| Good Morning!Welcome to issue number 106 of Last Week in AWS.You might notice an update to the visual styling of this newsletter. Hit reply and let me know what you think. The website is updated as well…I’ll be in Chicago this week. I’ll be attending a conference, but I should have some time to go crash a meetup / grab a cup of coffee. If you’ve got spare time, let me know. |
| This issue is sponsored in part by Site24x7, Zoho’s cloud monitoring solution. Site24x7’s powerful AI-driven monitoring solution offers complete monitoring right from end-user experience to application performance enabling you to get insights into what’s happening in your AWS environment, all from a single console for just 1 dollar per resource. Give it a spin Learn More |
| From the Community |
| A tale of migrating from SQL Server to AWS Aurora. I’m still waiting for a story about that migration done in reverse.Tinder (it’s like Date-a-Dog for humans) talks about their experiences with moving to Kubernetes. Honestly, this reads more like a cautionary tale from where I sit, but I recognize that this is contentious.Capital One talks a bit about their hard-won Best Practices for AWS Lambda Container Reuse. They use enough Lambda over there that they’re worth paying attention to. C1 isn’t exactly your typical large bank when it comes to cloud adoption…Every so often we get a glimpse at the people behind the blog posts. Hiro, the woman behind “AWS Newbies,” opens up about confronting her own mortality. If you read one link from today’s issue, it should be this one.I got an email from CloudFront that didn’t exactly thrill me. “We’re willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time” doesn’t apply to customer communication, and the forums don’t even count as that.I don’t generally enjoy playing with word cloud generators, but turning one loose on the full text of Jeff Bezos’s 23 Amazon shareholder letters is just my kind of nonsense.A random redditor broke NDA to tell us what tech stack AWS is built upon. I can’t approve of them violating their agreements, but this explains oh so very much.This week I spoke with Jessie Frazelle on Screaming in the Cloud Episode 56: Bringing Open Source to the Cloud. She’s just awesome. |
| If you’ve got Docker images you’re planning on using in a production environment, don’t miss this gem of a walkthrough to help you decrease their size. Why should you care? So you can save money and not slow things down every time a developer triggers a build. Thanks again to DigitalOcean for supporting this newsletter and the handy Docker optimization tips. Learn More |
| Jobs |
| If you’ve got an interesting job for this newsletter’s emminently employable subscribers, get in touch! The AWS ElasticBlockStore team has one impossible challenge: disambiguating their acronym from Elastic BeanStalk. They also have many challenges that they can overcome: effectively zero tolerance for data corruption, latency requirements that make almost every other AWS service look like slow tortoises, and being constantly overshadowed in keynotes by ridiculous services that wouldn’t work at all without EBS as a foundation. They can’t do it alone–join them today!How would you like an opportunity to apply your AWS skills with a company solving real-world problems and improves people’s lives and their health? Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research is hiring for a Principal Cloud Engineer in Cambridge, MA. It sounds like an incredible role: regularly work across teams cross-functionally helping other teams to implement industry best-practices in their work and keep the AWS-based platform running smoothly. Have a look at the job posting for more details.Do you want to work in the Bay Area? Almost certainly not; the people are insufferable here. Consider instead staying wherever the hell in the US you happen to be and talking to Truss, a software consultancy. Picture all of the advice that I’d give you, and now envision that wrapped in something you could tell a customer without getting punched right in your sarcastic mouth. That’s what Truss does, but they for some unknown reason don’t describe it that way. Currently, they are seeking stellar Infrastructure engineersanywhere in the US (yes, even the crappy parts) to help them with commercial and government contracts. Seriously, read this thing–they tell you what levels they’re looking to hire at AND THEN THEY EXPLAIN THEM SO YOU DON’T FEEL LIKE A MORON FOR NOT KNOWING THEIR INTERNAL RUBRIC! Virtually any other hiring manager who happens to be reading this should look at their job descriptions and feel comparatively ashamed. |
| Your CI/CD pipeline is broken. How do I know? Either I’m Nostradamus, or this is a very common problem. This week’s issue is sponsored by GoCD, from ThoughtWorks. It’s free and open-source, integrates natively with the most popular cloud infrastructures, and has both a broad community andenterprise support options for those of you who’re into either end of that very broad spectrum. Tools don’t solve issues, but GoCD eases your continuous delivery pains. Thanks to GoCD for their support. Learn More |
| Choice Cuts |
| Amazon CloudFront is now Available in Mainland China – It’s noteworthy that the only mainland Chinese city that has a CloudFront POP but not a full region is Shanghai.Amazon Comprehend Now Supports Confusion Matrices for Custom Classification – I swear, AI/ML service headlines are just restatements of “I’m a member of MENSA!”Amazon Polly Adds Arabic Language Support – أخيراAmazon Aurora Serverless Supports Sharing and Cross-Region Copying of Snapshots – I see that the latest Disney-themed database gains a bunch of cross-region features; this starts to make it look a little less Mickey Mouse and a bit more suited for production.Amazon WorkDocs Migration Service – On the one hand, it’s only a one-way migration. On the other, WorkDocs has such little apparent uptake that it kinda doesn’t need an export option.Announcing Azure to AWS migration support in AWS Server Migration Service – “We don’t talk about competitors at Amazon, except when we build tools to interface with them. And during keynotes for some strange reason. And when we reference them in product names aimed squarely at eviscerating their entire businesses. And on weekends for funsies.”Amplify Framework Announces New Amazon Aurora Serverless, GraphQL, and OAuth Capabilities – I see that adding a bunch of buzzwords to a title is still in vogue.AWS CloudFormation Coverage Updates for Amazon EC2, Amazon ECS and Amazon Elastic Load Balancer – As long as you know a service exists before CloudFormation does, you’re generally in pretty good shape.AWS Organizations now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions – This one took some doing. “How accounts are managed” is one of those things that’s made of regulatory red tape. I feel like this is roughly as difficult as it would be to steal the Declaration of Independence.NICE DCV Now Supports MacOS Native Clients – I didn’t realize that NICE was a thing–but how could could it be if it has no exclamation points after it? That joke’s for you, AWS employees. |
| Tools |
| Good news, you can use serverless-components/schedule to run a cron job. That’s… an awful lot of code to reimplement cron…If aws-nuke scares the crap out of you, aws-auto-cleanup does much the same thing, but more kindly. It supports TTL and whitelist settings. |
| … and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS |
