Good Morning!
Some fun releases, and a fair number of them last week! Seems like the spring thaw is coming in, after a fairly desolate winter.
From the Community
I like this "from first principles" approach very much to using AWS Lambda to set up email subscriptions. I may have to crib from this a smidgen…
Two weeks ago I dragged AWS for telling a journalist to go fill out an abuse form. Last week I dragged Microsoft for demanding a security researcher include a video in their bug report. And this week I get to drag Oracle Cloud for denying they were breached in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary. There something in the hyperscaler water this month? Google, I think it’s your turn next week?
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: Google Takes Wiz
Screaming in the Cloud: “Just in Case” vs. “Just in Time” with Aditya Bhargava
Screaming in the Cloud: SREcon, SLOs, and Step Functions are the new Lambda
Choice Cuts
Amazon DynamoDB now supports percentile statistics for request latency – This is at least an 80th percentile feature enhancement.
Amazon EKS now enforces upgrade insights checks as part of cluster upgrades – "If you don’t upgrade this cluster, we’re gonna charge you 6x as much, wait a year, and then forcibly upgrade it anyway" is a hell of an insight.
Amazon GameLift Servers expands instance support with next-generation EC2 instance families – Why is this minor enhancement to a niche service the first time I’ve ever seen these instance family differentiating points laid out so clearly?
- 5th Gen: Proven reliability with Intel processors with balanced performance
- 6th Gen: Includes AWS Graviton2 ARM-based options alongside Intel and AMD variants offering enhanced price-performance efficiency.
- 7th Gen: The latest evolution featuring DDR5 memory, enhanced networking, and offering significant performance gains over previous generations.
- 8th Gen: Cutting-edge AWS Graviton4 and Intel Xeon-based instances for demanding workloads
AWS CloudFormation now supports targeted resource scans in the IaC generator – I (seriously) want the GenAI extension from this. "Here’s some horrifying thing you ClickOpsed into existence; here’s a fully featured structured CDK expression of it, have a nice day."
AWS adds currency selection to Payment Profiles – Huh, for some reason "AWS Credits" aren’t a widely accepted currency most places. Gonna have to come up with some new form of company scrip.
AWS Deadline Cloud now supports Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) – As in "we ran out of IPv4 addresses for new allocations years ago; you missed the deadline, cloud."
AWS announces expanded service support in the AWS Console Mobile App – This is just confusing; one of those new services is Cloud9, whose most notable feature is that it’s no longer available to new customers. What happened here?
AWS Network Manager and AWS Cloud WAN now support AWS PrivateLink and IPv6 – Are you telling me that something called "Network Manager" didn’t support those things previously? Who’s driving the clown car here? Is it me?
Unlocking the power of Splunk with Amazon Bedrock – Build AI assistant using agents – That’s a typo. Everyone knows that you unlock the power of Splunk with money. Lots and lots and lots of money.
From virtual machine to Kubernetes to serverless: How dacadoo saved 78% on cloud costs and automated operations – I’m going to comment on this one without reading it, because I want to be explicitly clear that I’m not dunking on whatever the hell a dacadoo is here: whenever I see a "company X saved SOME_ABSURD_PERCENTAGE on their cloud costs," the question that immediately arises is "what the HELL were they doing before?" Above a certain amount of spend reduction, it stops looking like a virtue and starts looking like either the claim is exaggerated, the needs for the thing radically changed, or the original version was built in such a way that a Rube Goldberg machine would comparatively look like a paragon of efficiency. I know, it sounds impressive–until you think about the framing for more than five seconds.
Accelerating CI with AWS CodeBuild: Parallel test execution now available – Slow down there buddy, it’s not available for YOUR codebase because your tests are written like absolute garbage and can’t be run out of order.
Amazon S3 Path Deprecation Plan – The Rest of the Story | AWS News Blog – "Hey Corey, why are you linking to an article from 2019 that was last updated in 2020?" Because it was last updated in 2020. See, AWS told us they were taking away path style URLs in S3 five years ago, put it on hold, and then… silence. What’s going on here, please? If you found a way to make this work more scalably (and betting against the S3 team’s ability to scale is just lighting money on fire with extra steps), can you update this post / take it down? We’re stuck in an in-between state.
Detailed geographic information for all AWS Regions and Availability Zones is now available – What on earth is this. There’s now a field to tell me that the us-east-1 region, called in some AWS docs the "US East (Northern Virginia) Region," is in fact located in Virginia. This is almost certainly step 1 of a multi-step process that fixes some customer pain point or another, but in isolation that first step kinda appears to be onto the poor cat’s tail.
Optimizing network footprint in serverless applications – This is a surprisingly helpful review of some tenets that I wish more customers paid attention to. Compression is your friend (mostly) when it comes to driving down your data transfer costs.
Simplifying private API integrations with Amazon EventBridge and AWS Step Functions – Anything that mixes Step Functions and "simplifying" gets my vote. I like them. I want to use them more. It is freaking hard.
Announcing the Developer Preview of Amazon S3 Transfer Manager in Rust – It would be uncharitable of me to point out that it need never be more than a developer preview since Rust developers talk about Rust way more than they write code with it, right?
AWS SDK for Ruby: Deprecating Ruby 2.5 & 2.6 Runtime Supports and Future Compatibility – Wow, that’s a crappy headline. They’re not "dropping future compatibility," but you bet I checked to be sure. Going forward they’re dropping old versions 3 years after they go EOL. More than fair.
Announcing the AWS CDK L2 Construct for Amazon Cognito Identity Pools – FINALLY. This used to require, and I am not making this up, you to include a Lambda function to glue together some of the Cognito pointy bits.
AWS re:Invent 2024 recap for government agencies – This week we’re almost half a year past re:Invent, so isn’t this a bit too soon for governments to handle?
Tools
I built a BlueSky client for creating liveskeet threads (and uses AI for alt-text). It’s called LastSkeetinAWS.com, then I used it to skeet about what it does and how it works.
stu is a TUI explorer application for S3.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
