AWS’s (de)Generative AI Blunder

The fourth stage managing cloud infrastructure is “clicking around in the web console, then lying about it.” I call it “ClickOps.”

Last week Orca Security published two critical vulnerabilities in AWS. This led to a bit of a hair-on-fire day, since AWS didn’t get around to saying anything formally about it until later that afternoon. The particularly eye-popping phrase that stood out from one of the announcements was: “Our research team believes, given the data found […]

I’ve been giving Azure a fair bit of grief lately for some embarrassing information security lapses, and I think it’s only fair for me to explain in a format beyond “some tweets” exactly why that is. The write-ups I’ve seen have all been deeply technical and more or less bury the lede, so let me […]

People often ask me what my favorite AWS service is (generally S3, EFS, Systems Manager, or IAM depending upon the day or my mood), but I virtually never get asked about the inverse: what’s the AWS service I despise most of all? Maybe people are scared of the answer. Maybe they think that it’s going […]

It’s time for me to summarize what happened over the course of this very strange year. Welcome to my attempt at “Last Year in AWS” focusing on things that I found interesting — or at least, worthy of comment. We kicked off 2021 with a bang with an attempted coup at the US Capitol which […]

In the run-up to re:Invent (where as you might imagine I had a whole mess of other things on my mind) AWS significantly expanded their free tier offering for outbound data transfer. TechRadar called it “a major expansion,” The Register likewise sang its praises, and CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince claimed he was “doing a dance […]

AWS published its analysis of last week’s us-east-1 outage, and it raises more questions than it answers. I understand that they wanted to get it out when they did (late on a Friday during one of the worst cybersecurity flaps in years), to avoid excessive attention. But I’m unconvinced in reading it that the outage […]

The cloud may seem a nebulous concept, but it’s a place where a huge and increasing amount of IT takes place. And it has been a boon for startups.

The latest Amazon Linux adds SELinux security by default, an improvement that will convince many people to abandon it.

Counting AWS “customers” can mean wildly different things; best to give up on tracking sign-ons and user accounts and look for better ways to measure growth.

I’ve given so much grief to the AWS Managed NAT Gateway over the last few years that if I were to pass all of that grief through one of the gateways themselves it would bankrupt my company. It occurred to me that while I’ve talked about my problems with the service in bits and pieces […]

AWS offers its usual re:Invent justification letter to get your boss to let you attend re:Invent. As per my annual re:Quinnvent tradition, I’ve modified it slightly and sent it to my business partner: Dearest Mike Julian, I’d like your blessing and permission to attend AWS re:Invent 2021, Nov. 29 – Dec. 3 in Las Vegas. […]