Good Morning!
I took and passed my Cloud Practitioner certification last week, then attempted to take my Sysops Associate cert (I have some partner requirement things mandating this)–but Pearson Vue remains Amazon’s vendor of choice for certifications, and they can’t seem to be able to staff appropriately to handle appointments. The saga is still unfolding, but you can expect a full writeup once the issue resolves. I am not pleased.
But you should be, if you’re in New York City next week! The night before the AWS Summit, I’m holding a drink-up at Vol de Nuit at . THIS week? I’m taking my daughter on an adventure to Seattle, where we’ll not be touring an AWS office because who does something like that to a kid?
From the Community
There have been some noises about this week’s newsletter issue in which I criticized the release of AWS Compute Optimizer offering RDS recommendations thusly:
Too bad it’s completely useless for most customers, because RDS only has its own bespoke Reserved Instances, which are wildly inflexible. The fact that Savings Plans don’t extend to cover RDS is one of the more customer-hostile things AWS does, and a number of large customers are annoyed by it. So yeah, use this if you want recommendations you can’t take advantage of without leaving bushels of money on the table, I guess.
Let me clarify my position and commentary on this feature announcement.
The feature itself is fine, bordering on great. "You’re running RDS instances of type X, consider type Y instead" is a solid enhancement. For extra style points, it even supports a whole slew of customizations around the recommendations: RI awareness (which we’ll get into in a sec!), idle detection, storage, the lookback period under analysis, and integration with RDS memory metrics for deeper inspection. This is a solid feature enhancement that I’m sure will brighten the days of many customers and represents what I know to be a lot of hard work and internal negotiation to develop and launch.
However!
My concern with the feature is that customers are inherently limited in their ability to migrate between RDS instance types due to the inflexibility of RDS Reserved Instances and the RDS org not deciding not to support Savings Plans, or even a similar structure that’s worse in every way–like SageMaker’s own imagining of Savings Plans versus supporting the existing ones. While this feature announcement is RI-aware and will make recommendations that take those into account, if a customer has existing high RI coverage on RDS, they may not see recommendations to downsize their over-provisioned RDS instances.
That’s my issue: it’s not about this announcement, it’s about the capability being hamstrung by RDS RIs making this less effective than it could be–which is entirely an RDS issue, not an issue with the feature. If there were more flexibility in RDS RIs (Savings Plans!) then this feature might show substantially more optimization opportunities.
What do I mean about RDS RI inflexibility? While the discounts can be high (up to 69% discounting off of on-demand pricing), the RIs are bound to a combination of region, database engine, instance class, and deployment type, roughly equivalent to the inflexibility we had with EC2 Standard RIs–and why Compute Savings Plans were such a massive improvement. One of the best parts about Compute Savings Plans is that it doesn’t matter whether you’re using Lambda, Fargate, EC2, what instance family you’re using, etc–as long as you’re spending at least some committed hourly spend amount, there aren’t artificial economic barriers that constrain your architectural decisions.
This networking benchmark series is well worth looking at if you’re doing significant data work with Fargate.
Fascinating write-up of the triggering event for the recent "you get charged for failed writes to your buckets" issue that AWS fixed, written by a dear friend who works at Grafana.
Amazon Web Services dark patterns is a great exploration of a problem countless people stumble into, then get castigated for in social media forums because "they should have been smarter."
Huh, Azure stole a march on the other providers by agreeing to publish Cloud Service CVEs. Good on them. More like this, please!
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: RDS Hates Its Customers, Financially Speaking
Screaming in the Cloud: Complex Tech, Public Learning, & Impostor Syndrome with Kyler Middleton
Screaming in the Cloud: Summer Replay – The Evolution of DevRel with Jeremy Meiss
Choice Cuts
Amazon DocumentDB announces IAM database authentication – Before the Amazon Basics MongoDB customers get too excited, the primary user can only be authenticated using existing password-based authentication. So you’re not going full passwordless yet, buddy.
Amazon Redshift Query Editor V2 now supports 100MB file uploads – If your query is 100MB of text you are terrible at databases. We should hang out and start a club!
Amazon Time Sync Service expands microsecond-accurate time to 27 EC2 instance types – Bring them to the lower end, smaller instances next please. This should be global.
Announcing Amazon WorkSpaces Pools, a new feature of Amazon WorkSpaces – I do not understand this. It’s a pool of workspaces that result in each user getting "a fresh desktop every time they spin one up." Is it some kind of end run around monthly license fee nonsense or something? Why do this at all?
AWS CodeBuild supports Arm-based workloads using AWS Graviton3 – Cool, cool. Hey, Graviton 4 was announced at re:Invent eight months ago, has anyone seen a peep out of those instances yet? No? They’re still in preview? Weird.
Optimizing Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) for speed and scale – It’s wild to me that AWS’s oldest service (its beta predates S3’s) still sees enhancements twenty years later.
Ten Ways to Improve Your AWS Operations – Number eleven: Somewhere in your DevOps group is an employee named Steven. Fire Steven immediately.
Tools
I’ve been rolling out ball to all of my clients’ production environments lately. It’s a real game changer.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
