invent 2021 – “Don’t go, because for some godforsaken reason this event starts on Cyber Monday, directly after Black Friday. Explain to me again why you’re funding the retailer who’s likeliest to validate the absolute crap out of your market?”
Use AWS Control Tower to deploy AWS Quick Starts to multiple accounts – It’s still not what I’d call “quick,” but I’ll grant that for large organizations this does promote the current state of the art to what I’ll term “brisk starts.”
Customize Amazon Translate output to meet your domain and organization specific vocabulary – At AWS they can’t have Translate auto-learn new vocabulary; its database keeps filling with crap to the point of becoming absolutely useless due to being subjected to too many proposed new service names.
Querying AWS at scale across APIs, Regions, and accounts – “We are so bad at providing a reasonable path to discoverability around what’s running in your AWS account that third parties need to actively volunteer their labor in order for you to make any sense of it” is a hell of a take, topped only by the fact that some of those APIs do in fact cost money to query.
Supporting our Veterans through training, workforce development, and hiring – Plus let’s face it: once someone has dealt with combat I’d imagine it’s hard to get too excited about some random service throwing API errors.
Breaking down the questions on AWS Certification exams – This is a great review of how to contextualize certification questions. In the real world, the questions instead shift form to “does the thing you built actually work,” or in more exciting moments “how quickly can you get our company back online, because we are a bank?”
The business benefits of hiring early career cloud talent – Right now for AWS it feels a lot like the benefit to them is “people who are senior laugh at our recruiters and hang up the phone due to our reputation for not paying competitively / our mandatory non-compete agreements, so we’ve got no choice but to hire early career folks who aren’t quite savvy enough to figure that out.”
Tools
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Yes, fine, okay, a valid use of multi-cloud is in fact getting AWS prices in your Google Sheets.
A custom built de-referer service is something that only folks who run websites need to think about–but that can be anyone these days. It’s a fun service that leverages AWS Global Accelerator.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
