Good Morning!
There were a whole bunch of "content" pieces put out by AWS last week, but so many of them were just… well, I don’t want to call them "drivel," but they also weren’t at all relevant or interesting to most folks. This happens every year post re:Invent, but it’s still a bit disheartening to see. Onward!
From the Community
Ask me to rank which cloud provider has the best developer experience, and I’ll be hard pressed to choose a platform that isn’t Google Cloud. Their developer experience is unparalleled, and in the early stages of building something great, that translates directly into velocity. Try it yourself with the Google for Startups Cloud Program, giving up to $100k for each of the first two years in Google Cloud credits for companies ranging from bootstrapped companies all the way to Series A. Go build something, then tell me about it.
RedMonk’s Stephen O’Grady writes about re:Invent in A Faster Horse.
Man, I wish I could write about re:Invent like this. Just an amazing writeup from an actual reporter…
My classic MultiCloud Rant is getting a fair bit of attention this week; seems like republishing it was a good idea.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: A Multi-Cloud Rant (Holiday Replay)
Last Week In AWS: Censoring Myself Out of Pure Self-Interest
Last Week In AWS: The Dryer Ate the SOC
Screaming in the Cloud: Holiday Replay Edition – The Staying Power of Kubernetes with Kelsey Hightower
Screaming in the Cloud: Winning Hearts and Minds in Cloud with Brian Hall
Choice Cuts
Migrating to a cloud provider, like AWS, offers many benefits to its customers but setup must be done correctly to prevent potential security breaches. Check out the Top 7 AWS Security Misconfigurations you should be aware of to prevent potential security gaps in your infrastructure and discover remediations, such as use of AWS SCP in AWS organizations to define safety guardrails.
Introducing concurrent account provisioning operations for AWS Control Tower – Aw, man. Now what’m I supposed to do for most of an afternoon now that my "PROVISIONING!" excuse has been so rudely taken from me? This is a nice quality of life enhancement…
AWS Cost Anomaly Detection now supports percentage-based thresholds – This is the way. I care less about a $100 surprise charge when the baseline for the bill is $20K a month than I do when it’s normally $7.
AWS Trusted Advisor adds new fault tolerance checks – I wish Trusted Advisor didn’t require $100 a month or more in support charges per account, per month in order to get at what can basically be done via a number of open source tools already.
Heads-Up: Amazon S3 Security Changes Are Coming in April of 2023 – This is wonderful. Someone over on S3 remembered that the first "S" stands for "Simple," and they’re taking steps to get there. Just be aware it’s happening.
So… how do you truly solve the challenges of today’s ever-growing big data analytics needs? To help answer that, I, Corey Quinn, am incredibly excited to share ChaosSearch’s newly-launched video series focused on the seven deadly (ie. costly & complex) challenges of big data analytics! Check it out: The Data Journey – 7 Challenges of Big Data Analytics. During this 7 episode series, ChaosSearch’s CTO & Founder, Thomas Hazel, delves deep into the technical challenges (and solutions) around: Data Pipelining, Prep, Destination, Governance, Platforms, Analytics and Lifecycle! Each episode is about 10 minutes long, easy to consume, and designed specifically to help you supercharge your insights from your data! And now, without further ado, grab some popcorn, tell them that the esteemed Corey Quinn sent you, and enjoy the show!
LaunchDarkly’s journey from ingesting 1 TB to 100 TB per day with Amazon Kinesis Data Streams – This one sent me spiraling, since that would be inordinately expensive–at a level that would bankrupt LaunchDarkly based upon their funding history. It turns out that the real problem with this was in fact that I cannot perform simple arithmetic; it would indeed be crushingly expensive to send a zettabyte a month into Kinesis, but that’s not what they’re doing. Oops.
Visualizing the impact of AWS Lambda code updates – Wait. Wait wait wait. THIS is the amount of manual work you have to do in order to get a "deploy happened at this time" marker in your CloudWatch dashboards?!
New: AWS CLI v2 Docker images available on Amazon ECR Public – I’ve been using the official AWS CLI Docker image on Docker Hub for literally years; the fact that this didn’t exist on ECR Public until now is a prime example of so many "Amazon Basics" style offerings being incredibly weak versions of what customers actually want. If even Amazon itself couldn’t be bothered to use ECR Public for years, why on earth should any of its customers?
Tools
Get a handle on cloud sprawl! Empower teams to deliver better insights, faster. CloudQuery is a high-performance data integration platform for security and infrastructure teams. Sync your configuration data from any cloud or SaaS application to any destination/database to build your asset-inventory, CSPMs with standard data and visualization tools.
Ben Whaley’s beloved alterNAT can now be installed via the CDK.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
