Good Morning!
Charity Majors, Ben Hartshorne, and I are going to be shooting our respective mouths off about AWS bills tomorrow on a webinar. This should go well.
Bloomberg reported this week that (along with many others) I referred to AWS’s hyped generative AI offerings that nobody I know has been able to access (be they AWS employees or otherwise) as vaporware; nobody I’ve encountered yet seems to disagree.
From the Community
Did you know Network Traffic Within the Same Region Can Be Very Expensive? Database Architects (the blog, not the profession) discovered that you can do an end-run around cross-AZ traffic by relaying it through S3. That’s one of several dirty hacks to avoid an inflicted tax that need not be there.
AWS now mentions that there’s a lifetime account limit of 5000 RIs / $50K on the RI secondary marketplace; while limit increases are possible they’re unlikely. This is a quiet change from what was said a few months ago on that same page; someone’s business model just had a wrench thrown into it.
Two unpleasant bits of news this week: AWS forgot to bill for some of the data transfer for Multi-Region Access Points for the past year and a half, so you may be in for an unpleasant shock. And OpsWorks for Chef Automate / Puppet Enterprise are both being deprecated.
Some excellent guidance on remembering the important bits to log when you’re building for the future.
Some enterprising data scientist crunched the numbers and realized that AWS and Azure have massively more IP addresses than their competitors, and the market value of these for each company comes in at roughly $4 billion US. That’s wild to me.
We have a new blog post up at The Duckbill Group’s blog: What’s the Difference Between an EDP and a PPA?
My commentary on A Hidden Serverless Peril is really more of a commentary on my own crappy development practices, if I’m being honest.
The Information has a (paywalled) article mentioning that AWS is now paying open source companies under shared revenue models. Interesting!
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: A Hidden Serverless Peril
Last Week In AWS: Bad Behavior And Doing Things Right
Last Week In AWS: RedShift Costs a Peloton
Screaming in the Cloud: Honeycomb on Observability as Developer Self-Care with Brooke Sargent
Screaming in the Cloud: Remote Versus Local Development with Mike Brevoort
Choice Cuts
Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL improves availability of read replicas – I didn’t realize that Aurora reader nodes previously would go unavailable during a writer node restart; what’s the value proposition of this service again?
AWS Copilot announces Static Site pattern to host single-page web applications – Okay, the pattern is good, and this does it properly: by putting it into S3 and hooking up the relevant bits. But there are no containers involved, and Copilot is still marketed as being "for containerized applications," demonstrating that yet again AWS easily loses sight of the truism that words actually mean things.
Developing a serverless Slack app using AWS Step Functions and AWS Lambda – With the hype cycle globally focusing on generative AI, AWS turns its gaze towards losing the last war: Slack bots that don’t solve your actual problem.
How Broadridge used Amazon Managed Blockchain to build a private equity lifecycle management solution – Someone at Broadridge has severely irritated someone at AWS, who has then forced them to be a reference customer for Managed Blockchain. Gotta say, if I were using Managed Blockchain for something even Batman couldn’t beat that confession out of me.
Stronger together: Highlights from RSA Conference 2023 – Oh, was AWS aware that RSA was going on? Because they didn’t have a booth. Google had a big booth. Microsoft had multiple booths. And AWS apparently… has a blog post after the fact.
Welcome to AWS Documentation – AWS revamped their documentation site. No, they didn’t make it more useful, or rewrite some of the more confusing bits–they reskinned it. Because if there’s one thing people love, it’s being surprised with a new interface when they’re trying to solve a problem.
Tools
aws-doc-extractor pulls relevant details from the AWS documentation; I hope the reskin didn’t break anything.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
