Good Morning!
First, hi Seattle! I’ll be at Outer Planet Brewing at 6PM tomorrow (Tuesday); come by and let me buy you a drink if you’re in town.
If the keynote at last week’s NYC Summit was your first exposure to AWS, you could easily be forgiven for thinking that AWS was purely a generative AI company that did nothing at all with non-AI workloads, or databases, or compute, or networking.
This is a significant mistake on their part, as their messaging is scrambling to go the exact same places that every other big tech company is swarming–only without the compelling story to tell about it to make customers pay attention.
From the Community
Tailscale Funnel makes it easy to share your local development over the internet for collaboration, testing, and experimentation. With Tailscale Funnel you can receive a webhook from GitHub, share a local service with your team, or host a status page from your own computer.
Funnel securely exposes your dev environment at a stable URL, complete with auto-provisioned TLS certificates. Use it from the command line or the new VS Code extension.
rdsconn was a great hack by Aidan Steele; because nothing gold can stay, AWS has neutered the approach it was using.
I’ve been looking for ages to find a systemd by example reference–and now I have. I hate that this is considered cloud-relevant.
Apparently not understanding what ‘Voluntary Resignation’ means, that’s what Amazon will call their firing of employees who don’t relocate close to an office.
My reaction to the news that AWS Will Begin Charging For Public IPv4 Addresses was sent out of cycle last Friday and the news is still important to keep on top of.
Choice Cuts
The new Amazon Chime 5 on Windows, macOS, and web is coming soon – Amazon Chime Help Center – This is a big deal for the only Amazon Chime customer who doesn’t work at Amazon: me. I can’t wait to see how well this works!
Access and Query are now generally available for Amazon Managed Blockchain – In scam-related news, this is probably an exciting feature for this service’s sole customer. Unlike Chime, that customer is absolutely not me.
AWS Lambda adds support for Python 3.11 – This is a welcome change from their previous incredibly slow process. It’s somewhat suspicious that the older 3.8 runtime deprecates on the first day of re:Invent; apparently AWS doesn’t want people paying attention to the conference this year.
AWS Entity Resolution: Match and Link Related Records from Multiple Applications and Data Stores – This sounds like an awesome service, and I know just the customer that desperately needs it: the AWS Events team. See, every time I attend a webinar, summit, re:Invent, mixer, drinkup, or similar event, I get slapped with a 17 question mandatory form. First name, last name, company, how big we are, what we do, are we using AWS, etc. A forward-thinking service like this could really improve the customer experience, as well as helping announcements like this not present as hypocrisy. "Sure, it’s good enough for you schmucks, but we know better. Hah, remember when we told you ‘data’ was the future and you bought that, too?"
New – Amazon EC2 P5 Instances Powered by NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs for Accelerating Generative AI and HPC Applications – They only come in one size, and are $98.32 an hour in Virginia; the 5 stands for how many kidneys you’ll have to sell to run one of these puppies. They are also reportedly super in demand.
New – AWS Public IPv4 Address Charge + Public IP Insights – AWS will be raising your AWS bill starting in six months. There has never been a better time to yell at people about IPv6 support.
Preview – Enable Foundation Models to Complete Tasks With Agents for Amazon Bedrock – If you implement this into your customer service workflow, and you include lengthy pauses to pretend an actual human is typing, I hope your favorite Google product gets cancelled.
Migrating AWS Lambda functions from the Go1.x runtime to the custom runtime on Amazon Linux 2 – The Golang runtime finds itself, in a twist of fate that’s somehow fitting, Googled.
Introducing AWS HealthScribe – automatically generate clinical notes from patient-clinician conversations using AWS HealthScribe – Along with Healthlmaging, this is a prime example of AWS’s industry-vertical approach: slap an industry name on a barely differentiated version of a baseline service. Trouble is, customers are sophisticated when it comes to their specific industries, and they aren’t fooled. Virtually every previous incarnation of this pattern lands well with the tech press and the analyst firms, but actual customers pan them.
Analyze rodent infestation using Amazon SageMaker geospatial capabilities – It’s pretty clear that when it comes to SageMaker’s overzealous marketing, even the computer itself can smell a rat.
AWS Reaffirms its Commitment to Responsible Generative AI – Their primary example of this commitment is only releasing their Generative AI offerings to individual customers in private previews. What some would call "being late to the party," they recast as "responsibility."
Introducing Smithy for Python – Back when this was Java, I didn’t care. Now that it’s in Python, I would care except I’m too busy resolving dependencies in order to get my project working. Note: they’ve taken this article down, but are about to learn that automatically keep receipts via a Lambda function. Click the link and see what I mean…
Amazon SageMaker Canvas announces SOME THINGS I AM NOT GOING TO TELL YOU ABOUT – See, over a year ago SageMaker cranked up a "per session" charge eight months after I’d last played with it and deleted all resources, and that gouged me for $260 of AWS credits that were never refunded. I’ve replaced the link for this item to my blog post explaining the situation in detail. As a result, I equate the service to "scam" and refuse to legitimize it by telling you all about what it can or cannot do now–because it can absolutely slap you with a surprise $2000 a month bill per user who tries it anywhere in your AWS Organization. AWS SageMaker still owes me $260.
Tools
A nice smattering of tools that came out of the folks at AWS Support.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
