That’s right, our Charity T-Shirt drive is in play once again; snag yours at shitposting.fashion. All proceeds to benefit our friends at 826 National.
From the Community
Duolingo reports how they reduced their cloud spending by 20%, presumably by sending their creepy owl with severe boundary issues to chat with some Amazon SVP at 3AM in their bedroom.
Your AWS Account is a floating cloud of garbage. Mine is too. Nope, not a tweet, a fascinating article. Go read it.
Clickbait headline aside, How WebSockets cost us $1M on our AWS bill is a good example of how it doesn’t make sense to go delving into the deep weeds of your application architecture for cost or performance reasons–most of the time. Except in circumstances like this, it absolutely does.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: A Wheelbarrow Full of Nickels
Screaming in the Cloud: Finding a Fix for the Cloud with Stephen Barr
Screaming in the Cloud: Sleuthing Out the Key to Teamwork with Dylan Etkin
Choice Cuts
Amazon CloudFront no longer charges for requests blocked by AWS WAF – AWS realized that since WAF itself charges per blocked request, charging customers a second time was just a smidgen too far.
Amazon OpenSearch Service announces Extended Support for engine versions – "How do we charge customers more money after a period of time in return for quite literally no extra work?" "I’ve got an idea…" Note that the fee is per "normalized instance hour," so you’re going to pay a boatload if you think this is some ancient time like 2021 when you could spin up an AWS service, not touch it for a while, and not one day get belted across the face for more money.
Configure Route53 CIDR blocks rules based on Internet Monitor suggestions – Better performance routing for Route 53; this lets you point traffic to the best location given the current latency climate on the internet. Neat!
Announcing an improved self-guided experience for AWS Partner Central – What drives me nuts about this item is the inconsistent capitalization of the word "Partner," even when not used as part of an AWS-specific phrase. Nails on a chalkboard…
AWS introduces service versioning and deployment history for Amazon ECS services – Nice, we can roll back to the "copy of copy of v2.0FINAL_111024_usethisone.cq.prod-deploy" version of the app.
Reduce your Microsoft licensing costs by upgrading to 4th generation AMD processors – One of the reasons I stopped working in the Microsoft universe many years ago was nonsense like this. Cost optimizations around completely arbitrary things like "number of vCPU cores the computer has" drove me up a wall. I have a job to do; playing Amateur Licensing Accountant for the benefit of Microsoft was something I couldn’t stomach. I still can’t.
The attendee’s guide to the AWS re:Invent 2024 Compute track – "THERE ARE LOTS OF NON-AI SESSIONS" friend this is the Compute Track and damned near a majority of sessions have AI/ML or related terms in the session title.
Unauthorized tactic spotlight: Initial access through a third-party identity provider – The AWS security folks open up a smidgen about real-world sophisticated attacks against customer accounts, in this case by way of third party IDPs. I have to confess, I’ve always been exceedingly hesitant to broker all of my account logins through an additional third party…
Scaling up the Prime Video audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs by 90% – Prime Video Tech – For some reason AWS has memory-holed this article. Anyone know why? Fortunately the Wayback Machine remembers…
Tools
A small collection of handy AWS CLI Tips and Tricks.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
