Good Morning!
The last issue of the year; we made it! Thanks for reading along; we’ll be dark next week since AWS is largely dead right now, and back at it the week after.
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.
This analysis by Pat Myron shows something I’ve had a sneaking suspicion around for a while: the latest generation EC2 instances are not the same clear price/performance win of "more compute for less money" that previous generations have been.
A fascinating counterpoint to my "multi-cloud is a worst practice" position is Multi-Cloud Is The Default In Higher Ed. I’m not close enough to academia to know, personally.
My reposting of The Right and Wrong Way to Interview Engineers has solicited oh so very much feedback. If I didn’t respond to you yet, my apologies; it’s been a busy season.
After winning a 5-year contract, AWS gets to soak the US Navy to the tune of $700 million and change.
The register says that it’s time to retire ‘edge’ from our IT vocabulary. I think it’s very very close but not yet quite time to retire ‘edge’ from the IT lexicon until we’re told to do so.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: A Bunch of Vulnerabilities is Called an Embarrassment
Last Week In AWS: Holiday Replay: The Right and Wrong Way to Interview Engineers
Last Week In AWS: Screwing Up the Cloud Economics Math
Screaming in the Cloud: Holiday Replay Edition – Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery Made Easy with Rob Zuber
Screaming in the Cloud: The Uptycs of Cybersecurity Requirements with Jack Roehrig
Choice Cuts
Tired of the vulnerabilities, costs and slow recoveries when using snapshots to protect your AWS data? Check out Veeam for secure, zero-fuss AWS backup that won’t leave you high and dry when it’s time to restore.
Amazon Connect now allows contact center managers to join ongoing calls – I can’t make this up: the feature is called "barging." Because if there’s one thing I wished could have been more frequent when I worked in a call center, it was absolutely not the ability for my boss to barge in on any of my calls to make them worse.
Amazon OpenSearch Service now supports Amazon Graviton2 (M6g, C6g, R6g, and R6gd) instances in four additional regions – Why do I care what a managed service uses under the hood? Because this isn’t cloud-native, it’s cloud-hosted; it’s basically software installed on EC2 instances and then upcharged to you. Why would you use it? Because AWS advantages its own first party services like this by not charging for cross-AZ replication traffic, and there’s no way for you or any third party vendor to compete with that.
AWS IQ launches public profiles for companies – It’s becoming increasingly muddled what the difference is between IQ and the regular Marketplace.
AWS Organizations console adds support to centrally manage region opt-in settings on AWS accounts – It’s been a few days and I can’t find this thing in my Control-Tower managed org to save my life.
ROSA now provides an AWS Management Console experience for satisfying ROSA prerequisites – One of those prerequisites is apparently "be a massive enterprise with decades of software heritage lying around," because no matter what angle I look at ROSA from, I can’t seem to find a way to tilt at that windmill with a greenfield project.
Amazon EMR Serverless cost estimator – If there’s one thing customers love, it’s having to jump through complex hoops to predict what their cloud cost is going to be.
Organize your AWS Serverless code to prevent merge conflicts – A "merge conflict" is the collective noun for a group of developers. The way to avoid it is to only have one developer working on a serverless microservice.
AWS Multi-Region Fundamentals – AWS Multi-Region Fundamentals – A new whitepaper has dropped. Fun story, retrofitting multi-region is roughly about as hard as going multi-cloud is, but you’ll only find that out once you try to do it. Good luck!
Tools
All anyone really wants is to be understood. Including your users! Combine AI models with the Pinecone vector database to make your applications understand and act on what your users want… without making them spell it out. Make your search application find results by meaning instead of just keywords, your personalization system make picks based on relevance instead of just tags, and your security applications match threats by resemblance instead of just regex. Pinecone provides the cloud infrastructure that makes this easy, fast, and scalable. Understand more about Pinecone and try it →
The last tool of the year is a request from me; please +1 my request to add support for an ~/.aws/config.d/ directory to the AWS cli. I don’t want to comingle different client account profiles in one file; I want to include them on a per-client basis for a variety of excellent reasons. Help?
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
