Good Morning!
Bad writing strikes again! Last week I railed against what appeared to be AWS Transfer Family creating a new logging format. While this would indeed be horrible, further investigation reveals that this isn’t what’s happening, suggestive headline of that post to the contrary. They’re simply outputting structured data, which is a good feature. Carry on with your excellent work–just please describe it better using your words.
And of course, if you’re looking to hired or be hired, the Last Week in AWS Job Board is probably where you should head. Go for it; I’ll wait here for you to come back and finish reading this newsletter.
From the Community
I’m not a JavaScript developer, but this rant titled JavaScript Gom Jabbar hits home for anyone that works with computers for a living regardless…
In case you were wondering how the other side lives, Azure Media Services is being retired soon.
A cloud benchmark for HPC workloads that I find trustworthy. So many are vendor captured; this one appears not to be.
At long last we have data on Azure revenue: $34B in revenue in 2022, less than half of AWS’s for the same period. Really puts a lot of their posturing about "Azure growth percentages" into an unflattering light…
AWS Docs GPT is the interface to the AWS docs that I wish existed as a formal AWS offering.
We’re periodically asked Should I Purchase AWS Through a Reseller? Here’s our take on the matter.
I was going to make some snide comment here about the Secret Service’s announcement that Former Amazon employees plead guilty to $10 million fraud–probably including a joke about stealing a Managed NAT Gateway, but honestly this is a pretty good read. So many people act unethically since they believe they’re going to get away with it, and for what? No shade to Amazon on this one.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: Amazon Basics Ohio
Last Week In AWS: S3 Is Not a Backup (Replay)
Last Week In AWS: The Horrible Game That Inspired My Bank
Screaming in the Cloud: Best Practices in AWS Certificate Manager with Jonathan Kozolchyk
Choice Cuts
Amazon CloudWatch now supports dashboard variables – Whoa. To my understanding the only way to do this sort of thing previously was to templatize your dashboards in CloudFormation or similar.
Amazon DynamoDB now simplifies and lowers the cost of handling failed conditional writes – These announcements are bittersweet, because I get to throw away a lot of bad code that I spent time writing to get around the exact thing that this feature fixes.
Mountpoint for Amazon S3 adds support for creating new files – The "use S3 as a read-only filesystem" open source project loses the qualifier, and now I fear it needs a big scary "you probably don’t want to use this" banner more than ever. The pattern is actively dangerous if you don’t understand the trade-offs you’re making…
AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store increases API throughput limit – This is kind of amazing. I remember when Parameter Store first launched and I smacked face-first into the original rate limit (which as I recall was something like 30 requests per second?) when spinning up a pile of ECS containers all at once at a client. With a new default limit of 10,000 transactions per second, I can still cause this behavior but now I have to work really really hard to do it.
Announcing DynamoDB local version 2.0 – Whoa, this is a big change; I thought it was largely abandonware. Great to see that not everyone at AWS eschews local development workflows… (Disclosure: I am a small investor in LocalStack.)
Building Generative AI into Marketing Strategies: A Primer – I swear to you that I read this title and thought it was an internal strategy document from AWS Marketing that somehow leaked into their blog feed. "Talk about Generative AI at all costs" is certainly An Approach…
How To Build an Email Service on SES – Perhaps you thought SES (Simple Email Service) was itself an email service. Perhaps you are a fool.
Downgrade SQL Server Enterprise edition using AWS Systems Manager Document to reduce cost – I’m a big fan of using things inappropriately as databases, and I endorse this approach of using AWS Systems Manager Document as your database instead.
ITSkills4U: From dentistry to IT – "Work in IT or work in dentistry; either way it’s like pulling teeth."
Tools
Y’know, CloudWatch Logs LiveTail costs money, but I was reminded recently that there’s a tail — AWS CLI 2.12.1 Command Reference command in the AWS CLI that doesn’t incur that charge…
If you want to "get good" as the kids say, there are a lot of ways to do it. I like to learn by doing, so the Cloudonaut Debug Games are right in line with this.
Years ago I whined on Twitter about a workflow using Docker that I wish existed. Apparently somebody listened, and remote-docker exists.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
