Good Morning!
re:Invent starts today, us-east-1 caught fire last week, an S3 bucket negligence award leads to a gorgeous pun. I’ll be tracking releases all week long at requinnvent.com, Corey Quinn’s own version of AWS’s own version of Google Cloud Next. I have a schedule there of various events, and I’ll of course be tweeting throughout.
From the Community
What do HubSpot, Klarna, Alert Logic and Armor all have in common? They all use the ChaosSearch Data Platform to connect and index data in their own AWS S3 environments, rendering their data fully searchable and available for analysis with their existing data tools. With unlimited scale, industry-leading resiliency, and massive cost savings, ChaosSearch is an ideal replacement for the ELK stack (which we all know tends to flop over at scale)! Now perform scalable log analytics on your AWS S3, using the familiar ElasticSearch API for queries, and Kibana for log analytics and visualizations, while reducing costs and improving analytical capabilities! Want to learn more? Schedule a demo (easily pick a day and time that works for you), or start a free trial today! Sponsored
Pray.com users got punched in the faith by this week’s S3 Bucket Negligence Award.
Speaking of getting punched in the faith, us-east-1 basically crashed into the sea last Wednesday, impeding AWS’s ability to dump not-quite-exciting-enough enhancements before this week’s keynote.
Duckbill Group customer Mercado Libre has selected AWS as its primary cloud provider. It’s always fun to see our clients in the news!
A dive into how Jeff Bezos makes decisions.
An open source demo of how the new Gateway Load Balancers can be used to monitor traffic.
Somehow the most popular DB on AWS is Redis. You don’t need my snark, that’s a great joke all on its own.
Jobs
If you’ve got an interesting job for this newsletter’s eminently employable subscribers, get in touch!
Want to write about AWS? Want to build your own brand doing it for Last Week in AWS? We’re hiring worldwide for exactly that. This is a part-time contractor position, so easily doable on the side with your day job. Applications are open here.
Chime is a challenger bank providing free banking & credit services – our mission is to give people financial peace of mind, we’re tangibly helping people in the real world, and we were recently valued as the #1 most valuable fintech company in the US (with a $14B valuation). We’re looking for AWS/Terraform experts who can help us secure our cloud infrastructure – if you’d like to learn more about it then we’d love to hear from you (for “How did you hear about this job?” please enter “LastWeekInAWS”).
Choice Cuts
6Connex saved 50%. Onriva saved 35%. And Uber saved 15% in the first 30 days. Typical AWS cost savings using nOps cloud management. Yup, typical savings. nOps was built for DevOps teams, and provides auto-discovery of high-risk issues, dashboards with instant drill-down to the resource level for root cause analysis, and aligns with AWS Well-Architected. Get a free trial. Start saving with nOps Sponsored
Amazon Braket now supports manual qubit allocation – If you need help with this, please reach out to your Account Professor.
The Amazon Chime SDK now supports messaging – …what the hell was the Chime SDK doing before? Isn’t its entire raison d’être to support messaging?!
Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer announces CodeQuality Detector to help manage technical debt and codebase maintainability – Now the robot tells you how bad your code is compared to other code the robot has seen and judged others for in the past.
Amazon Elasticsearch Service adds Gantt charts for visualizing events, steps and tasks – “When your manager gets an MBA, it invariably becomes a team effort.” Apparently an Elasticsearch product manager is getting their MBA. Congratulations.
AWS Ground Station launches new antenna location in Hawaii, USA – Great news for both of the Ground Station customers out there.
AWS Secrets Manager now supports 5000 requests per second for the GetSecretValue API operation – Whoa, that sucker will spew secrets faster than a former White House staffer.
Third-party software built for Amazon S3 is now available in the Amazon S3 Management Console, powered by AWS Marketplace – The S3 console now shows you ads for third-party software, because AWS has been so very good at cross-selling adoption of its own first-party services.
You now can restore Amazon DynamoDB tables even faster when recovering from data loss or corruption – How much faster can you make them? “Even!”
New – Code Signing, a Trust and Integrity Control for AWS Lambda – This is pretty clearly aimed at big enterprises with untrustworthy other divisions against which you must guard.
re:Invent 2020 Liveblog: Andy Jassy Keynote – Jeff Barr is going to liveblog Andy’s keynote. I’m going to livetweet it; let’s see whose is more informative / funnier.
Creating faster AWS Lambda functions with AVX2 – You can make faster Lambda functions if you first install a crapton of build dependencies, then recompile your software to take advantage of certain CPU extensions. How straightforward!
New Synchronous Express Workflows for AWS Step Functions – Once you’ve scaled the learning cliff that is step functions, there’s now a slightly different expression of them.
AWS Copilot is now generally available – A straightfoward CLI to launch containers into AWS is now GA, just in time to compete with Lightsail containers.
Introducing AWS CloudFormation modules – Hooray for slightly less boilerplate in every last resource declaration you need to write.
Why AWS loves Rust, and how we’d like to help – They’re definitely checking the first box of the Rust community standards, which is “refusing to shut up about Rust.”
AWS Security Profiles: Colm MacCárthaigh, Senior Principal Engineer – I don’t know why they only ever do these profiles of security employees when there are way too many other interesting releases (mid-February is slow, do these then?!), but it’s worth highlighting just how great Colm is. Every time I’ve encountered him on customer issues, I come away impressed by him.
Tools
The Engineer’s Handbook on Cloud Security
A primer on securing your cloud infrastructure and demonstrating compliance. Get the Handbook. Sponsored
Ben Kehoe’s tools for making AWS SSO more bearable are well worth a look.
A Python decorator to make API calls to all accounts in an organization may be the best thing I’ve found all year.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
