Good Morning!
AWS carpet-bombs the world with surveys, but the AWS Answers Community-Led Survey doesn’t come from AWS, and thus only shows up but once a year. Please, fill it out. Unlike AWS surveys it doesn’t ask you whether this is relevant to your personal or business interests, and then ignore whatever you say.
I don’t run the survey, but I do read it carefully; it shapes the things I talk about in this newsletter, and what I pay attention to. Please, help keep me on-track.
From the Community
Be aware of the Makefile effect is probably the best name for the phenomenon I’ve seen yet. I do it with SAM templates, CDK, Lambda handlers, etc: I copy the file or code from my last successful project, remove the project-specific stuff, and go from there. In other words, nobody knows offhand how to build these things from scratch anymore.
PluralSight has apparently killed a bunch of old A Cloud Guru lifetime subscriptions, including my own. I think it’s technically legal–after all, it was a "lifetime" subscription, and after this stunt PluralSight is absolutely dead to me, so…
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: And we’re back!
Screaming in the Cloud: Replay – Analyzing Analysts with James Governor
Screaming in the Cloud: Replay – Inspiring the Next Generation of Devs with Scott Hanselman
Choice Cuts
AWS CodePipeline introduces new debugging experience in AWS Management Console – It’s odd; half the time I feel like AWS wants us the hell out of the console, using IaC–and the other half they’re trying to get us in there for as many things as possible. The takeaway: we’re always doing it wrong.
The AWS Management Console now supports simultaneous sign-in for multiple AWS accounts – Holy crap this solves a problem experienced by approximately everyone, for approximately the entire lifespan of AWS. I’m calling it: this is 2025’s release of the year. (2024’s was the Savings Plan Analyzer, and it wasn’t a particularly close decision because that thing’s amazing.)
EC2 Image Builder simplifies converting Windows ISO files to AMIs – This would have been useful for creating AMIs (pronounced with three syllables) a while back; I’m glad I don’t have these specific workload concerns anymore. But man this is nice for customers who aren’t on that same track…
Now open — AWS Mexico (Central) Region – Last week there was one new region in 2025. This week there are two new regions in 2025. If this trend continues we’ll have a region for every living human by Christmas.
AWS CDK is splitting Construct Library and CLI – This is fascinating. I wonder what drove this decision–and what it’ll mean for those static aws-cdk workloads that haven’t been touched in years the next time they need an update. That remains the CDK’s Achilles heel in my experience…
Amazon Bedrock launches with Claude 3.5 Sonnet in the AWS Top Secret cloud – It would appear that somebody leaked. In seriousness, the Top Secret cloud is accredited to run Top Secret workloads–but what are the requirements to deploy workloads there? Is it like GovCloud in that "if you ask, you can deploy?" Or is it a full-bore background check with clearances required and blood oaths? Asking for (truly) idle curiosity; if you know, go ahead and hit reply so I can learn something!
Preventing unintended encryption of Amazon S3 objects – "Encrypt Everything–no wait not like that" says AWS, in the wake of S3 objects being encrypted using native S3 functionality via ransomware. That’s frankly an ingenious attack vector. Evil. But ingenious.
Secure root user access for member accounts in AWS Organizations | AWS Security Blog – I missed this during the pre:Invent frenzy, but you can now flat out remove root credentials for organization member accounts. This is big deal, and I highly recommend you do this.
Cost-optimized log aggregation and archival in Amazon S3 using s3tar – I don’t think I’ve encountered s3tar before, and now I’m actively annoyed because it would have solved a couple of problems for me in way less time, way more elegantly than the Rube Goldberg monstrosities I cobbled together instead. How long as that been hiding there?!
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
