AWS’s (de)Generative AI Blunder

Disaster recovery / business continuity / “backups” are always an interesting subject for very large scale cloud environments. Many of the old data-center strategies that grumpy old sysadmins (that’s me!) relied upon don’t hold water anymore.

In a move that’s equal parts predictable and surprising, AWS has decided to make their Valkey-based services significantly cheaper than their Redis counterparts.

I was in New York this week for the AWS Summit, and while it’s always great to catch up with readers (thanks to those of you who came out to the drinkup!), AWS friends, and others, I found myself rather taken aback by the overwhelming strength behind the Generative AI theme of the entire event. […]

There have been some noises about this week’s newsletter issue in which I criticized the release of AWS Compute Optimizer offering RDS recommendations…Let me clarify my position and commentary on this feature announcement.

This morning’s announcement that Adam Selipsky would be stepping down as AWS CEO, with longtime Amazonian Matt Garman stepping into the role, feels like a natural correction. Garman has long been seen as the heir apparent to AWS’s leadership. When Selipsky was named CEO in the last succession, my initial reaction was a baffled, “I’m sorry, who?”

Let’s begin with the tl;dr: At this year’s re:Invent, I’m hosting a photo scavenger hunt with significant prizes for “most items found” and “most creative entry.” Sign up through my webapp at findme.lastweekinaws.com. The rest of this post details how I built this app.

AWS may be using your data to train its AI models, and you may have unwittingly consented to it. Prepare to jump through a series of complex hoops to stop it.

AWS re:Invent looms larger on the calendar with each passing day, promising not just an avalanche of new services but also–let’s face it–some truly perplexing names. However, the oddity of AWS service names is low-hanging fruit. The true enigma lies in their labyrinthine pricing dimensions.

The AWS re:Invent session tracker leaves much to be desired, a point that many in the community have lamented for years. Its glaring shortcomings range from the absence of a calendar view to a lackluster search function and the inability to share links to individual sessions. Frustrated attendees have long been in need of a better solution, and several community members rose to the challenge.

My Route53 database is humming along nicely, my podcast interview backlog is full, and I’ve outsourced my thinking to ChatGPT, so I have some unprecedented free time to build a side project. Awesome! What cloud provider should I use?

Picture this: You’re in your swivel chair, feet propped up on your standing desk because you are a glorious acrobat, and you’re looking over your company’s Amazon EC2 fleet utilization report. You’re captivated by the custom colorful dashboard, carefully tuned to a 1st-grade reading level. You see the overall number in its soft, non-threatening font, […]

How much would AWS cost for Amazon Prime Day? Here’s Corey Quinn’s best guess at the company’s AWS bill for the two-day shopping event.