Good Morning!
This week sees Google Cloud Next, Google’s re:Invent equivalent. I’ll be onsite for part of it; we’ll see what they launch / deprecate this time.
From the Community
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Sometimes the title says it all: You should have lots of AWS accounts.
My observation that Confidential Computing Is for the Tinfoil Hat Brigade resulted in what appeared to be two categories of response: "you’re right" vs. "you’re wrong and also I work on Confidential Computing for a living." The jury remains out, but skeptical.
A user report of how setting up Ubuntu Desktop on AWS Workspaces goes.
I used to think that Quantum Computing was the most academically intensive thing AWS did, but their new hire to the Automated Reasoning group makes me rethink that.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: Amazon File Cash
Last Week In AWS: Basic Security Alerting
Last Week In AWS: Confidential Computing Is a Cloud Paranoia-Based Wasteland
Screaming in the Cloud: ChaosSearch and the Evolving World of Data Analytics with Thomas Hazel
Screaming in the Cloud: HeatWave and the Latest Evolution of MySQL with Nipun Agarwal
Choice Cuts
The LAN was a magical place to learn about computers. You could do things that would be unthinkable on today’s internet: permission-less file sharing, experimental servers with no security, shared software where one machine could easily bring down the network, and surly network admins who somehow didn’t get ejected from companies due to their toxic attitudes. Can we have a 90’s LAN-like experience again, along with the best parts of the 21st-century internet? Tailscale thinks we can, and I’m inclined to agree with them. Try now – it’s free forever for personal use with up to 20 devices. I’ve been using it for over a year personally, and am moderately annoyed that they haven’t attempted to charge me for what’s become an essential-to-my-workflow service.
AWS Cloud Map Updates Service Level Agreement – I consider Cloud Map to be a poor service name–because my initial response to this was "wait a second, viewing where your resources and workloads are shouldn’t be in the production critical path to the point where it needs a four-nines SLA." Joke’s on me; it’s a service discovery thing; without it, some workloads simply won’t work.
Amazon DevOps Guru now allows customers control over the notifications they receive – Why on earth is this a novel concept rather than a day one design requirement?
Amazon S3 Object Lambda now supports using your own code to modify the results of S3 HEAD and LIST API requests – I can think of a bunch of useful ways to implement this, but I’m not sure they’re as funny as the terrible concept / pattern of "it’s now easier than ever before to lie directly to your users’ faces about what’s really in that S3 bucket."
Amazon SageMaker Clarify now can provide near real-time explanations for ML predictions – "What the hell are these results, explain yourself immediately?!" fast talking as a service.
AWS Lambda Functions powered by AWS Graviton2 now available in 12 additional regions – This is great, but for the life of me i cannot find a page that lists its regional availability now that doesn’t require me to manually click between over 20 regions by hand.
The five most visited Amazon DynamoDB blog posts of 2022 – It must be awesome to work on an AWS team that apparently gets to take the entirety of Q4 off.
Prevent account takeover at login with the new Account Takeover Insights model in Amazon Fraud Detector – Maybe validate this thing on AWS accounts before pitching it this way? There sure are a lot of apparently account compromises turning into horrible billing surprises these days…
Bootstrapping multiple AWS accounts for AWS CDK using CloudFormation StackSets – At first this made no sense to me; it’s not exactly hard to run a quick cdk bootstrap in a new account or region. Then I remembered that the CDK is in use at a lot of companies that tightly control what can or cannot be run in production–and then I saw the light.
Designing hyperscale Amazon VPC networks – There are a whole lot of things to consider when designing large-scale networks. Most of them you’ll get right the second time; this blog post has the potential to save you a whole lot of time.
Tools
Push your code when it’s ready, launch it when you are ready, and most importantly: log off you’re ready and not worry about your coworkers calling you at 3AM and screaming you the songs of their people, specifically "Rage in D Minor." Take control of your launches with AWS AppConfig Feature Flags, and stop causing problems for other people on purpose.
The Compute Cost Calculator is a compute "normalizer" that spits out, in plain language, the relative normalized cost of various compute options.
aws-pricing gives you AWS pricing inside of your Google Sheets. You might find this handy for some of your own Cloud Economics work.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
