Good Morning!
From the Community
This post on How To Be An AWS Alliance Lead is worth the read. And it’s true: more and more companies have jobs whose sole function is "managing their relationship with AWS." I imagine the day-to-day is akin to saying "nice doggy" until you can find a rock.
I missed this when it came out: Lessons Learned from 1TB DynamoDB Import.
Somehow with all of their complaining over the years about companies switching to "source available" software licenses, I somehow missed that Amazon Has a Restricted License, Too.
Always one to embrace the counterpoint, I love this critique of the reality of single table design for DynamoDB.
Why Can’t Network Teams Have Nice Things asks this surprisingly apt blog post. They avoid the obvious answer of "because historically, Network Teams were not nice people."
That didn’t take long; AWS has rapidly walked back their disastrous takedown of community re:Invent schedule planners, meaning the disruption only (conveniently) lasted long enough for the initial rush of session reservations.
Amazon has bought 300 acres of the Nevada desert and nobody appears to know why. My theory is that they need a place to bury their "Earn Trust" Leadership Principle where nobody will ever find it. I mean, have you TRIED to shop on their retail site lately? Good lord!
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: Cloud Institute for the Criminally Underpaid
Last Week In AWS: Delegate, Delegate, Delegate…
Screaming in the Cloud: Keeping Workflows Secure in an Ever-Changing Environment with Adnan Khan
Screaming in the Cloud: Making an Affordable Event Data Solution with Seif Lotfy
Choice Cuts
Introducing Amazon EC2 R7i instances – Amazon EC2 has launched the new R7i instances for the truly indecisive customers who just can’t make up their minds between memory, compute, I/O, or the number 7. Like-for-like, they’re roughly 5% more expensive than the R6i equivalent instance. Cue whining about "price/performance" that sails past the heads of the realities of many customer workloads.
AWS announces Amazon Redshift integration with Visual Studio Code – Unfortunately, Microsoft has already beaten them to market via integrating VS Code with Excel.
AWS announces member account level credit sharing preferences – This is a great thing, both for large organizations that have complicated accounting problems around the free flow of credits between accounts, and for employees who shine at their absolute best when stealing credit from other teams.
CloudWatch launches out-of-the-box alarm recommendations for AWS services – In what can only be described as AWS finally lending you a helping hand, you can now get pre-packaged alarm recommendations for your favorite services. Nothing says progress like handing you an off-the-shelf list, rather than DIY your digital house of horrors. Congrats, CloudWatch – you’re not as useless as you were yesterday. Someday they might even deign to give us a one-click "deploy these to my account for me." I’m being entirely sincere here–this is a great service for those of us who are intimidated by "a blank page upon which to craft a sensible default."
Leapfrog from CentOS 7.9 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.9 with Convert2RHEL and Leapp Utilities on AWS – This is great news for the customers who were running CentOS7 because it was supposed to be supported for a full ten years, who then find themselves getting screwed over by the upcoming Surprise Lifecycle Shortening by Red Hat. This presupposes that those customers, finding themselves completely pantsed by Red Hat, figure that their best option is to pay Red Hat money for screwing them over rather than migrating to alternatives that stand by their commitments to users.
Enhance your security posture by storing Amazon Redshift admin credentials without human intervention using AWS Secrets Manager integration – Deep integration with other AWS services is one way that Secrets Manager can increasingly differentiate itself from Systems Manager Parameter Store by ways other than "we cost money instead of being free."
Archive to cold storage with Amazon DynamoDB – Remember, if you don’t need rapid access to data, you probably can save a bunch of money by putting it into storage media that respond slightly more slowly.
Keeping an eye on your cattle using AI technology – In an effort to corner the livestock surveillance market, AWS’s latest brainchild involves using Machine Learning to track your cows. Because farmers, having toiled over their fields from dawn to dusk, were desperately awaiting a solution to monitor Bessie late into the night. Moo’ve over traditional farming, the artificial-intelligence cow herders are here. Amusingly, a bunch of Amazon’s Generative AI solutions are "in preview," which means they don’t support CloudFormation–meaning that the systems you implement to track your cattle are themselves pets rather than cattle.
Top 10 unforgettable moments from AWS GenAI Day – In another self-congratulatory post from the AWS blog detailing 10 "unforgettable" moments from the AWS GenAI day, they managed to forget to make it even slightly engaging for anyone not employed by AWS. Honestly, an exec tripping over a microphone cord and faceplanting on the livestream would have been required to make anything "unforgettably" distinguished from the constant firehose of GenAI content without substance.
Stellantis: driving innovation by investing in employees’ digital skills – In a stunning revelation, Stellantis has realized that treating its employees with a modicum of respect might score them innovation points – brave, really. Translated from PR Speak: they’re throwing AWS training at them and crossing their fingers.
Tools
dynamodb-armor is a drop-in replacement for DynamoDB and wraps its API calls in sensible ways to avoid production issues.
I wish one of AWS’s code habits was "consistent APIs" but clearly that’s not the case.
I wish something like "grep" existed for cloud storage–wait, isn’t that what cloudgrep is for?
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
