Good Morning!
If you’re making plans for re:Invent this year, come commiserate with us at our annual Duckbill / RedMonk drink-up at Atomic Liquors. If you’d not mind filling out ye olde registration form just so we have a rough idea of how many of you to expect, it’d be appreciated.
From the Community
Has Generative AI ruined the re:Invent experience? I’d say so. There are 21 session topic categories, yet AI/ML comprises a whopping 34% of the sessions. Hopefully it beats the 100% that the Google Cloud Next keynote hit back in April, which was absurd.
Matt Garman (the new CEO of AWS) sat for an interview with TechCrunch. "I think the reason that customers use AWS today is because we have the best and broadest set of services," sounds like something that was a lot more credible three years ago. Today? The competition has caught up.
Another choice quote: "You can’t invest in everything. You can’t build everything. We don’t like to do that." Does… does Matt Garman not realize where he works? The AWS product strategy has long been a post-it note with "Yes" scrawled on it. It obviously shouldn’t be!
The last point he made was around open source: "I think we’ve evolved and learned as an organization how to be a good steward in that community and hopefully that’s been noticed by others." Yes. Yes, it has been noticed. Gold star to AWS on improving on this front so dramatically.
My post on AWS’s Valkey Play: When a Fork Becomes a Price Cut is my first in a while; it feels good to get back into writing again.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: Attend My re:Invent Talk!
Screaming in the Cloud: Navigating the Cloud-First World with Eric Pullen
Screaming in the Cloud: Replay – Breaking the Tech Mold with Stephanie Wong
Choice Cuts
Announcing Amazon ElastiCache for Valkey – Along with one for MemoryDB, this is basically "switch over from Redis (which is a proprietary fork of Valkey) to something API compatible and knock at least 20% off of your pricing." That’s no small thing.
Amazon WorkSpaces now supports file transfer between WorkSpaces sessions and local devices – "Administrators can control whether this is enabled" is the line I was looking for in this announcement, because without that this whole thing is a data breach in progress for some shops. Fortunately, that line is there. Good improvement!
AWS Application Composer is now AWS Infrastructure Composer – Taking a break from deprecating services, AWS takes time out to replace one bad service name with another worse service name.
AWS CodePipeline introduces new general purpose compute action – Holy… this just runs shell commands as an action. I wanted that when Lambda first launched, I wanted this in GitHub Actions, and at last something supports my sysadmin-centric view of the world. There are dozens of us!
AWS Lambda now detects and stops recursive loops between Lambda and Amazon S3 – The combined Lambda / S3 teams’ office party will only feature half as many Fabergé eggs this year.
Convert AWS console actions to reusable code with AWS Console-to-Code, now generally available – It only works in three services and you have to remember to click "Record" first (always my failing), but Console-to-Code is now an official version of the far more capable Former2, which has the temerity to exist without being "AI Powered."
How to identify inactive users of Amazon Q Developer – Ooh, given that it charges per month this is great. reads the post Oh, wait. Nevermind. The point is to identify them so you can then pester them to use Amazon Q Developer. Spoiler: users aren’t avoiding Q Developer because they don’t know it exists, it’s a perceived quality issue. That’s the polite version of "rightly or wrongly, they think it sucks compared to other options."
Transitioning off Amazon Lookout for Metrics – Lookout! For Metrics is AWS’s deprecated service of the week.
Sign-in to AWS Console Mobile Application with an AWS Access Portal or third-party IdP URL – I just used this and holy crap, it’s amazing. Please find whomstever is responsible for this getting rolled out and promote them all immediately. I’ve been unable to log into this thing in my federated accounts since forever. Take a bow!
How AWS uses active defense to help protect customers from security threats – As Scott Piper points out, this significantly impacts some security researchers’ ability to do their excellent work. I hope AWS makes exception cases for trusted folks like Scott.
Tools
While unfortunately written in Rust which means I’m about to get Some Emails From People, the cloudwatch-log-redirector is great regardless. Drop it onto an instance or container, it stuffs whatever you send it into CloudWatch Logs.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
