Welcome to the 15th issue of Last Week in AWS.
Last week was relatively quiet, given the holiday in the US, so we’ve got a slightly shorter than normal issue this week.
Interested in sponsoring an issue? Hit reply and let me know.
Community Contributions
A great overview of reasons to consider a multi-AWS account architecture, ranging from the obvious to “wait, that’s a thing?”
“Somebody should benchmark SQS” I thought to myself a few weeks ago. It turns out, that somebody is Softwaremill, and they did just that. No surprises here, but it’s great to get real-world data around what performance looks like. Obviously run your own tests if you’re sensitive to SQS latencies, but this serves as a great starting point– both for numbers and for methodology.
Atlassian takes us on a deep dive of how they built their Kubernetes infrastructure on top of AWS. For more in this vein, see the relevant AWS blog post below.
Choice Cuts From the AWS Blog
Manage Kubernetes Clusters on AWS Using Kops | AWS Compute Blog – Pay attention; Amazon themselves are blogging about how to work with Kubernetes. For those who have better things to do with their lives than follow container orchestration systems (seriously, is it really even living?!), Kubernetes came out of Google, and as a result is built with Google Cloud abstractions; getting it to work on AWS is a bit of a stretch sometimes. This speaks volumes about how AWS potentially sees the future.
New Information in the AWS IAM Console Helps You Adhere to IAM Best Practices – AWS expands its automation of telling you “you’re doing it wrong,” giving CISOs everywhere a twinge about their future job security.
AWS Price Reduction – SQL Server Standard Edition on EC2 – It’s now less money to run Microsoft SQL Server on EC2. No, not Microsoft SQL Server on RDS; why would you even bring that up? That’s a completely different thing! (Wait, what?)
New – API & CloudFormation Support for Amazon CloudWatch Dashboards – Tired of building custom dashboards that nobody ever looks at? You can now use CloudFormation to programmatically build dashboards nobody will ever look at instead.
Tools
Now a tool to automate spinning up your load testing environment, which is a polite way of “fire up a bunch of AWS instances to beat the crap out of your website until it breaks.” Wait, there’s more– it’s called bees with machine guns.
I’ve wasted months playing slap-and-tickle with a variety of tools to encrypt secrets within files. Mozilla has come out with an answer that ties into KMS; of course it’s too late to solve the problem I spent months engineering around, and of course they make my stab at it look like a joke. Excellent work– check out sops.
Tip of the Week
Ever wonder what some esoteric service or acronym from the land of AWS means? Take a look at the official glossary if you get stuck; it’ll help you grasp the difference between EBS (the volume thing) and EBS (the beanstalk thing); soon you’ll have no reason to be confused.
…and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
