Good Morning!
Welcome to issue number 148 of Last Week in AWS. I’m in Los Angeles this week and will be hosting a meetup near Burbank; more details to come via Twitter.
Somehow Onalytica (an influencer marketing platform company) conducted an analysis across Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Forums, Blogs, News and Tumblr content and discovered that I’m the GREATEST CLOUD INFLUENCER IN THE WORLD. I’ve spent the past week being completely insufferable as a result, a trend that shows no signs of abating any time soon.
From the Community
This issue is sponsored in part by my friends at CHAOSSEARCH! The rise of democracy has caused grave problems for most log analytics companies, in that with fewer monarchies every year, we’re dramatically short on princesses to kidnap for ransom to pay our log analytics vendors. CHAOSSEARCH bucks that trend as a fully managed log analytics platform that leverages your AWS S3 as a data store. Their revolutionary technology radically lowers costs for analyzing log data at scale, and they pass those savings on to you! If you are tired of your ELK Stack falling over, or tired of paying over-the-top prices to the current litany of ho-hum log analytics vendors out there, try CHAOSSEARCH today! So check them out and tell them Corey sent you so they can sigh exasperatedly and ask you what I said this time… Sponsored
A discussion of One-Zone S3 and the potential for the destruction of an entire Availability Zone.
If you’re wondering what the AWS CDK is, here’s a real example based introduction to it. If you’re not wondering what the AWS CDK is, that example based introduction is still there regardless.
A tool for Amazon Translate that converts whatever you’ve got into AWS’s strange yet beautiful custom format.
“Hackers keep getting access to your data. Is Amazon to blame?” Betteridge’s law of headlines says no.
A dive into modern cloud architecture concepts; it’s worth a review.
Solarwinds’s Thomas LaRock does a far better job than I could explaining exactly why watching AWS and Azure’s marketing departments attempting to out-mumble one another with benchmarks is awful, fails to serve customers, and is just tiresome to watch from all sides.
Tying ASGs, Route 53 records, and Terraform together made for a fascinating technical read.
Datadog released their State of Serverless report, and as much as I want to snark all over it, it’s pretty well done.
I’ll be keynoting DataStax Accelerate 2020, and revisiting my historical nuanced position of “Multi-Cloud is complete crap.” What will I say? Guess you’d best plan on showing up to find out. The code ‘Duckbill35’ gets you 35% off if that’s useful to you…
If you’re looking to work on private yachts, congratulations; you’re possibly one of the victims of this week’s S3 Bucket Negligence Award.
Another S3 Bucket Irresponsibility Award goes to a company that exposed the personal details of roughly a Brazilian soccer fans.
Continuing in their established tradition, AWS has released CloudWatch Synthetics in preview, then left the job of explaining the offering coherently to others.
Jobs
If you’re considering a job change, check out a position below. Regardless of where you find it, you should definitely negotiate your salary. If I were to magically become employable, I’d immediately head to FearlessSalaryNegotiation.com and talk to Josh Doody about it before saying anything further. He’s done this many times before, with a special emphasis on engineering roles at FAANG companies. He’s an artist when it comes to getting the best compensation possible without seeming greedy or losing the offer. He offers coaching, free articles, an ebook, and other things along the way. Check him out–and tell him Corey’s talking about him again.
[Amazon QLDB] (https://www.amazon.jobs/en/search?basequery=QLDB&locquery=&latitude=&longitude=&locgroupid=&invalid_location=false&country=&city=®ion=&county=) is a fully managed ledger database that provides a transparent, immutable, and cryptographically verifiable transaction log owned by a central trusted authority. You can think of it as that rarest of creatures, “blockchain with an actual business model and without the ridiculous hype” and not be too far off. If you must take a job in the blockchain universe, consider QLDB. I did a dive into it recently and, much to my chagrin, found precious little to complain about. Continue the good work there!
X-Team is hiring Go developers with strong AWS skills, 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. Take my word for it; check out X-Team and see for yourself. Tell them Corey sent you…
Choice Cuts
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Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) adds $objectToArray, $arrayToObject, $slice, $mod, and $range Aggregation Pipeline Operators – I choose to believe that the actual parameters it’s just added failed to properly populate the AWS release template in the headline.
Amazon EBS increases limits on Fast Snapshot Restore and expands availability to additional regions – Have they fixed the hideously expensive pricing model yet?
Amazon EC2 adds the ability to easily query the billing information of Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) – Without even clicking into this, I know that “easily query” and “billing information” in the same sentence make this entire release headline a lie.
