Good Morning!
Another week of Eternal March 2020, another pile of AWS announcements available for your consumption.
From the Community
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This older post about the economics of theoretically hosting Facebook on AWS forgets one key thing: at that spend level, retail pricing would be a long-forgotten fantasy.
I’m not saying that the developer who got a surprise $7K bill did everything correctly. I am saying that the mistakes are clearly understandable, and point to crap UX in a way that for once wasn’t just annoying to a customer, but harmful.
“Do one thing every day that makes your mother ashamed” is solid life advice. Getting quoted in “People” for a series of edgy puns probably keeps me good for at least a week, right?
The Missing Guide to AWS API Gateway Access Logs shouldn’t need to exist, but of course it does.
A re:Invent video discussing (among other things) just what the hell the “edge” is in practical terms is worth a look.
Jobs
If you’ve got an interesting job for this newsletter’s eminently employable subscribers, get in touch!
Do you have 20 years of experience in a marketing digital leadership position? Do you want to suffer my slings and arrows in a scenario where nothing you do is a right answer and I’m going to dunk on it anyway? Consider applying to become AWS’s Vice President of Digital Marketing & Infrastructure. You’ll be responsible for designing, building, and operating the technology infrastructure that powers the global marketing efforts behind AWS. Please consider applying if this sounds like you; I need some new material.
Choice Cuts
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Get ready to roll! 2021 AWS DeepRacer League Season is now underway – You can now build algorithms to drive toy cars for fun in the safety of your own home or office. Uber has been doing this for years in the safety of our public streets.
Amazon VPC Flow Logs now reflects AWS Service name, Traffic Path and Flow Direction – VPC Flow Logs do indeed remain a hell of a murder mystery, but with this change Angela Landsbury will at long last have something to go on.
Announcing General Availability of Ethereum on Amazon Managed Blockchain – Some of the worst people will no doubt be excited by some of the worst technology.
AWS CodePipeline now supports 1000 pipelines per account – The maximum monthly bill you can incur on a free tier account likewise just increased by an even $1000.
AWS Step Functions adds tooling support for YAML – XML support still missing, no matter how many times I ask for it.
We’ve been benchmarking AWS vs Azure vs GCP for three years now. This year, we tested 54 machines, ran 1,000+ benchmarks, and questioned innumerable assumptions. We do it all for you, dear reader. To help you evaluate the clouds and their machines, and to help you choose the right configuration for your app.On many of the benchmarks, the margins were razor thin. Nevertheless, trends emerged. GCP’s throughput? Can’t be matched. Amazon’s network latency? Unbeatable. Intel chips? Stumbled. Wait, what now?Read the 2021 Cloud Report — or skim the highlights. Sponsored
New Amazon SNS Console Now Available in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions – I’m guessing the previous GovCloud SNS console required DirectX and Internet Explorer 6.
AWS Startup Showcase Highlights the Culture of Innovation that Helps Startups Succeed – “Why would I care about an event showcasing startups? AWS is just going to launch competing services that–ohhhhhh.” That’s right, sign up now for the AWS Product Roadmap Showcase!
Update: Amazon ECS Product Name Change in the AWS Billing and Cost Management – “We changed a name in the billing system” is huge news. Unfortunately they published this only after the change had taken effect and broken Finance’s workflows. Womp womp.
AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region Now Open to All, with Three AZs and More Services – Osaka is now a full AWS Region instead of whatever the hell a “local region” was supposed to be.
Amazon EMR 2020 year in review – The fact that the 2020 roundup was released in March of 2021 is probably the most succinct roundup of the state of Amazon EMR I can imagine.
Supporting AWS Graviton2 and x86 instance types in the same Auto Scaling group – The same autoscaling group? As in “all instances in here should be effectively identical?” And then they’re suggesting mixing the processor architectures within those? Was this post sponsored by Bad Idea Jeans or something?
How AWS streamed re:Invent 2020 – The video streaming quality was excellent; now we know why. A lot of work went into the technical implementation of their event. I look forward to the followup post, “How AWS YOLO’d the re:Invent 2020 Sponsor Expo at the last minute.”
Automating custom cost and usage tracking for member account owners in the AWS Migration Acceleration Program – Posts like this always talk about automating things, and then immediately delve into the pile of code and resources you need to write and provision in order to locally solve a clearly global problem.
How our AWS Rust team will contribute to Rust’s future successes – AWS has indeed hired a Rust team and gotten out of their way to let them do what they do best: evangelize Rust instead of writing code.
How to replicate secrets in AWS Secrets Manager to multiple Regions – Maybe I’m old fashioned, but given that each secret costs me 40¢ a month (per region!) maybe AWS could figure out how to solve this problem for me where this blog post can be replaced with “click the button?”
Tools
Download today: Kubernetes security ebook – tips, tricks, best practices
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It’s been a while since I’ve seen an enhancement for “ping” that I cared about–since mtr in fact. sping does it though by measuring latency on both halves of the trip.
rpCheckup is an AWS resource policy security checkup tool that identifies public, external account access, intra-org account access, and private resources.
Quail – is a fairly polished AWS resource provisioner. This has promise!
Ooh, iamlive got updated last week.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
