Good Morning!
Duckbill Group office hours: You have questions. We have coffee.
That’s right, join the cloud economists and negotiators at Duckbill Group — my day job — for an upcoming office hours session. Whether you’re dealing with unexpected cost spikes, struggling to forecast cloud expenses, or simply want to ensure you’re not overpaying, Duckbill is here to help. Bring your questions and horrifying AWS bills to this interactive session.
March 20, 10:00a PDT. Register here(it’s free!).
From the Community
An interesting dive into Picking a European Public Cloud Provider. A lot more folks are going to be considering this given the current political situation.
John Gruber savages Apple’s missteps in Something is Rotten in the State of Cupertino. How much of this could be said to Amazon setting fire to its earned customer trust in its relentless pursuit of GenAI?
Been a while since we had a good S3 Bucket Negligence Award, but this poorly reviewed "Uber for Nurses" company has broken the streak.
Apparently the hamfisted folks at Amazon PR feel that it’s a journalist’s duty to fill out their form when it comes to light that Amazon is still hosting stalkerware victims’ data weeks after breach alert.
A take on GCP from someone who spent the past decade working with AWS. I concur with most of it.
– I’m giving a remarkably on-brand Lightning Talk at SREcon25 in Santa Clara called "For the AWS Bill is Dark, and Full of Terrors." Come heckle me; get $100 off of registration with code AWSRECON25100. See you there!
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: The Name’s Doing a Heavy GameLift
Screaming in the Cloud: The Difference Between Marketing and BS with Jonathan Cowperthwait
Choice Cuts
Amazon Bedrock now supports multi-agent collaboration – Okay, this is a neat idea. If collaboration amongst people with different focuses / objectives can yield good results, why not try it with GenAI?
Amazon RDS for MySQL announces Extended Support minor 5.7.44-RDS.20250213 – In other words, RDS for MySQL announces a price hike unless you stay on top of it.
Amazon Route 53 Traffic Flow introduces a new visual editor to improve DNS policy editing – A visual UI for tuning your database performance is always a handy thing.
Application Load Balancer announces integration with Amazon VPC IPAM – Whoa. Finally there’s a way to allowlist a subset of IP addresses in various firewalls, and be sure that your load balancer IPs won’t magically shift out of them at unpredictable intervals. This was very much in demand back in 2015.
Announcing the end of support for Node.js 14.x and 16.x in AWS CDK – Goody, one more thing to update the next time I need to change a 3 year old microservice to update a single string.
Watch the recordings from AWS Developer Day 2025 – Despite personally knowing at least 8 of the presenters named here, this post is the first I’m hearing about AWS Developer Day 2025. I want you to stop and think for a second about how closely I track everything AWS does, then wonder along with me just what kind of marketing missteps are required to make the previous sentence even remotely possible.
How GoDaddy built a category generation system at scale with batch inference for Amazon Bedrock – "This post provides an overview of a custom solution developed by the for GoDaddy," a sentence fragment that makes no sense, just like so many uses of GenAI. I could point out that it’s ancient sysadmin wisdom to never put a company with "Daddy" in its name in your production critical path, but that’d just be shooting the elephant in the room.
Formula 1® unlocks the most competitive season yet with AWS – No, no AWS, making fun of you for being late to AI by pretending to be late to the Formula 1 race was my re:Invent 2023 gag; you’re once again too late to something.
Secure cloud innovation starts at re:Inforce 2025 – That’s interesting. I would have thought that since "Security is Job Zero®," secure cloud innovation should really have started a couple of decades ago. Oops.
A few weeks ago I pointed out that the ACM Private CA cert limit had silently been raised to 20 million certs. Now it’s at 50 million certs, likewise with no announcement.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
