Good Morning!
Last week I made a joke about CloudWatch Backup Metrics existing, but Restore Metrics were sadly missing. To be clear restore metrics do exist, the blog post didn’t mention this because nobody cares about restores until it’s too late, and getting a whole bunch of outreach from AWS about this topic shows that people there are in deed reading this newsletter. I’m absolutely going to capitalize on that now that I know.
From the Community
Ah – the original promise of data lakes (I can almost hear the sad trombone). But now there’s a new approach – anchored by technology you are already using – that’s empowering business insights with virtually no limitations of speed, scale or cost! To learn more, join me, Corey Quinn on a webinar this Wednesday, Feb 17th entitled “The Future-Proof Data Lake for Log Analytics That You Already Have (but just aren’t using!)”. During this webinar (did I mention I’ll be speaking?) you’ll learn where your architecture should be going, and how you can leverage the elasticity and scale of your existing cloud storage to future-proof your data analytics, security and more! Register for this Wednesday’s webinar – even if it’s just to hear my dulcet tones! Brought to you by ChaosSearch – the revolutionary, fully managed data platform that turns your Amazon S3 into an UltraHot data store! Sponsored
Before you click, ask yourself one question. Is AWS ElasticWolf real, or something I made up to goad you into clicking?
AWS Stash is so beautifully written and well executed that my response was “there’s no possible way that this is an AWS offering,” and indeed it isn’t. This is hands down the best way to consume re:Invent video content.
Gene Kim mentioned this on Twitter; a comparison of various transcription APIs that used one of my Screaming in the Cloud episodes (this one featuring Kelsey Hightower) as one of the sample set. As a fun aside, all of my episode transcripts are done via a contracted human (not a service) who keeps a detailed list of “terms of art.”
An AWS Lambda that can schedule its next runtime is both awesome and a terrific way to juice your AWS bill.
I appeared on the GeekWire Podcast to discuss Andy Jassy, AWS, the next CEO of AWS, what exactly my problem is, and several more exciting topics.
Another experiment detailing exactly what happens when you commit secrets to a public git repo.
The NHL is partnering with AWS, or at least it is until Satya Nadella buys a team too.
TIm Bray has rounded up his Andy Jassy Talking Points in a very human, approachable way. “Who is Andy Jassy” is suddenly a mainstream question.
Great news for contractors everywhere: there’s now a rusty foundation for them to fix. AWS is apparently funding it.
Jobs
If you’ve got an interesting job for this newsletter’s eminently employable subscribers, get in touch!
Perhaps you’ve had trouble with the Amplify framework. Perhaps you’d like to help others avoid the challenges you’ve overcome. Perhaps you really like talking louder and louder because you misunderstand what “Amplify” is all about.Consider applying to become a Developer Support Engineer for the Amplify Framework. Work directly with open source users via GitHub issues – help reproduce customer issues, and answer their questions. Work with developers where they hang out, including Discord, Twitter, GitHub (as always it’s pronounced Jith-Ubb), Stack Overflow, and more. Note that this is a highly technical role – you should ideally have some front end knowledge (JS + 1 framework (React, vue, flutter, react native, etc..) is preferred. Note that this is NOT a typical “support” role–it reports through the Amplify service team itself.
Choice Cuts
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
Amazon Aurora Global Database supports managed planned failover – This is a neat enhancement. Historically Aurora Global Databases supported unmanaged unplanned failovers, but that’s usually just shortened to “service outage.”
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) customers can now customize reverse DNS for their Elastic IP addresses – I missed this last week–it definitely is worth highlighting. At long last I can stop seeing “amazonaws.com” in my access logs.
AWS Cloud9 launches visual source control integration for Git – I would just like to point out that this trails GitHub CodeSpaces so significantly that the clear customer win would be to take the (MIT licensed) VS Code and implement that. Unfortunately, AWS is unlikely to do such a thing, but man would that be nice.
AWS CloudHSM Adds New Availability Zones – Services that only work in certain (inconsistently named between accounts) AZs are both interesting and worrying.
Introducing Amazon CloudFront Security Savings Bundle – CloudFront and WAF combine to save you money on both in varying amounts in return for a year-long commitment to a number that will almost certainly be inaccurate. Operators are standing by for your call!
Introducing Serverless Image Handler v5.2 – I love that AWS has a first-party offering to solve the first thing companies generally try to build with Serverless, but does such a weird job of talking about it that all of those companies build their own version like it’s freaking Hello World.
Scheduled Actions of Application Auto Scaling now support Local Time Zone – This is use case for localized time zones that is awesome. Developers can think locally in this context, and that’s a legitimately good thing. Setting time zones in databases to local time zones is a horrifying thing that you should never do; it leads to problems down the road something fierce.
New AWS Partner Report Highlights Importance of Balancing Growth and Profitability – It’s unclear to me whether AWS telling its partners “it’s important to focus both on growth AND profitability” is merely condescending, or a very sad statement on the business acumen of those partners.
CFO Series: The Sniff Test – Do not sniff your CFO. Do not let your CFO sniff others. I really can’t stress this enough.
Need to classify and protect sensitive data in AWS? Is Amazon Macie just too expensive or inadequate for your use case? There are good reasons why AWS users are flocking to Open Raven. Discover, classify, map, and monitor sensitive data risks in AWS, continuously and in real-time. Operationalize data loss protection and compliance, end-to-end. Watch the webinar to see how Open Raven compares to Amazon Macie. Sponsored
Why you Should Adopt Agile Cloud Transformation – Without reading this post, I can already tell you that the real answer that is never mentioned is “because if you don’t, we won’t make any freaking money.”
Standardizing quantification of expression data at Corteva Agriscience with Nextflow and AWS Batch – The next time someone asks me why I didn’t use AWS Batch for something I’m just going to point at headlines like this. A great service by all accounts, but not exactly what one would call “approachable.”
Opt-in to the new Amazon SES console experience – There’s a new SES console to interact with how you can send email from AWS. In what can only be a lack of confidence, AWS put this on their blog rather than emailing the announcement out.
Announcing the winners of the AWS City on a Cloud competition – This is apparently the sixth annual competition, and also the first time I’ve ever heard of it.
〈 Hello | World 〉! | AWS Quantum Computing Blog – “This is a brand new AWS blog; it’s about Quantum Computing” is all but guaranteed to be the most understandable post it ever publishes.
Tools
Download today: Kubernetes security ebook – tips, tricks, best practices
The rapid adoption of Kubernetes to manage containerized workloads is driving great efficiencies in application development, deployment, and scalability. However, when security becomes an afterthought, you risk diminishing the greatest gain of containerization – agility. Download this ebook to learn how to (1) build secure images and prevent untrusted/vulnerable code, (2) configure RBAC, network policies, and runtime privileges, (3) detect unauthorized runtime activity, and (4) secure your Kubernetes infrastructure components such as the API server. Sponsored
They’ve again updated the AWS Lambda Power Tools. Ignore the crappy wording; if you write Lambda functions and find yourself doing a bunch of the same things over and over again, check these out.
Generating an IAM policy via client-side monitoring is the stuff that we want but AWS refuses to give us.
The EC2 Instances tool I adore has a new home. Very curious to see what Vantage does with it…
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