Amazon ECS now Supports tagging for Task Sets – Untangling container-based workflows from a cost allocation perspective just got a smidgen easier. Don’t mistake that for “easy,” though…
Amazon Elastic Container Service has added support for canary deployments – Time will tell whether this is actual canaries, or parakeets with delusions of grandeur and fancy hats.
Amazon Polly Launches Brand Voice – I’m very interested in pricing around this. Billie the Platypus needs a voice…
Amazon QuickSight launches enhancements to narrative editor and anomaly detection – With luck, that narrative editor can be used to change QuickSight’s own narrative, which currently stands as “Amazon QuickSight is like an affordable version of Tableau except it’s crap.” I’m really hoping Amazon can improve QuickSight more quickly than Salesforce can ruin Tableau.
Amazon RDS Data API now supports AWS PrivateLink – …but AWS still stubbornly insists upon pronouncing the term as “ah-pee.”
Amazon RDS Performance Insights Supports SQL-level Metrics on Amazon RDS for MySQL – …and for MariaDB as well. There were two releases saying the same thing; I’ve condensed them into one for your convenience. I’m here for you, reader.
Amazon Redshift now supports per-second billing – While it’s nice to see this falling in line with EC2, I’m unconvinced it matters. Rapid spin-up and spin-down of EC2 instances is very much a thing; rapid ANYTHING with RedShift is basically not.
Amazon VPC Flow Logs Now Support 1-minute Aggregation Intervals – VPC Flow Logs are way more granular now, but you still need a giant pile of nonsense (be it custom tooling or a vendor-provided solution) to turn them into anything actionable.
Announcing AWS Ground Station Cross Region Data Delivery – …in only two regions, both located in the US. This is one of those “scale it to a few more regions before making a big deal about it, folks” releases.
AWS AppSync releases integration with AWS X-Ray and GraphQL Info object support – We’re all learning new things all the time. Last week, I learned that GiraffeQL isn’t really about giraffes at all, and AppSync learned that X-Ray is a real AWS service that exists.
AWS CodeBuild Adds Support for Amazon EFS – This is freaking huge, and changes my narrative from “EFS is for legacy NFS workloads only” and suddenly opens the door for CodeBuild (a completely serverless build service) to have persistent data. I’m already seeing possibilities for drastically improved build times, intelligent reduction of meaningless work on every build, and a brighter future. More like this please!
AWS RoboMaker supports sudo access inside robot and simulation applications at runtime – How the hell is sudo going to interplay with the three laws of robotics?!
AWS Storage Gateway is now available on Linux KVM hypervisor – It supports basically everything except “shoving the thing into Docker,” and I’m already regretting having given them that idea.
Cloud9 launches support for tagging new and existing environments – I was hoping for a few other enhancements to Cloud9, but I’ll take this; it indicates that the service hasn’t been abandoned. I have dreams–such dreams for this service!
Now rerun commands with AWS Systems Manager Run Command in just a few clicks – The days of “oh, your attempt failed. Retry it after you enter in all of the data you did last time. Manually. Again.” Updating Control Tower accounts, you need this functionality too.
Customer Obsession: AWS Cost & Usage Report Technical Documentation – It’s awesome when you spend ages learning things by reading tea leaves to get to a point of mastery. It’s way more awesome when they fix the documentation around that thing so the next person won’t have to struggle nearly so hard. This is a welcome release!
EC2 Price Reduction in the São Paulo Region (R5 and I3) | AWS News Blog – “i3 instances are so inexpensive, how could they possibly–oh, right. São Paulo.”
New Desktop Client for AWS Client VPN | AWS News Blog – AWS talked to many, many customers about what features they’d love to see them focus on. Then they misplaced the notebook with all of that customer feedback, shrugged, and released an OpenVPN desktop client with the justification of “a lot of existing OpenVPN clients are hard to manage and don’t support esoteric authentication options” instead. Meanwhile Amazon Chime remains Amazon Chime.
Build ARM-based applications using CodeBuild – I’m continually amazed by how little work is needed to do things for ARM. Which is great, since I’m profoundly lazy.
Tools
Another tool for injecting SSM parameters into your applications.
The best tools let you build your own dashboards. The worst tools force you to.
Oh I like this. peerd is a tool that lets you set up VPC peering connections in an automated way without mucking around in the bowels of manual hell.
Some quick terraform code to create Vault infrastructure, should you need such a thing.
A network planner that lays out network address allocation for your VPCs.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
