Good Morning!
Amazon did not have a great week, regulatorily speaking. The FTC comment period about the business of cloud computing ended, their warehouse practices are now the focus of a senate probe, the FTC is suing Amazon for its Prime enrollment dark patterns, their iRobot acquisition is now the subject of an EU investigation, and the launch of Amazon Clinic is being delayed after the senate asked some hard questions. Ever think that maybe, just maybe, your company should have a strategy that’s slightly more sophisticated than "yes?"
From the Community
AWS apparently sponsored an actual open source product; they’re covering NixOS’s S3 bills for a year. Let me see if I can drop the cost for these folks a bit…
It is absurd and also true that there remains no official way to install the AWS CLI (v2) on Mac M1 after a year+ of asking. I’m running inside of a Docker container for god’s sake.
This was profoundly disturbing; an Amazon driver thought he heard a resident say something racist (note: he did not), and as a result the Amazon customer was locked out of their smart-home Alexa devices for a week as a result. I’m sorry, are you the customer or are you the licensee when you purchase Amazon products? This has cascading implications for cloud, none of them good. Remember when Google thought a gmail account was conducting fraud so it shut down the linked company GCP account for a day? And it blew up in their faces and they fixed that problem? Yeah, that’s what this feels like.
Google Cloud decided that it’d been a while since they smacked themselves squarely in the wibbly bits, so they discontinued Google Domains and Google Cloud Domains (reportedly; Google hasn’t said bupkiss on this obviously, since why would they)? This is clearly not a serious company.
My FTC response has already been quoted in a few actual news articles. Well okay then!
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: FTC Request, Answered: How Cloud Providers Do Business
Last Week In AWS: Guest Host for re:Inforce Week – Scott Piper!
Last Week In AWS: re:Inforce and fwd:cloudsec with Scott Piper
Screaming in the Cloud: Creating an API Security Solution at FireTail with Jeremy Snyder
Screaming in the Cloud: Observing The Hidden Complexity Behind Simple Cloud Networks with Avi Freedman
Choice Cuts
Announcing Amazon EC2 Hpc7g instances – I’m sorry, I know they’re for High Performance Computing, but I can’t see that instance type name and not think it’s another horrible HP product.
AWS Lambda supports starting from timestamp for Kafka event sources – This has the potential to open up a few new design patterns, several of them likely horrible.
AWS Step Functions launches Versions and Aliases – A good enhancement for all of you chumps who somehow don’t write perfect code the first time like I do.
AWS Transfer Family announces structured JSON log format – NO! USE A PREEXISTING FORMAT YOU UNHOLY SON OF A BINCH! Don’t create your own bespoke thing!
5 Stages to Building a Successful Partner Practice with AWS – “How to build a business that we approve of.”
Say Hello to 176 AWS Competency, Service Delivery, Service Ready, and MSP Partners Added or Renewed in May – Absolutely nobody is going to read through this list of 176 partners, and so being an AWS Partner becomes increasingly undifferentiated.
How GoDaddy Implemented a Multi-Region Event-Driven Platform at Scale – Oh, is this what they were doing instead of paying attention while their managed WordPress platform got thoroughly subverted by bad actors?
New Amazon EC2 C7gn Instances: Graviton3E Processors and Up To 200 Gbps Network Bandwidth – This blog post is a good example about how AWS talks a lot about Graviton without saying very much about it. There’s no technical depth into what differentiates Graviton 3 from Graviton 3E. For actual technical depth, my thanks to David Cuthbert in the Last Week in AWS Slack Community for surfacing this AnandTech article.
Stream VPC Flow Logs to Datadog via Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose – Wow, this would bloat both your AWS and your Datadog bills. AWS’s solution to this is to switch Datadog over to billing you through the AWS Marketplace, which… is kinda like optimizing your AWS bill by migrating everything to GCP.
Creating real-time flood alerts with the cloud – Sure would be swell if that same cloud could deliver real-time alerts about horrible billing mistakes sooner than "the next day."
Use AWS Private Certificate Authority to issue device attestation certificates for Matter – I want you to use this so the products I buy from you work in my SmartHome, please.
Should I use the hosted UI or create a custom UI in Amazon Cognito? – Trick question, you should use recurring Last Week in AWS sponsor FusionAuth instead. They didn’t pay me for this item any, nor did they know it was coming; Cognito just sucks that much.
Coming soon: updates to AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam – Huh, the very odd questionnaire that comes with my re:Invent Lounge Pass is getting some updates.
How I achieved all six specialty AWS Certifications on first attempt – Honestly, the fact that someone can do this at all is really kinda damning as to the value / sophistication of the specialty certs. If I were to tell you that I passed the medical boards with two weeks of cramming, despite never having attended medical school, you’d kinda wonder what the hell was going on with the AMA’s certification these days, no?
How to win a $5 Amazon Gift Card, just by signing up for the Amazon News newsletter – Note that you don’t receive a $5 gift card, you have a chance to win such a thing. This is one of the most remarkably on-brand Amazon promotions I’ve seen in years.
Tools
I really should internalize this exit trap pattern for shell scripting.
If you like cloud-init, there’s something disturbing about you; cloud-seed is the smaller, more accessible version.
serverless-website-analytics is the replacement for Google Analytics that you self-host (albeit in your AWS account) that I believe I’ve been looking for.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
