I went diving in Cozumel last week, and only caught up on AWS nonsense at the end, when it came time to write this thing. A busy week over in AWS-land!
Happy holidays this week; I really hope next week’s issue is a ghost town. Take time with your friends, family, and on-prem pets.
From the Community
AWS VP of Basically Everything (okay, Storage, Data Streaming, Messaging, and Amazon Q Developer for migration and modernization) Mai-Lan Thomsen Bukovec sets forth a Principal Engineer Roles Framework. For those unaware, Amazon Principal Engineer isn’t like "VP at a bank;" they don’t pass that distinction out all william-nilliam. This post explains why it’s like that. I’m already seeing applications of this framework well beyond engineering. Take the time to read it, and let me know what you think.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: The re:Invent Stragglers
Screaming in the Cloud: Creating the Foundation for a New Home Assistant with Paulus Schoutsen
Screaming in the Cloud: Replay – Learning to Give in the Cloud with Andrew Brown
Choice Cuts
Amazon AppStream 2.0 introduces client for macOS – 8 years after it launched, AppStream 2.0 finally realized "hey, maybe MacOS users would want to stream applications too!" Did they send this one in via Pony Express?
Amazon EC2 instances support bandwidth configurations for VPC and EBS – This feels like it’s smack dab in the sweet spot of "things I pay AWS to worry about." I’m sure it’s helpful for someone, but it shouldn’t be.
Amazon Timestream for InfluxDB now supports Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) connectivity – I used to view AWS’s IPv4 charge as a spur to adopt IPv6-but here we are a year in, and significant services still aren’t supporting v6. In that light it’s hard to see the IPv4 per-IP charge as anything other than a cash grab.
Amazon WorkSpaces Thin Client now available to purchase in India – Man, something in India must have royally pissed Amazon off, if they’re gonna inflict these crappy things on the market. Source: I have one. It… ain’t great.
AWS Backup launches support for search and item-level recovery – About damn time. "We need to restore the entire environment" is vanishingly rare compared to "we need to restore this one specific file upon which all depends."
AWS Mainframe Modernization now supports connectivity over Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) – This is an amazing technical leap for the mainframe set. If the team behind this is taking requests, I’d like it if carrier pigeons supported push notifications next.
AWS Marketplace now supports self-service promotional media on seller product detail pages – Awesome! If there’s one thing the AWS Marketplace has been missing, it’s self-serving nonsense.
AWS re:Post now supports Spanish and Portuguese – "Nobody is using re:Post and we can’t understand why. Maybe it’s because our target audience doesn’t speak English?" You’re teetering on the brink of an epiphany there, my friends.
AWS Resource Explorer supports 59 new resource types – In my COP218 talk at re:Invent, I was successfully (and correctly!) talked out of taking a cheap shot at Resource Explorer by my co-presenters–so I’ll take it here instead! This is why I say that the AWS bill is the single source of truth of what’s running in your AWS accounts–because even Resource Explorer is playing catch-up with reality. FOR SOME UNKNOWN REASON services never seem to launch without billing support.,..
AWS offers a self-service feature to update business names on AWS Invoices – "Okay, what the hell customer is ‘Shitposting Industries’ and–nevermind I just figured it out."
Announcing CloudFormation support for AWS Parallel Computing Service – Wow, haven’t seen one of these in a while. It was like somebody flipped a switch, and instead of services lacking CloudFormation support all the time, it’s become rare enough to occasion comment. Someone at AWS is sweating the details. Know that your work doesn’t go unnoticed.
Announcing Node Health Monitoring and Auto-Repair for Amazon EKS – AWS – Is the Amazon EKS team okay?! Are they safe?! I can’t remember the last time they launched a new feature like this without charging exorbitantly for it. Please check to see if they need help.
And that’s a wrap! – An era comes to an end. Jeff Barr has been the voice of the AWS News Blog for the past twenty years, and he’s finally hanging up his ~690 broken keyboards to work on other things at AWS. Due to a confluence of his personality and the era in which he joined AWS, he was a singular exception to AWS’s official posts having the corporate daylights beaten out of them. You can tell it’s a Jeff Barr post without reading the byline just due to the sheer humanity they put out. No one else has been able to breach Corporate Comms containment like he has, and I doubt they ever will again. The AWS star is a bit dimmer today because of this.
Many happy returns, Jeff.
Best practices for creating a VPC for Amazon RDS for Db2 – It remains "don’t do it." I requested access to DB2 when it launched a year ago, which in turn is routed to IBM. I’m still waiting to hear back from them. I am not even slightly kidding.
How the Amazon TimeHub team handled disruption in AWS DMS CDC task caused by Oracle RESETLOGS: Part 3 – Huh, I really thought they’d have said all they needed to say in the first two parts. Congratulations to both of the customers to whom this applies I guess?
How to detect and monitor Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) access with AWS CloudTrail and Amazon CloudWatch – What this article doesn’t mention is that the data event in CloudTrail costs 20x more money than the event it’s monitoring does. That is not an exaggeration.
Enforce resource configuration to control access to new features with AWS – This is an incredibly deep article discussing a very complex thing–but there’s a much easier way. Simply run your workload in a non-"flagship" AWS region, and new features basically won’t come your way for years after they’re first released.
Maximizing your cloud journey: Engaging an AWS Solutions Architect – Man, every AWS Solutions Architect I’ve ever met has been humble to a fault, so why does this headline speak as if I should genuflect whenever they pass by? The SA team is great, but to read this you’d think they were dogmatic self-absorbed asshats. I assure you, they are not–and despite recurring rumors to the contrary, they’re not working on commission. (They also don’t pay their own AWS bills, which probably explains their liberal use of Managed NAT Gateways in reference architectures)…
Tools
The always-brilliant Simon Willinson talks about building Python tools with a one-shot prompt using uv run and Claude Projects. This is genius, and I’m going to steal the idea immediately. His example project is a tool that spits out all the reasons S3 might be throwing an access denial for an object.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
