| Good Morning!Welcome to issue number 112 of Last Week in AWS.I have two equally exciting announcements to make today.The first is that I’ll be giving part of the Leadership session in the re:Inforce Foundations track later this month. “That’s a lot of words; what does that mean?” Think of it like the keynote for one of the four conference tracks. There’s already a conference keynote, so you can think of this as the valuenote instead. That’s right–I made a datastore joke.If you’re going to be in Boston, let me know; there’s never been a better time to attend the world’s most popular cloud security conference named after an email subject line. Email me and I’ll even give you a discount code that knocks a few bucks off the price.The second is that as of three hours before this email goes out, I’ve launched a new podcast: AWS Morning Brief. I’ve been asked to create a podcast separate from Screaming in the Cloud–one that doesn’t feature guests, and is as snarky as this email is. Today the dream arrives; the inaugural issue is sponsored by AWS, specifically the re:Inforce conference. That sound you just heard was the population of an entire floor of a skyscraper in Seattle simultaneously dropping their coffee cups and shouting “We sponsored WHAT?!”Give it a listen, and let me know what you think. |
| This issue is sponsored in part by Site24x7, a full-stack monitoring service by Zoho. Site24x7’s powerful features not only enables you to gain insight into the resource usage of your AWS hosted infrastructure but can also tell you how much they are costing your organization. So you get to kill two birds in one stone, without blowing your IT budget. Give it a try. Learn More |
| From the Community |
| Should AWS access and secret keys live in your codebase? Hell no they should not.An introduction to what AWS is.A tale of ECS Secrets Done Right.As service meesh (yes, that’s how they pluralize) become more common, so do articles about working with them. Excellent former boss of mine Josh Barratt has a great article about Envoy custom auth rate limiting for your perusal.A scientific rant about why AMI is obviously pronounced with three syllables.Atlassian tells their story about getting low latency, multi-region services on AWS to scale effectively.AWSgeek has another Visual Service Summary, this time of AWS Ground Station.A dive into the new i3en instances and their use for bigger data.Tim Bray dumps his thoughts on SQS. |
| This week’s issue is sponsored in part by DigitalOcean. With flat pricing across all global regions for compute, object storage, and databases – plus a free managed Kubernetes service – DigitalOcean makes it easy to scale up your infrastructure without guessing what your cloud bill will be every month. Plus their documentation and tutorials are some of the best in the industry, so there’s no need to go to cloud school to use their services. Thanks again to DigitalOcean for their ongoing support. Learn More |
| Jobs |
| If you’ve got an interesting job for this newsletter’s eminently employable subscribers, get in touch!Don’t you know who I am?! If you do, you should consider talking with the folks on the AWS Identity team, as they could use the help. Unlike several AWS service teams I could name, Identity is well named–it’s very clear what they do. IAM, Cognito, Organizations, Directory Services… their work controls who can access what, when. Their impact is huge, their scale incredible, their customers “everyone.” Go chat with AWS Identity if you’re looking for a meaningful role on an important team. |
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| Choice Cuts |
| Amazon Chime Voice Connector now supports United States Toll-Free Numbers – A service you don’t use solves for your long distance bill, a problem you haven’t thought about for a decade!Amazon EBS adds ability to take point-in-time, crash-consistent snapshot across multiple EBS volumes – This is handy for those of you RAIDing EBS volumes. Yes, you can do that. No, you probably don’t need to anymore.Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports SQL querying – When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a DBA. Consider retooling / restaffing.Amazon Pinpoint Announces a Major Update to the Deliverability Dashboard – I flat out do not understand this pricing model. $1250 flat rate per month is either comically high or comically low for most customers. My criticisms of Pinpoint are still forming elsewhere…Amazon Textract – Now Generally Available – Yes yes, this is fantastic HEY FOLKS LISTEN! The new version of Microsoft Excel for iOS can now take a picture of a chart AND IMPORT IT INTO THE SPREADSHEET! That’s transformative for an awful lot of businesses out there–and my highlighting it here in the Textract release announcement is giving AWS a taste of what every company who releases a product during re:Invent week feels. If you have a product release you’re planning for re:Invent and you don’t work at AWS, consider moving that launch date.Amazon Aurora Serverless MySQL 5.6 Now Supports Data API – The Data API is now available. Beat the crap out of your databases with Lambda functions no more; use the HTTP endpoint instead.Amazon ElastiCache for Redis improves cluster availability during planned maintenance – …finally. This one hit me so hard four years ago that I still wake up in the night sweating. I’m glad to see that my ticket was finally addressed.Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) is now Generally Available – The pricing of this thing can only be described as Kafka-esque.AWS DataSync Now Supports EFS-to-EFS Transfer – I’m not clear if this is a node of some sort that sits between the two objects, or just sets up a source-to-destination direct link.AWS IoT Things Graph Now Generally Available – Internet of Things Things Graph is the latest Amazon Web Services service to launch. My biggest frustration with the “IoT as an AWS umbrella brand” maneuver is that there are truly transformative services under it that people ignore, simply because they aren’t running IoT devices.Enable EC2 Hibernation Without Specifying Encryption Intent at Every Instance Launch – Great news! This horrible thing that you didn’t know was a thing is no longer a thing! You’re welcome!Introducing Fraud Detection Using Machine Learning – Holy crap they’re onto me–wait. They’re talking about a different kind of fraud.New Quick Start deploys AWS Cloud9 cloud-based IDE – Whenever I see a quickstart that claims to simply “set up an existing AWS service,” I instinctively know that setting up that service contains multitudes of dragons.Volkswagen Group Research Works with Altair and Uses Nvidia Technology on AWS to Accelerate Aerodynamics Concept Design – “This is incredible technology. Previously we could only lie to one or two emissions regulators per quarter; with the power of machine learning on AWS we can now lie to many times that number in less than half the time!”AWS and the CLOUD Act | AWS Security Blog – Whenever the AWS security blog weighs in on federal law, you know you’re in for one heck of a read. |
| Tools |
| The seals continue to weaken; a revisiting of PAWS, an AWS SDK for Perl.CloudBanshee has a tool that lets you compare a bunch of EC2 instances.Various cloud security configuration checks you can run in cloudsploit.Not directly AWS related, but LeakLooker lets you find open databases that live there.TrueCar’s wormhole enables instant data, and has an accompanying blog post. |
| … and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS |
