Welcome to issue number 55 of Last Week in AWS.
AWS is supporting blockchain, I’m spending some time in Seattle next week to rage-cry about it (hit reply and let me know if you’re around to meet up; with enough interest we’ll do a meetup), and the world continues to go on as it ever does. I’ll have some interesting conference news to announce in the near future as well. Onward!
This week’s issue is sponsored by DigitalOcean:
Looking for a high-performance cloud platform with no billing surprises? Always know what you’ll pay each month on DigitalOcean with monthly caps and flat pricing across regions. Get started with a $100 credit. https://do.co/lastweek
Community Contributions
Cloudonaut takes us behind the scenes of the network performance benchmark. Handy if you’re considering building such a thing yourself– or you’re curious how someone might build such a thing.
AWS Support celebrated its ten year anniversary last week, so I wrote a quick post myself: What I Don’t See From AWS Support.
I was fortunate enough to be on a panel with Manish Pandit at re:Invent 2017; now he’s releasing a how-to guide for IP Whitelisting with Amazon API Gateway. I’ll be honest– I didn’t know this was possible.
A recap from the SF Summit that explores orchestrating containers with Fargate.
A quick and convenient way of using Lambdas to get Slack notifications from CloudWatch alarms.
Missed this one a few weeks ago; the tale of how Meetup migrated 15 years of photos to AWS. It’s got something for everyone.
This article goes into a fair bit of depth around how Netflix does full-region failovers.
This fun dive explains how (for some use cases) RedShift can be beaten by the judicious use of S3, Athena, Lambdas, DynamoDB, and a few other odds and ends.
My article for LinuxJournal was published; take a look at The Agony and the Ecstasy of Cloud Billing.
Last week I was joined by AWS Community Hero / iRobot Cloud Robotics Research Scientist Ben Kehoe on Screaming in the Cloud Episode 6: The Robot Uprising Will Have Very Clean Floors.
A “through the years” analysis of AWS pricing over time. This helps reaffirm some stuff that I’d assumed / handwaved over.
This week’s S3 Bucket Negligence award is won by LocalBlox. You may not have heard of them, but they’ve certainly heard of you– they leaked 48 million individual records.
Choice Cuts From the AWS Blog
Amazon EC2 now Offers Microsoft SQL Server on Ubuntu and Amazon Linux 2 AMIs – Cats and dogs living together at last– Microsoft databases running on a variety of Linuxes.
Identify Opportunities for Amazon RDS Cost Savings Using AWS Cost Explorer’s Reserved Instance (RI) Purchase Recommendations – I get that this stuff takes a while to get out the door, but “saving 20-70% on customer database spend” is a big win for the customer; I’m surprised this wasn’t higher on the priority stack.
Introducing AWS Blockchain Templates for Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric – AWS is pleased to announce its slowest database offering yet, which also happens to be championed by some of the worst people on the internet.
Introducing the Registry of Open Data on AWS (RODA) – This is a neat idea, but it seems to be missing an awful lot of insecure S3 buckets.
Tools
This one’s a wobbler– it could land in the Tools or the AWS Blog section. Such are the challenges that AWS’s Open Source group presents me with. In any case, s5cmd offers a worthy CLI tool for working with S3 in bulk.
FittedCloud has open sourced a script that leverages the new CostExplorer API. I like the direction this is going in.
Terrible Tip of the Week
…and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
