Good Morning!
What a year 2020 was. Since AWS only released what amount to depressing war crimes last week, this week’s episode is my heavily opinionated “best of 2020” (itself an oxymoronic phrase) from the last year of links. I have an anonymized “clicktracker” system that tells me which links get the most unique clicks, but doesn’t tell me what any individual user clicked; this is by design. Let’s see what it says!
From the Community
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This post on the three f’s of cloud pricing is near and dear to my shriveled salt-packed heart, and apparently resonated with many of you.
The most popular article I linked to this year was this blog post on Fixing AWS’s Architecture Diagrams: Video-On-Demand Service. I confess I didn’t see that coming.
The UK government’s GitHub repository consisting of how they reach their cloud architecture decisions was also wildly popular.
I adore how over the summer ESPN did an article about how meticulously Andy Jassy went about naming his hockey team six months before he got on stage and deadass introduced “Amazon Lookout for Equipment.”
My admittedly trollish post about why Zoom chose Oracle and maybe you should too was my most viewed post all year long, followed closely by the Google disease afflicting AWS. For my money, my favorite / most useful bit of writing was my continuing support of the idea that multi-cloud is the worst practice.
One final S3 Bucket Negligence Award hits close to home by victimizing hundreds of social media influencers.
Jobs
If you’ve got an interesting job for this newsletter’s eminently employable subscribers, get in touch!
Choice Cuts
How well can you answer: Where’s all my data in AWS? What data is sensitive? Who has access to it, and how can it flow? If your answer is “not well”, then consider Open Raven. Think security visibility and compliance for cloud data. Track it all in live 3D maps, and discover what you didn’t know. Then set and monitor policies in production to ensure what you know is actually true. Best of all, make annoying and resource intensive compliance problems go away. Request a demo today. Sponsored
Amazon S3 now delivers strong read-after-write consistency automatically for all applications – This was super easy to miss, but watch what happens as a few big companies discover the implications of this change.
AWS made a big fanfare of Honeycode, their long-rumored no-code solution, but everyone I’ve spoken with confirms my own perspective after trying it: in its current state it’s complete crap.
New – Amazon EBS gp3 Volume Lets You Provision Performance Apart From Capacity | AWS News Blog – I maintain that this single change is the biggest and most transformative release for customer AWS bills in years.
Introducing Amazon S3 Storage Lens – Organization-wide Visibility Into Object Storage | AWS News Blog – This came out so quietly that you’d swear they were trying to bury it–but it’s transformative. Seriously: look at this glorious thing and fix your S3 billing issues.
Tools
Mistakes happen in the cloud. Just ask anyone who’s accidentally left expensive workloads running, put sensitive data in a public bucket, or agreed to deploy an Oracle product. The folks at cloudtamer.io believe that a well-governed cloud means never having to say you’re sorry–and not because Finance doesn’t know where to find you. cloudtamer.io unifies access and identity management, budget enforcement, and compliance automation into a single solution that works across both AWS and Azure. If your cloud ops team or developers apologized recently, check them out. If they refused to apologize, several notable tech companies are currently hiring. Sponsored
I can’t quite get past the fact that someone ran with my joke and implemented an actual database on top of Route 53.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
