Good Morning!
Hello from Seattle! Did you know it’s cold here? Yikes, no wonder the people who name AWS services are so apparently humorless; they’re too busy staying warm.
From the Community
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Apparently AWS CodeWhisperer is getting much better than it was in its early days.
I don’t usually go for benchmarks without heavy caveating, but this Arm vs. Intel series has a great approach; given that the author’s a computer science professor without any (obvious) vendor ties means I’m inclined to trust it.
Max Rozen talks about moving a million uptime checks a week off of Lambda and onto Fly.io.
Darko Mesaros did a crime: deployed Kubernetes with the best computer 1986 had to offer, a Trash 80 (TRS-80 for the pedants). The worst computer 1986 had to offer remains a cornerstone offering of IBM Cloud.
AWS denies that its is slowing AWS sustainability work. Given that AWS generally doesn’t comment on these questions I’m immediately suspicious. I’d also point out that its carbon footprint tool lags its competitors something fierce and has seen no meaningful update in years, so I’m wondering if the reason it’s not "slowing" its sustainability work is because that work was at a full stop already.
My post about AWS Being Asleep at the Lambda Wheel got a tremendous about of email–all of it agreeing with my overall point. I’m sure that some folks on the Lambda team aren’t happy with the post, to which I have to ask: why are you reading it instead of shipping modern runtimes? Work first, play later.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: AWS is Asleep at the Lambda Wheel
Last Week In AWS: Corey Invades Seattle
Last Week In AWS: Listening to This Podcast Will Improve Your Hiring Diversity
Screaming in the Cloud: Data Protection the AWS Way with Wayne Duso and Nancy Wang
Screaming in the Cloud: The Growing Dominion of Cloud Providers with Raj Bala
Choice Cuts
Do you cringe every time someone starts up a new AWS account? And changes to the cloud are like the Wild West! They can impact not only cloud cost but also security and reliability. Knowing what cloud assets you have and their health status can be challenging. Firefly can help you find Shadow IT, then codify it as Terraform IaC so it can be properly managed and governed. Try it for free at gofirefly.io.
Amazon Aurora Serverless v1 now supports customer configurable maintenance windows – I like how Aurora Serverless v1 and v2 are each getting diverging capabilities and are still under active development; given that neither can scale to zero, neither one of them count as "serverless" by a variety of definitions, including some of the early AWS whitepapers on the topic.
Amazon CloudWatch Internet Monitor is now generally available – From the makers of "Happy Fun Status Page That Lies To You" comes better observability about the overall state of the internet. This is AWS’s managed service for plausible deniability.
AWS Lambda Powertools for .NET is now generally available – The SawStop table saw has a great feature built in: when it detects flesh-like capacitance disruption, it fires a cartridge that stops and retracts the blade basically instantly. It’s an amazingly great safety mechanism that’s well worth the price! By contrast, if you’re not careful the Lambda Powertools will take your hand clean off–but it’s still worth exploring for the functionality. If you don’t believe me, just ask Ol’ Stumpy the Serverless Architect…
Amazon Neptune Serverless now scales down to 1 NCU to save costs – 1 is not 0, and thus Neptune "Serverless" isn’t. At over $70 a month minimum, you’re not going to be deploying these to every branch you’ve got in development, and thus it violates a bunch of what people think of as "serverless" tenets.
AWS Control Tower announces a progress tracker for landing zone setup and upgrades – Also from the makers of "Happy Fun Status Page That Lies To You" comes a new progress bar that will take a page from Microsoft’s playbook I suspect…
In the Works – AWS Region in Malaysia – I didn’t realize Malaysia had a data residency requirement, but of course it does; otherwise AWS wouldn’t build a region there. It’s the same reason they won’t build one in the central US until some state passes such a law, which they’ll do as soon as they realize that it’d mean a multi-billion dollar investment from Amazon.
New – Amazon Lightsail for Research with All-in-One Research Environments – Just when I’m on the verge of forgetting about Lightsail (because it makes me regret the sharp edges of the other AWS services) they come out with a neat enhancement to remind me that they exist.
Announcing Amazon ECS Task Definition Deletion – This is a sad feature enhancement; this was previously an immutable auditing database that didn’t require blockchain nonsense, but now it can’t be used that way anymore.
Announcing the end of Windows Installer support for AWS Tools for Windows – Wow, AWS deprecated a thing. Sure, it’s a busted janky thing that has a better answer, but people were (to my understanding) using that thing…
“Avatar: The Way of Water” and the future of filmmaking – "The team ran 3.3 billion thread hours on AWS," meaning that the movie was basically "Avatar: The Way of Cloud Bills." Yowza!
A detailed overview of Trusted Advisor Organizational Dashboard – Ah yes, Trusted Advisor… the service that suggests that I first terminate an unused instance in my account to save $20 a month, then suggests I buy a Reserved Instance for that same instance to save $10 a month, then suggests I resize it to an instance that costs $5 to save $15 a month, then rolls the whole thing up as "potential savings of $45 on my $20 instance." "Trusted" is doing an awful lot of undifferentiated heavy lifting here…
Tools
MinIO object storage runs everywhere the cloud operating model runs – offering S3 compatible, cloud-native storage to enterprises that value simplicity, scale and performance in a software-defined, self-hosted solution. Learn more at www.min.io and be sure to tell them that Corey sent you.
Since the AWS Lambda team is abdicating their role, some of you pointed out some worksaround for the issues this causes. aryounce/go-arm-lambda: More easily run Golang ARM binaries as Lambda functions is a way to more easily run Golang arm binaries as Lambda functions, since that isn’t supported natively despite it being easy as hell for Go itself to support. Here’s a post on how to roll your own container image for Python 3.11. And some helpful folks pointed out that in less than a month the only supported Ruby runtime version goes EOL entirely. I really wish I didn’t have to collect these.
Last week I mentioned a wrapper around Session Manager to call instances by its name; apparently Disney has come out with a much more fully featured set of SSM helpers. How does it not have an adorable talking animal as a mascot, though?
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
