Good Morning!
Another week has come, and gone, and apparently will be taking Amazon Chime with it. I’m conflicted, since most of my job is introducing Amazonians to one another. Read on!
From the Community
Normally I just make fun of databases, then wait for someone like Chase Douglas to pen actually informative articles like Vaultwarden Serverless: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love AWS Aurora DSQL.
Sweet, another AWS networking article featuring a cartoon duck, this one titled Old man yells at subnets .
I asked the leading question Is AWS Delivering on Its 3-Layer Approach to AI? I think I like the direction it’s trending, at least.
I think I missed this podcast interview with Matt Garman when it first came out. I implore you to read it; you can feel the personality and passion leaking out of his answers. It reminds me a lot of the way Andy Jassy used to field these things. In case it wasn’t clear, I’m very much a fan.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: The AWS Chatbot Disappointment
Choice Cuts
Amazon ECS increases the CPU limit for ECS tasks to 192 vCPUs – Ah, ECS finally catches up with AWS’s premier Serverless container service: CodeBuild. No, I’m not kidding; it’s supported 192 vCPUs for ages.
Amazon Q Developer now supports upgrade to Java 21 – I’m sorry, I don’t understand this. Why would the chatbot that pops up notifications in my Slack channel need to support Java’s LTS?
AWS announces Backup Payment Methods for invoices – How does this interact with the existing backup payment method for large customers, which feature the account manager emailing, then calling, then showing up at the customer’s house at 2AM sobbing?
AWS CodePipeline adds native Amazon EKS deployment support – This makes absolutely no sense until you realize that CodePipeline charges $0.002 per action execution minute, and that EKS remains glacially slow to deploy. Someone’s ship is coming in; most likely the CodePipeline product owner’s private yacht.
AWS Price List API supports AWS PrivateLink – I can only imagine the hilarious set of conversations that led to this–the ability to use AWS PrivateLink for security when querying public information from AWS.
AWS CloudFormation: 2024 Year in Review – They’re releasing this at the end of February because that’s how long it took the rollback to complete.
Cost optimize your Minecraft Java EC2 Server – As it happens, my 7-year-old daughter is super into Minecraft, and I’ve been trying to find ways to teach her more about the technical side of gaming. I eagerly pulled up the article, prepared to translate the technical steps into something kid-friendly. Here’s where I could use the internet’s advice: is it less likely to lead to expensive therapy bills if I try to explain to her how to set up Systems Manager, or just take the shortcut and directly tell her to go fuck herself?
Improving Security in Amazon WorkMail with MFA – I bet you didn’t know that Amazon had its own email suite, did you? Don’t worry, it’s well established and absolutely not going anywhere any time soon. Now let me take a big drink of water here and move on to the next item in the AWS news queue.
Update on Support for Amazon Chime – PFFFFFFFFFT 💦 Man, I spend a LOT of time on Amazon Chime, mostly introducing Amazonians to one another. I’m gonna miss it since I don’t yet have every AWS employee’s personal cell phone number. Fortunately, that’s what data breaches are for.
Best practices to respond to security risks across your AWS Organizations – This misses the critically important step of maintaining strong friendships in the industry, and keeping your résumé updated at least quarterly.
Reduce IT costs by implementing automatic shutdown for Amazon EC2 instances – This works SUPER well, since the person who implements something like this is about to no longer cost their employer their salary the first time this turns off something it shouldn’t. Remember the peril of saving money: if you leave something on, the worst case is it costs money. If you turn something off, worst case is suddenly your production database is no longer databasing. I would absolutely not trust CPU utilization alone to tell me that something is safe to turn off.
How to restrict Amazon S3 bucket access to a specific IAM role – This article has been updated to use the aws:PrincipalArn condition key instead of the aws:userid condition key. The real problem is that this is a very common request, and the article is 1900 goddamned words long because it is absolutely that complicated to achieve.
Introducing the AWS Trust Center – This webpage is going to become a laughingstock in probably 8 months or so when AWS starts slapping third-party advertisements on their own website. Nothing says "trustworthy" quite like "THIS ENTERPRISE WEBPAGE IS SPONSORED BY CHEX MIX."
Tools
Nping is just like regular ping except it’s written in Rust. "Okay, but why would–" I SAID IT IS WRITTEN IN RUST!
Subtrace is Wireshark for Docker containers, and is both "open source" and "not accepting community PRs" which is fascinating all its own. This is worth watching.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
