Welcome to issue number 78 of Last Week in AWS.
Cloud computing from space, new Community Heroes, and oh– the re:Invent session catalog has been posted. Happy October!
The amount of data (and infrastructure) you have to work with only keeps increasing – and you have to generate logs from all of it and synthesize them as much as possible. This free eBook from Scalyr will help you do just that: figure out what to log and how to log it. You’ll get step-by-step guides for logging in Java, C++, Python, C#, JS, Ruby, Go, Node.js, and whatever the hell Spring Boot is. Download on the eBook format of your choice (Kindle, Google Play, iTunes, Nook, and Kobo). It’s impressively researched, and extremely timely. Thanks to Scalyr for their support of this ridiculous newsletter.
Community Contributions
If you’re not familiar with Vicki Boykis’s work, fix that– her latest post, the Case of the Broken Lambda, is well worth the read. I love the murder-mystery approach here.
An economic exploration into what it costs to run a mass emailing platform built atop Lambda. Less than you might think, as it turns out.
If you’re running a database on top of EC2 due to the myriad issues with running RDS at scale, be aware that your clock could be slowing you down.
I missed this one last week– a new S3 Bucket Negligence Award, this time for 7GB of medical data. Take a bow, Medcall Healthcare Advisors; you’ve done your part to make people more reluctant to trust cloud technology because you don’t grasp how permissions work.
Friend-of-the-newsletter Tom McLaughlin of Serverless Ops has a guest post talking about going Serverless and keeping DynamoDB from waking you up. I’m enough of a fan of DynamoDB that it can wake me up any time it wants.
I had to read this six times to make sure I wasn’t being fooled, but it would seem that AWS is preparing to partner with Iridium in order to provide cloud services via satellite. That’s… a game changer.
One of my favorite Twitter accounts now has a FAQ posted about how it works.
Reuters has an article about how effectively “every large cloud company except Amazon” are working together on a data pricing pact.
Returning sponsor ThoughtWorks has a blog post from last year that’s well worth reading; it delves into the concept of Pipelines as Code and what that means. I learned something here; I suspect you might too. Thanks to GoCD / ThoughtWorks for their ongoing sponsorship of this newsletter.
Choice Cuts From the AWS Blog
Amazon Aurora Now Supports Stopping and Starting of Database Clusters – Every so often a great feature is tarnished by my thinking “wait– it didn’t do that already? Seriously? That’s ridiculous…” This is one of those moments.
Amazon CloudWatch adds Ability to Build Custom Dashboards Outside the AWS Console – Building dashboards for display that don’t require a dog-and-pony-show login process? Wow, two CloudWatch changes in a week; who gave the CloudWatch team access to sugar after 2PM?!
Amazon CloudWatch Agent adds Custom Metrics Support – It’s nice to see that in a world where some services climb mountains, others hit the snooze button forty times, eat six bags of Doritos, and then slap out some tiny enhancement that just barely demonstrates that they’re still alive.
Amazon EC2 F1 instances now Available in an Additional Size – Good news, that brings the total number of instance type/size options in us-east-1 to 144 as of this week. Awesome. Just awesome. “Now please commit to using the one you’re using for the next three years…”
Amazon Linux 2 Now Supports 32-bit Applications and Libraries – It turns out that the 64-bit revolution is still coming, it’s just taking a heck of a lot longer than anybody thought previously.
Amazon RDS Now Provides Database Deletion Protection – Years after we’ve all learned that CloudFormation will cheerfully blow away a database (but strangely not an S3 bucket), a fix is introduced. How… timely.
Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL now supports IAM Authentication – Postgres really, really feels like it’s an afterthought for Amazon. “Here’s a handy feature that our MySQL offering’s had for years” is nowhere near as exciting as it should be.
AWS Amplify Announces Vue.js Support for Building Cloud-powered Web Applications – Rejoice, yet another javascript framework you don’t care about is supported via Amplify.
AWS PrivateLink now supports access over AWS VPN – I’m left with the feeling that something just changed with how AWS VPN does networking, and they’re dressing it up as multiple features. Curious…
Changes to Tags on AWS Resources Now Generate Amazon CloudWatch Events – A tag changing now throws an event. This can be either very handy, or incredibly noisy, to your preference.
Network Load Balancer now supports AWS VPN – Details are sketchy, but if you’re using AWS’s VPN offering this may be helpful to you. More helpful might be guidance to use other VPN offerings.
Reserved Pricing Now Available with AWS Elemental MediaConvert – Yet another service now lets you make long term commitments to forecast your on-demand usage years in advance as if it were freaking CapEx. Everyone wants lower prices, nobody wants models like this.
Meet the Newest AWS Heroes (September 2018 Edition) | AWS News Blog – I missed this last week– the newest AWS Heroes. While they’re all awesome, I’m particularly thrilled to see Jerry Hargrove here. His Visual Service Summaries are things of beauty.
Now Available – Amazon EC2 High Memory Instances with 6, 9, and 12 TB of Memory, Perfect for SAP HANA | AWS News Blog – Three new instance types named u-6tb1.metal, u-9tb1.metal, and u-12tb1.metal are are not only utterly unpronounceable, but also the second best way to run SAP HANA. The first is of course to not run SAP HANA at all.
Saving Koalas Using Genomics Research and Cloud Computing | AWS News Blog – It’s nice to see Amazon applying their technology to high koala-ty issues like this one.
Use YubiKey security key to sign into AWS Management Console with YubiKey for multi-factor authentication | AWS Security Blog – I’m so excited about this one that I wrote my own blog post in celebration. It’s a good start.
This week, sponsor DigitalOcean gives us a whitepaper that requires no personal information to download, and applies (as is their tradition) to environments that extend well beyond DigitalOcean. Running Cloud Native Applications on DigitalOcean Kubernetes is well worth a quick read. Thanks to DigitalOcean for their ongoing sponsorship.
Tool (yes, just one this week)
athenacli lets you autocomplete Athena commands, and includes syntax highlighting. Note this is for the Athena AWS service, not the one from Greek mythology.
…and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
