Good Morning!
Apparently if you want to "hire and develop the best" while also "striving to be the earth’s best employer," it’s unavoidable that you treat "the best" in hostile, insulting ways. I do not understand Amazon’s approach to RTO, but after spending this long gazing upon how they operate, I’m not surprised in the least by their "fists-of-ham" approach to communicating to their team about it. I like Amazonians; I believe they do excellent work and deserve to be treated better than… whatever the hell this is.
My inbox has also been exploding because some AWS person ages ago typoed arn as aRN (note the capitalization difference) and have decided to fix this with a veritable call to aRNs email blast. Just another day in the cloud, eh?
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From the Community
Based on this analysis by Ganesh Swaminathan, I’m hard pressed to identify why everyone wouldn’t use Flex EC2 instances for Intel workloads as soon as they become available in the configurations they need.
Despite being a vim user for my entire professional career, I only corresponded with Bram Moolenaar once, but he was incredibly kind. We’re all poorer for his absence.
My hat is off to The Verge for getting a rare podcast interview with Adam Selipsky, and then using their first question out of the gate to ask him what the hell is going on with AWS’s airport ad campaigns.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: AWS Begins Charging For Public IPv4 Addresses
Last Week In AWS: Cloud Security Has a Good Week
Last Week In AWS: EC2’s Weird Flex
Screaming in the Cloud: How Cloudflare is Working to Fix the Internet with Matthew Prince
Screaming in the Cloud: The Role of DevRel at Google with Richard Seroter
Choice Cuts
Amazon Interactive Video Service announces Real-Time Streaming – This thing is so phenomenally expensive at any kind of scale that if you select this as the technology to underpin your new streaming platform, you’ve got to do some work to convince me that you’re not being a fool.
Amazon MSK Serverless expands availability to three additional AWS Regions – This is a release that works around internal challenges that frankly shouldn’t really be there. A service is either "available" or "not available" in most platforms; on AWS it’s a crapshoot whether it’s available (and fully featured!) in the region you need it to live within. Yes, these are hard problems–but regional expansions are purely paying off technical debt, and should come with a small dose of shame that things work this way.
Amazon VPC now supports primary IPv6 address on an elastic network interface – Fortunately this makes IPv6 addresses a lot more "static," but man does it take a bit of work to wrap your head around some of these concepts. Now that it has economic impact, expect a lot of us to get way better at it.
AWS Artifact launches email notifications – If you care about compliance reports, turn this on and save yourself some work. But you don’t care about compliance reports; you just have to pretend to so you don’t get fired. So turn this on and then ignore it.
Announcing AWS Backup logically air-gapped vault (Preview) – I always preferred to write backups to another cloud provider, and ensure that the people who have access to read / alter those remote backups aren’t the same ones who have access to the primary production accounts–but what do I know?
Mountpoint for Amazon S3 is now generally available – I can’t wait to throw this in the face of that dickhead interviewer in 2009 who said I was wrong for calling S3 a filesystem. It took another 14 years, but I’ve been vindicated!
Network Load Balancer now supports security groups – FINALLY. Thank you! This was MADDENING.
Using response streaming with AWS Lambda Web Adapter to optimize performance – If this had existed a few years ago it would have saved me days of work. The lesson we take here is that procrastination is a modern best practice.
AWS recognized as a Leader in 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Contact Center as a Service with Amazon Connect – I’m realizing that I’ve been far too harsh on Amazon Connect. It has its rough edges, sure–but its competition is still stuck in the dark ages.
Tools
Subnet-Watcher give you observability into your AWS subnets. Suddenly, yes–this matters a whole hell of a lot more than it once did.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
