Good Morning!
Welcome to issue number 122 of Last Week in AWS.
I’m speaking this evening at a meetup in Mountain View, this time savaging Google for a change; come on out!
From the Community
This week’s issue is sponsored in part by Site24x7. With support for more than 25 AWS services and other popular public cloud platforms, Site24x7 aims to provide businesses complete visibility into the uptime, performance and operational health of their cloud-powered applications. Also with CloudSpend, their AWS cloud cost analytics solution in tow, the path to predictable AWS cost is not far away. Give them a spin. (SPONSORED)
I’ll be speaking at Sensu Summit 2019 next month! Use code Speaker50off to save 50% off of a ticket if you’ll be in Portland, Oregon.
A walkthrough of the differences between PUT and POST S3 signed URLs.
I’m speaking at the AWS Community Day next month giving my “Last Year in AWS” roundup of interesting releases. See you in Mountain View…
A terraform-driven equivalent to Control Tower for setting up an AWS account baseline.
Cloudonaut has an intensive review of AWS Backup, a higher level glue service.
An open guide to working with CDK, open-cdk is opinionated set of tips and best practices for working with the AWS Cloud Development Kit.
An AWS and Terraform rocket-start guide, this is worth a look if you’re just getting into those waters.
A walkthrough from someone who actually uses AWS Device Farm as something other than a “does this service exist or am I messing with you” litmus test.
A story about how a rare unicorn of a company with a significant Lambda bill reduced the cost.
Well this TechCrunch article explains the rash of unencrypted EBS notification emails AWS sent out over the past several weeks.
One of my personal heroes AWSgeek Jerry Hargrove came up with something so useful I’m annoyed I didn’t come up with my myself: a History of Amazon Web Services.
The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee left more than 6 million email addresses of U.S. citizens exposed to the internet, netting them an S3 Bucket Negligence Award.
Honeycomb talks about using Honeycomb to understand your AWS bills. Pointing Honeycomb at an AWS bill is like obliterating a squirrel with an elephant gun: horrifyingly massive overkill, but having seen it in action neither I nor the squirrel I can deny its effectiveness.
I spoke with UpGuard’s Chris Vickery on Screaming in the Cloud about CapitalOne, Open S3 buckets, and what’s up, guard?
Still no sign of AWS settling its obnoxious non-compete lawsuit against a former sales schmoo. I got mentioned in the article!
And another S3 Bucket Negligence Award. If this keeps up, Upguard should just have their own section in the newsletter.
The Bank of Cardiff, inexplicably based in California, also scored itself an S3 Bucket Negligence Award.
Jobs
If you’ve got an interesting job for this newsletter’s eminently employable subscribers, get in touch!
If you want to search for useful information in a mountain of data, you’d probably at least consider using ElasticSearch. If you’re searching for a challenging role, consider the Amazon Elasticsearch team. With challenging roles across most business domains, they’re likely to have something that fits whatever it is you’re searching for.
X-Team is hiring for a fully remote team, anywhere on the planet. The work is interesting, they partner with companies you’ve heard of, and you can work from wherever you care to be. Now before you wind up getting cynical, let me save you some time–I already did, and hopped on a phone call to chat with them and then berate them for their crappy culture. Instead I was pleasantly surprised: they invest in their people (including a personal development stipend), they have distributed community events (both online and in person around the world), and actually work with their employees; this isn’t a “send us a postcard if you ever get there” body shop. They’re looking for folks with AWS skills, as well as a wide variety of other technical abilities; this is legit. Take my word for it; join X-Team and see for yourself. Tell them Corey sent you…
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 Senior Software Engineers anywhere 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.
AWS is hiring a License Manager in Bahrain–wait, that’s not a job, that’s a service expansion! And probably a miserable job, too.
Choice Cuts
Ever wondered why your CEO doesn’t give a toss about technical debt? The folks at Raygun set out to learn why, interviewing the executive leadership at Xero, Pushpay, and Vend to find out what’s really going on and how they think about engineering effort and software quality. (SPONSORED)
Amazon Aurora Multi-Master is Now Generally Available – It presumably adds “Replication” to CAP theorem, resulting in CRAP Theorem.
Amazon DynamoDB now helps you monitor as you approach your account limits – And you can helpfully store those limits in DynamoDB itself–wait.
Amazon EC2 Fleet Now Lets You Modify On-Demand Target Capacity – My thanks to the department of “Wait, you mean it didn’t do that already?”
Amazon EC2 Fleet Now Lets You Set A Maximum Price For A Fleet Of Instances – Aw, that’s one less bill heart-attack for some folks.
Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports new instance sizes – And all of them cost a king’s ransom to run, because Oracle.
Amazon Rekognition now detects violence, weapons, and self-injury in images and videos; improves accuracy for nudity detection – …but is still freely available for sale to governmental departments who put children in cages. No, Amazon, this issue is very much not going away on its own, and your continued silence about it does you no credit.
Amazon WorkDocs Migration Service – They’ve built this in anticipation of one day having a WorkDocs customer to migrate.
Amplify Framework adds local mocking and testing for GraphQL APIs, Storage, Functions, and Hosting – Meanwhile I continue to mock all cloud services personally.
AWS Health is now Available in AWS GovCloud (US) – “What the hell is AWS Health” you may ask. I did. It’s what powers the Personal Health Dashboard, a slightly less egregious liar than Amazon’s global status page.
AWS Lake Formation is now generally available – And sucks, because unlike “CloudFormation” it’s two words instead of one. I want whoever made that decision to know that I will one day come for them, as they’ve tread onto the semantic hill upon which I choose to die.
Amazon CloudFront Announces Support for Resource-Level and Tag-Based Permissions – It took them a long while to launch this, but it’s CloudFront; it takes them forever to do anything.
Introducing Amazon EC2 I3en and C5n Bare Metal Instances – Congratulations on the launch of the new Bear Metal instances.
Tools
This open source awslimits tool is still more capable than the current version of Service Quotas, but I’d not bet on that holding true forever.
Code Terrorist and personal friend Richard Boyd has released AWS Account Manager Email Manager Manager, which involves me as a demonstration for how to effectively manage AWS email spam for multiple AWS accounts.
A scenario toolkit for AWS pen-testing; CloudGoat has a CapitalOne scenario ready for you.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
