Good Morning!
Last week was the first of three weeks of re:Invent (AWS’s own version of Cloud Next) and my attendant re:Quinnvent sideshow / conference / trainwreck and I can’t believe that I’m somehow only a third of the way through it. You read this newsletter while I go find coffee.
From the Community
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I don’t know that AWS threatens IIoT partner ecosystem is how I’d frame what AWS is doing, but it’s definitely worth watching.
There’s a fun EBS pricing bug that caught me this morning and raised an eyebrow. Fear not; gp3 pricing is decent and not $2.8 million a month per volume (which is what our experiments extrapolated out to).
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.
Do you hold a US Security Clearance? Do you want to build exciting things? Protect exciting secrets? Make big trouble for Moose and Squirrel? Check out the AWS Cleared Jobs and see if AWS might have a role that’s up your alley. Many restrictions apply; see page for details.
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
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Announcing Amazon EC2 Mac instances for macOS – Yes, they’re expensive compared to buying a Mac and running it yourself. They’re “who gives a crap” money to teams who have security / regulatory requirements that their Mac builds have been pointedly ignoring / hiding from auditors.
AWS CloudTrail provides more granular control of data event logging through advanced event selectors – This is a hidden release that’s absolutely going to save you a pile of money on your CloudTrail logs if you configure it.
Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) now support tag-on-create and tag-based access control – They’ve been with us forever, and AWS can’t pronounce them, but now AMIs are at least getting new features.
Amazon Web Services Announces AWS Proton – A service that takes aim at its biggest competitors in the market such as the Serverless App Repo, CodeStar, the AWS Service Catalog, and Service Catalog AppRegistry.
Announcing Amazon Lookout for Equipment, a service which detects abnormal equipment behavior and enable predictive maintenance – An AWS Service Namer has given up, and we’re looking forward to seeing other services named after signs next week such as “Amazon Employees Must Wash Hands Before Returning to Work,” “AWS Don’t Walk on Grass” and “Amazon 11′-8″”.
AWS announces AQUA for Amazon Redshift (preview) – This is a super exciting feature that they apparently forgot they announced in 2019.
AWS announces tiered pricing for input/output operations per second (IOPS) charges for Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) io2 volume, reducing the cost of provisioning peak IOPS by 15% – EBS IOPS pricing gets more complicated but less expensive. Remember, you almost never need io1/io2; check EBSBurstBalance.
Understanding Kubernetes: A Guide to Modernizing Your Cloud Infrastructure
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AWS Compute Optimizer now supports Amazon EBS volume recommendations – This thing currently sucks in a few ways. It doesn’t tell you to switch from gp2 to gp3. It doesn’t tell you that you’re over-provisioned entirely by using io1 or io2 volumes and should use gp3 instead. And it should either be its own top level service called AWS Storage Optimizer, or (preferably) this shouldn’t be a top level service at all and live somewhere in the billing tools. But y’know. Other than that it’s great.
AWS Lambda changes duration billing granularity from 100ms down to 1ms – The internet is losing its mind over this change, as everyone’s 7¢ Lambda bill is now going to be a lot closer to 5¢ every month.
AWS Lambda now supports container images as a packaging format – Docker is now Lambda or Lambda is now Docker or I don’t even know I am oh so very confused.
AWS Lambda now supports up to 10 GB of memory and 6 vCPU cores for Lambda Functions – Now that Salesforce has acquired Slack, their next task is to get its memory hog client to run within Lambda.
Contact Lens for Amazon Connect launches real-time contact center analytics to detect customer issues on live calls – This detects customer phrases that indicate customer issues such as “not happy,” “poor quality product,” “cancel my subscription,” “were your parents cousins,” “you ignorant swamp donkey,” and “the ethics of Facebook.”
Python Support for Amazon CodeGuru is available in preview – I’m looking forward to crashing this service to hell with my terrible, terrible Python code.
New- Amazon DevOps Guru Helps Identify Application Errors and Fixes – Amazon steps into direct competition with “Azure DevOps” for “the service that gets absolutely roasted for its name on Twitter the most” in 2021.
Amazon EKS Distro: The Kubernetes Distribution Used by Amazon EKS – With EKS becoming open source, at long last you can finally run Kubernetes somewhere that isn’t in an AWS data center.
Amazon Monitron, a Simple and Cost-Effective Service Enabling Predictive Maintenance – An AWS Service Namer lost an arm-wrestling contest with a robot and had to name this service after the robot as a result.
New – Amazon QuickSight Q Answers Natural-Language Questions About Business Data – “Q, why did I cheap out and use QuickSight instead of Tableau?”
Amazon S3 Update – Strong Read-After-Write Consistency – You can now, and I swear I’m not making this up, safely use S3 as a database.
AWS Marketplace Now Offers Professional Services – I’m being completely sincere when I say this: why can’t I find and hire an accountant or an attorney on the AWS Marketplace? Why does the offering need to be tied to third party software?
New – Amazon EBS gp3 Volume Lets You Provision Performance Apart From Capacity – gp3 is a game changer, full stop. 80% of the cost of gp2, it can be converted in place, and there’s no downside. Do it immediately.
Introducing Amazon ECS Anywhere – You can now deploy ECS anywhere. “Does that include other cloud providers?” Huh, the AWS employee I was asking just dove through a window rather than answer the question.
Introducing new cloud-based creative studio Preymaker – The only way an Amazon thing with the name “Preymaker” could be worse is if the service itself were a startup incubator.
Want more PostgreSQL? You just might like Babelfish – Translation layers are super hard to pull off, but getting away from MSSQL in favor of PostgreSQL is a game changer–if it works.
Empowering formerly incarcerated citizens through coding skills training, mentorship, and job support – Not everything AWS puts out is important, but this is. I encourage you to read it.
Tools
Tired of juggling the cost of AWS backup and recovery with your SLAs? What about multiple products for your data NOT in AWS? Then quit the circus act and check out Veeam! Veeam unifies AWS backup and recovery with any other platform you need to protect into one easy solution. Better yet, they’ll help cut your cloud costs without compromising the ability to recover what you need, when and where you need to (even across clouds). They’ll be at re:Invent, so check them out! I hear they’re giving out free t-shirts… Sponsored
I know it’s an old tool, but cli53 is new to me. I used it to make a zone file this week to migrate one of my Route 53 databases.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
