Good Morning!
I return from my sabbatical, blessedly unaware of what’s been going on in the cloud ecosystem for the past month and a half.
At a glance, some of the highlights:
The Amazon Games boss said that AI won’t take work away from actors because ‘for games, we don’t really have acting.’ Maybe that’s true for Amazon Games, which also doesn’t really have any hit games, but for the rest of the industry? Games have very clearly become a form of narrative storytelling, and the actors behind it bring those stories to life.
Elasticsearch is open source again, at least until they change their minds yet again and attempt to rug pull everyone a second time. That ship has sailed; OpenSearch is the way forward from here.
It turns out that Amazon’s only a 100% renewable energy powered company if you redefine some terms and forget what words mean. Poor form, if you ask me. Which you of course did by subscribing to this thing.
Amazon has quietly deprecated the DeepRacer; this year is the final DeepRacer league and "will be an AWS solution" moving forward, but that says nothing good about the future of the hardware platform. A shame; many folks seemed to really like it.
Now I’m back to the grind: bracing for re:Invent.
From the Community
If someone can get to your Yubikey for many uninterrupted hours, they can theoretically clone it, but it’s almost certainly way easier for someone to get to you with a heavy metal pipe for thirty seconds–so I’m not exactly freaking out about this attack for anything this side of a state level entity.
Now open — AWS Asia Pacific (Malaysia) Region | AWS News Blog – I missed that this was announced. Awesome, wonder why it’s there? Oh, right, data protection laws that make it tricky to transfer data abroad without consent. I sure do wish that internal use of data would require similar consent levels.
A great analysis of AWS data architecture approaches. It’s apparently in two white papers, but I’ve never heard of a "pilot light" approach to this. The term rankles.
massive bill upticks – This is a neat one. The AuditorAccess policy can cause when querying data about SQS queues; reading the metadata marks the queue as "active" and thus chargeable. Good on AWS for immediately refunding the overage when asked about it, but I wonder how often this catches people out.
My nemesis Rachel Stevens talks about Software Licensing Changes and Their Impact on Financial Outcomes. Spoiler: as best she can determine, there really aren’t any.
For a company whose CTO is known for wearing an "Encrypt Everything" t-shirt on stage, AWS sure does have a lot of resources that aren’t encrypted by default.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: IAM, some more IAM, and yet more IAM
Screaming in the Cloud: Creating GenAI Teammates with Amit Eyal Govrin
Screaming in the Cloud: Replay – Navigating the Morass of the Internet with Chloe Condon
Choice Cuts
Organizational Units in AWS Control Tower can now contain up to 1,000 accounts – I’m pretty sure I have a couple of clients that are going to be thrilled about this. There are a lot of patterns that lend themselves to this many accounts; some are great, some are terrible, but just "number of accounts" in isolation isn’t enough data to pass judgement. I deem this a Good Change.
Amazon SES announces enhanced onboarding with adaptive setup wizard and Virtual Deliverability Manager – Okay, ignore the SES bit for a second–"adaptive setup wizard" is the future of where AWS service consoles need to go. Understanding who the customer is and what they’re trying to achieve helps avoid the cornucopia of checkboxes that cause massive mental overhead. Call it AI if you must, but more of this type of thing please.
AWS Glue now provides job queuing – Huh, I was under the impression that Glue was the Spark portion that ran the job, and MWAA was the Airflow option that orchestrated the job. Doesn’t this start to cross that boundary?
AWS Network Load Balancer now supports configurable TCP idle timeout – Ooh, exciting network change for long-running connections that are also very quiet. GIVE IT A SECOND, Bobby, the computer is still thinking!
AWS named as a Leader in the first Gartner Magic Quadrant for AI Code Assistants – If I look at the leader quadrant, the usual suspects are all there: GitHub, Amazon, Google, and GitLab. With the exception of that last one, I’ve used the others and I’m frankly very hard pressed to articulate a meaningful difference between any of them.
AWS to highlight generative AI, cloud advancements at IBC 2024 – AWS lately highlights generative AI in every circumstance it possibly can, regardless of how much sense it makes.
Tools
At last, Google Docs natively supports Markdown.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
