Good morning!
Welcome to issue number 119 of Last Week in AWS.
I’m around San Francisco all week long for a change; it’s time to travel a bit less for a few weeks and devote my time to fixing AWS bills for companies large and small. If that resonates, get in touch!
From the Community
Longtime person I admire Rachel by the Bay returns after a long hiatus with an article about cloud provider availability.
I hadn’t heard of confd until this article on dockerizing legacy applications.
Not everyone’s environment is a born-in-the-cloud startup that sprang fully formed into the world a year ago. Some of us have on-premises data centers, which give rise to hybrid cloud environments. How do you monitor those? Consider NetApp’s Cloud Insights to grant insight into all of your infrastructure—not just the parts that live in a public cloud somewhere. Thanks to NetApp for their support of this newsletter. (SPONSORED)
A quick serverless conference app in a box, which makes one wonder what went oh so very wrong with AWS’s conference apps.
An app built on top of Connect and Lex to… bring the 1990s back in the form of an answering machine. Please leave a message after the beep.
firecracker project – Taking a page from AWS’s container team, the open source LNK now has a public roadmap. Huzzah!
A Tale of Two Buckets: Investigating Multi-Account IAM Issues in S3 and CloudFront.
A post from Pinterest Engineering about how they use Presto in production. Sounds spendy to me!
An entire /10 of IP address space was sold to Amazon from a previous amateur radio block. I’ve gotta say, I don’t really see the kerfuffle–and I’ve been a HAM for nearly twenty years.
Once again Jerry Hargrove has done a gorgeous visual service summary, this time of the newly announced EventBridge.
A 13 minute video on how Amazon uses Snowmobile trucks and Snowball devices for data transfer. I refuse to call them “the Snow family,” which despite being AWS’s preferred moniker, sounds dumb to my ears.
I wrote an opinionated wrap-up of the AWS New York Summi and its feature releases.
I wrote a blistering critique of CloudWatch last year; now I revisit it and highlight a new CloudWatch feature: Live Data.
A user’s take on the AWS Certified Advanced Networking exam. (Warning, LinkedIn link.)
More drama continues to unfold around both Amazon and Microsoft vying for JEDI, the $10 billion Pentagon contract.
After all the kerfuffle around selling Rekognition to the cops, the cops themselves have stopped using it because it works like crap.
A pretty great approach to working directly in the cloud; I do something very similar myself.
Jobs
If you’ve got an interesting job for this newsletter’s eminently employable subscribers, get in touch!
Amazon AuroraI’m a big fan of misusing various things as databases—but let’s talk this week about something that’s actually intended to be used as one. Amazon Aurora is one of the best services named after a Disney princess that you’re likely to find–and they’re hiring. They won the SIGMOD systems award for 2019, and it’s likely they’re not stopping to rest on their laurels; they’ll leave that to SimpleDB instead. They’re hiring for a wide variety of positions and doing interesting work; consider joining them.
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; check out 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.
Choice Cuts
Amazon ECR now supports increased repository and image limits – Excuse me, AWS. I think you mean that Amazon ECS now supports increased repository and image quotas.
AWS CodePipeline Achieves HIPAA Eligibility – You see less of these, as products are now launching with HIPAA eligibility, but now you can shove your hippos into a pipeline if you’d like.
AWS Device Farm improves device start up time to enable instant access to devices – And continues to be my favorite “am I making this service up or does it really exist” trivia question.
AWS Direct Connect Now Supports Resource Based Authorization, Tag Based Authorization, and Tag on Resource Creation – The tagging team continues to emerge from its cocoon.
Elastic Fabric Adapter is officially integrated into Libfabric Library – I consider my suspenders to be an elastic fabric adapter. AWS does not.
AWS Cost Explorer now Supports Usage-Based Forecasts – It now supports the one thing you’d actually want to use it for, years after its competition already does this.
Postmark provides lightning fast delivery for your application emails. Our mission is to deliver your transactional email to customers on time, every time. It’s incredibly easy to integrate with our API, and we give you unparalleled insight into each and every email and recipient. Our hope is that you can just forget about your email and focus on building your app — but if you do need us, a helpful human is always just an email away. Try us out, and use the code AWS20 to get 20% off for 3 months. (SPONSORED)
Amazon Introduces Amazon Corretto Crypto Provider (ACCP) | AWS Open Source Blog – Alternate title: “Amazon highlights exactly how abysmal crypto performance in Java has been until this point,” but that’d just be punching down. Look at that graph. Ouch.
How to get specific security information about AWS services | AWS Security Blog – Good news–we now have over 40 hours of additional homework to do to grok “basic” security information about AWS services.
Tools
A Redis-like API for DynamoDB means you get most of the benefits without the lock-in concerns.
Ever wondered why your CEO doesn’t give a toss about technical debt? The folks at Raygun set out to learn why, interviewing the folks at Xero, Pushpay, and Vend to find out what’s really going on and how they think about engineering effort and software quality. (SPONSORED)
An interactive CLI tool that lets you use ssh / copy files via SSM without SSH’s port opened.
Want to write from Secrets Manager to files on disk? There’s probably a better answer, but now you can do it.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
