Good Morning!
I’ll be in Seattle for a drink-up next week; save the date for Tuesday night. Details to follow in next week’s issue.
From the Community
AWS’s list of tasks that require root user credentials fails to include Mechanical Turk which absolutely does require it. Man, the company’s attention to detail is being distracted by what I can only assume is AI. This grows concerning.
Date-a-Dog / Tinder For Pets came up with a takeover attack for AWS Amplify that’s since been patched.
In an admirable move, Tailscale is adding SSO support to all plans. It’s a nice salmon swimming against the stream of SSO taxes.
The AWS stops selling Snowmobile truck for cloud migrations is no longer offered by AWS; I posit it’s because there aren’t too many data center networks that can saturate 100PB over a single link over a reasonable timeframe; getting a whole bunch of Snowball Edges means you can fill them in parallel a lot more easily.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: A Remarkably Quiet Week
Screaming in the Cloud: Behind The Tech Event Marketing Scene With Katie Reese
Screaming in the Cloud: Mastering Kubernetes for Multi-Cloud Efficiency With Nick Eberts
Choice Cuts
AWS IAM Identity Center adds independent 90-days session duration for Amazon CodeWhisperer – I’ve been using GitHub Copilot for ages so I haven’t checked it lately, but I seem to recall CodeWhisperer needed constant logins to function. Maybe that’s changed, but I’m not super interested in paying for a second coding assistant when the first one is as great as Copilot…
Deloitte and AWS Strategic Collaboration to Accelerate Cloud Adoption in Growth Markets – Perhaps next they could strategically collaborate to get Deloitte’s website to stop living at the "www2" subdomain. I get cloud migrations are tricky, but you do see how having that for decades kinda undermines your whole "we’re experts in cloud adoption" go to market messaging, right?
Improve cost visibility of Amazon EKS with AWS Split Cost Allocation Data – Credit where due, this is nice. Split allocation on clusters is a perennial problem for customers.
Congratulations to the PartyRock generative AI hackathon winners – Holy CRAP, the winner got $20K as a prize–oh, wait. They’re AWS credits. Nevermind; go and put it with the rest of them. But seriously, congratulations to the folks who entered just based on the sheer creativity it expressed. There’s so much "clever" lurking within AWS’s (gargantuan) user community.
Access Amazon RDS across AWS accounts using AWS PrivateLink, Network Load Balancer, and Amazon RDS Proxy – "I’m in Account A, and want to access RDS in Account B, this blog post explains how to do it." How do you not see that happening and not recognize that your service team has a bit of work to do to solve what’s currently and very obviously a big point of friction in the AWS customer experience? "Eh, I’ll make it listen publicly and maybe remember to add a security group, it’s easier" is what actual customers often do.
Programmatic approach to optimize the cost of Amazon RDS snapshots – "You have to run a bunch of bash and write some SQL" is a common annoyance with AWS Solutions, but given that it’s RDS I will allow it this time.
Reduce cost and improve performance by migrating to Amazon DocumentDB 5.0 – The strong "pick me" vibes from this are impressive. It turns out that customers aren’t migrating to Amazon Basics MongoDB in droves, and the palpable sense of desperation to boost the service’s revenues can be felt in the way this post is worded.
A secure approach to generative AI with AWS – Gen AI security is very important; you don’t want third parties or worse, your competition to find out what lies the overhyped chat bot is telling you about your data.
AWS celebrates big technology wins at NAB 2024 – If the "NAB Show Product of the Year Award" that Deadline Cloud just won isn’t pay-for-play, congratulations to the team. If it is, congratulations to their corp dev team instead.
New AWS survey reveals the link between AI fluency and the next education revolution – Company desperate to sell you AI / ML at any cost (which is high, obviously) commissions a survey that shows positive things happening if you learn more about AI. Surely there are no conflicts of interest at work here.
CVE-2024-28056 – Good work, friends at Datadog. Security is hard, but unlike a large Redmond-based competitor, AWS seems to take it seriously enough to fix the issues quickly while also communicating with impacted customers. What a zany idea; surely that won’t scale, right?
Creating shortcut links to AWS Management Console destinations – AWS IAM Identity Center – Ooh, you can offer users a "click this link" to take them where they need to go now? That’s a big win.
In an effort to streamline the clunky S3 interface, they removed the pesky part where they warn you about open S3 buckets. I guess those aren’t problems anymore!
Tools
Delving into depth around the explosion of CloudTrail events generated by using the console now gets easier with Cloud Console Cartographer.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
