Good Morning!
We published our Guide to Savings Plans (because they’re awesome) along with our Guide to Reserved Instances (because some service teams like RDS refuse to play nicely with the other kids). Together, they answer an awful lot of questions we tend to get from folks. We hope you enjoy them.
From the Community
It is hard to recommend Google Cloud has a frequently mentioned refrain about how Google Cloud’s deprecations make it very hard to trust. I don’t think AWS is getting there–but frankly, rather than the drip-drip-drip of deprecations we’ve seen all year from AWS, they’d be better served by just ripping the band-aid off with an omnibus post announcing EOL for all the effected services and being done with it. Instead, this constant reminder that "another service has been deprecated this week" makes it feel like AWS is heading down this path.
This is a great analysis on the attack surface of AWS Nitro Enclaves, along with some settings you should absolutely implement yourself if you’re using them.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: FTP is Eternal at Enterprises
Screaming in the Cloud: How to Responsibly Automate Your Home with Mike Gray
Screaming in the Cloud: Politely Asking for Permissions in the Cloud with Sandy Bird
Choice Cuts
Amazon Aurora MySQL now supports RDS Data API – This took a truly disturbing amount of time to get implemented; presumably the RDS team was preoccupied with "not supporting Savings Plans" as their team priority.
Introducing Amazon EC2 C8g and M8g Instances – Good launch. However, if I upgrade my dev/utility instance from its current c7g.large to a c8g.large, it will increase its cost by over 9%. The machine is usually bored; there’s no "but you make better price/performance gains" argument to be had here–it’s strictly a price hike.
Amazon EC2 Instance Connect now supports IPv6 – Good! Now do another 50 services and maybe you’ll start to have something comprehensive-shaped.
Amazon SNS now delivers SMS text messages via AWS End User Messaging – SNS hands off its SMS delivery responsibility to a service that prioritizes such things.
AWS CloudFormation Git sync now supports pull request workflows to review your stack changes – A solid win for the gitops folks / infrastructure as code movement.
AWS CloudTrail launches network activity events for VPC endpoints (preview) – Oh hell yes. This helps me figure out why the bloody thing isn’t working when it damned well should–oh of course, it’s a security group.
AWS Serverless Application Repository now supports AWS PrivateLink – Holy crap, that thing’s still alive?! Not that it’s an ignored service or anything, but the footer on the Serverless App Repo still shows a copyright date from four years ago.
AWS announces general availability for Security Group Referencing on AWS Transit Gateway – This doesn’t solve much technically from a capability story– but it absolutely makes life better for the humans driving the technology.
Generative AI Cost Optimization Strategies – If GenAI is this expensive (and I assure you as a Cloud Economist it absolutely is) then why are you seemingly so hell bent on shoving it down our throats constantly?
Customizing your HPC environment: building AMIs for AWS Parallel Computing Service – Some deranged jackwagon on the HPC team has given this post an image mispronouncing AMI as "ah-mee." I’m not kidding. Who would DO such a thing?!
Making traffic lights more efficient with Amazon Rekognition – This is a great example of "you don’t want to use the cloud for the use case." Their own figures show it costs $6K a year in cloud charges per intersection. At that rate, running your own image recognition thing locally starts to pay for itself fiendishly quickly. I mean hey, either way you’re gluing a bunch of disparate things together–that’s the meaning of "AWS Solution" when used in the corporate blog context.
Whose contract is it anyway? How AWS Marketplace works – This is a super handy guide to exactly why AWS will disclaim any liability for a product you buy on their website, just like Amazon retail does when you buy a toy for your kid that’s stuffed with lead or whatnot.
Switch your file share access from Amazon FSx File Gateway to Amazon FSx for Windows File Server – Yes, because it’s that time of the week again: the FSx File Gateway is being deprecated. For god’s sake; stop doling these out and just bite the bullet already.
Tools
A handy roundup of CVEs affecting AWS Lambda, since AWS makes these hard to find.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
