Good Morning!
We can tell that performance review season is over at Amazon. Last week was notable not for the number of releases, but rather how impactful a few of them are likely to be.
From the Community
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Wow. I ask AWS to release Isengard and the community responds with something that feels directionally close to it called OrgFormation.
I rarely link to YouTube videos, but this “PM Shares AWS Migration Experience” video is well worth the three minutes it’ll take you to watch it. I’m losing it over here.
A former AWS employee-turned-group-VP at Oracle Cloud talks about what he learned in his time at AWS in a thoughtful post highlighting the perils of a writing culture.
Sometimes I’ll be heads down for half a day and wonder what I’ve missed in the industry. If I want to argue about pedantry, I’ll turn to Twitter; if I want to catch up on things that actually matter, I go to Techmeme. I’ve been a huge fan for years, it’s crucial to my workflow, and I want to be very clear: I have not been paid to say any of this.
I don’t like the fact that not all availability zones are equivalent. I feel like the one in us-east-1 that doesn’t support Nitro should come with a warning label.
Jeff Barr (who needs no introduction to basically anyone who’s so much as heard about AWS before) posted a beautiful tribute to his late father, Stephen Barr Senior. Jeff has always been an incredibly kind person; I’m sorry he’s hurting.
The Wall Street Journal’s opinion pieces are often trash, but I find myself largely agreeing with The Case for Splitting Amazon in Two.
Jobs
If you’ve got an interesting job for this newsletter’s eminently employable subscribers, get in touch!
The AWS Region Services organization redefines the way AWS designs, builds and operates regions that will enable new regions and region offerings of different designs and sizes. We deliver products by working backwards from unique Customer requirements for broader applicability.
Nebulaworks is a software engineering firm founded, built, and managed by engineers, for engineers. Our mission is to create high-performance engineering teams where members are inspired to collaborate openly, incentivized to gather new knowledge and skills, and value simplicity when solving difficult problems. We’re looking for individuals who are passionate about being a force multiplier, enabling our customers to unlock their high-performing team potential. If you love Linux, open-source, and value driving all changes through version control we’re currently hiring Sr. Software Engineers, come introduce yourself!
At Modern Treasury, we are building payments infrastructure to power $750 trillion in bank transfers every year. Before Modern Treasury there has never been a universal API into the global banking system. Our ambition is to be the de facto standard for money movement for the world’s most innovative and fastest growing companies. Our customers use our APIs to automate payouts, direct debits, balance tracking and other payments use cases at scale. Join our engineering team at Modern Treasury to help build the new foundation of business and finance.
Choice Cuts
MinIO is pioneering high performance object storage for the era of the hybrid cloud. The software-defined, Amazon S3-compatible object storage system has been voted the “Most Impactful Open Source Project” by Strata/O’Reilly and is run by more than half of the Fortune 500. With 600M+ Docker pulls, MinIO is the fastest-growing private cloud object storage company. Founded in 2014, the company is backed by Nexus, General Catalyst, Dell Technologies Capital, Intel Capital, AME Cloud Ventures and key angel investors. Check out MinIO today! Sponsored
Amazon Redshift announces public preview of Streaming Ingestion for Kinesis Data Streams – I suppose it’s unsporting to note that there are articles dating back a couple of years on how to get Kinesis Data Streams to stream data into Snowflake.
Amazon Rekognition Video supports 7 new languages and improves accuracy for text detection – Progress! There was a time I could count on at least one of those 7 languages being something either problematic or culturally insensitive. Slowly but surely an AWS service beset by controversy iterates towards respectability.
Amazon SageMaker Autopilot now provides Confusion Matrix and additional new insights for classification problems. – The real Confusion Matrix is the list of SageMaker sub-services.
Announcing a new AWS Billing console Home page experience – Go check out the billing dashboard in your AWS account, and you’ll discover it’s become worlds better than it used to be. It’s a great glimpse of a bright future for cloud economics.
AWS Control Tower now provides updated support for AWS best practices and Region deny – This feature release is my fault. I’d just finished updating and reorganizing my Control Tower environment four hours before this dropped; now I have to go back and update all of my accounts again.
AWS Managed Services now available in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions – A whole bunch of AWS Partners in the US federal space are about to have their market validated for them.
AWS Migration Hub Refactor Spaces – Now Generally Available – “Here’s a dedicated environment in which to refactor your applications as you migrate them” is a facepalm moment for me. Of course that’s a common pattern, and of course AWS can make that easier. It just never occurred to me to actually build out something dedicated to do that.
New for App Runner – VPC Support – Huzzah! Now if only it supported a container that listens on multiple ports. (If it does, please reach out with the Bat of Correction to thwap some sense into me.)
NEW – Replicate Existing Objects with Amazon S3 Batch Replication – This is a remarkably strong candidate for what could potentially be “the most expensive API call in all of AWS.” Be careful with this one!
How GE Aviation automated engine wash analytics with AWS Glue using a serverless architecture – “GE Aviation held together with AWS Glue” is probably not the intended takeaway from this headline, but now it’s all you’re going to remember now that I’ve said it.
Load testing applications built with the Amazon Chime SDK – The way I’d load test this would simply be to post a meeting link to Twitter and brace myself for the barrage of nonsense I was about to experience. This is probably why this blog post exists: for people who are good at their jobs instead.
How to mount Linux volume and keep mount point consistency – A fairly lengthy blog post to offer a solution that fits in a tweet: “address volumes via their UUIDs rather than device name.”
Deep Dive on AWS App Runner VPC Networking – Very often the thing that makes you rock is also the thing that makes you suck. VPC networking is very much like that; it empowers some truly awesome things, but the cost is that very few of us hold the entire mental model in our heads anymore. Down that path lies danger.
Improving Customer Experience and Delivering 94% Savings Using Amazon Lex – “How on earth do you save that kind of money with this solution?” By firing people, Kyle. You save 94% by firing people.
Now Available: AWS Virtual Waiting Room solution – AWS now offers a solution that’s explicitly crafted to help you disappoint your customers.
SQL Server High Availability Deployments Using Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP – The only times I’d ever even considered running databases on top of NFS or other network filesystems was when there was a NetApp backing the share. Eventually all things come to cloud, and this is a neat example of exactly the kind of nonsense I used to do in the olden days.
Proactively keep resources secure and compliant with AWS CloudFormation Hooks – CloudFormation becomes a hell of a lot more interesting for a lot of use cases; being able to execute arbitrary code before CloudFormation modifies resources can be a game changer. I love that this isn’t per template or stack; I can’t wait to see what people build with and for this that I can steal to achieve interesting outcomes without having to fiddle with all the parts myself. I can’t remember the last time I was this excited about a CloudFormation release. Maybe Drift Detection?
Tools
Configuring a VPN server is hard due to their complexity and vast knowledge of certificate and networking required. You can spend the next 6 months setting up an OpenVPN server and fine tuning it. Or you can just use our solution and be up and running within 3 min. Not to mention that we have built in reliability into the product – it mimics the Serverless ideology. 0x4447 VPN Server using OpenVPN® on the AWS Marketplace Sponsored
Ever see job ads asking for ten years of experience in a five year old technology? How Old Is It helps you figure out what’s reasonable to request without looking like a clown. I’d love something like this for AWS services.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
