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Newsletter

Issue No.376

RDS Hates Its Customers, Financially Speaking

06.24.2024
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Corey Quinn HeadshotAbout the Author

Corey is the Chief Cloud Economist at Duckbill, where he specializes in helping companies improve their AWS bills by making them smaller and less horrifying. He also hosts the "Screaming in the Cloud" and "AWS Morning Brief" podcasts; and curates "Last Week in AWS," a weekly newsletter summarizing the latest in AWS news, blogs, and tools, sprinkled with snark and thoughtful analysis in roughly equal measure.

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Good Morning!

A refreshingly light week of announcements; maybe they’re starting to save up the big ones for the NYC Summit in a couple of weeks? I’ll be there; plan on a drinkup in the city the night before if you’re around.

From the Community

Amazon Has A Secret Way To Scrape Microsoft’s GitHub And Feed Its AI Model. Big surprise, it’s Amazon acting in ethically dubious ways again. I’ve gotta be honest with you: I look back at some of my early writings about AWS in which I defended the company, and I’m ashamed of my naivete. I believed what I said at the time, but nowadays I can’t imagine giving them the trust I once did.

Fly has an interesting post on AWS without access keys. I really wish OIDC was better than it is to get going with; I love the idea.

I could not possibly love this post, reasonably titled I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again, any more than I already do. Read it. It’s well worth your time.

In a wild display of chutzpah, Tinder-for-pets company Date-A-Dog has a State of Cloud Costs report out. The temerity of a service as painfully expensive as Datadog has become has quite the gall to start analyzing other companies’ cloud spend trends, from where I sit.

There’s a meetup in a few weeks in SF; the Advanced AWS community is resurrecting. I’m bummed to miss it; I’m in NYC for the summit so I’ll miss 5 Lessons from 5 Years of Building Databases at Scale.

Why is it that every time Rekognition is in the news, it’s for something profoundly disturbing?

Jobs

And now for something even more near-and-dear to my heart, we’re hiring for multiple roles at Duckbill! We’re looking for both full-time

Podcasts

Last Week In AWS: AI Generated Quotes About GenAI

Screaming in the Cloud: Navigating Legal Risk and Compliance with Alex King

Screaming in the Cloud: S3’s Hidden Features and Quirks with Daniel Grzelak

Choice Cuts

Amazon CloudWatch announces AI-Powered natural language query generation – "Alexa, what disk volumes are running into IOPs limits?" "Here you go. By the way, did you know you can order biscuits for aerial assault on Amazon Prime?"

AWS Compute Optimizer supports rightsizing recommendations for Amazon RDS MySQL and RDS PostgreSQL – Too bad it’s completely useless for most customers, because RDS only has its own bespoke Reserved Instances, which are wildly inflexible. The fact that Savings Plans don’t extend to cover RDS is one of the more customer-hostile things AWS does, and a number of large customers are annoyed by it. So yeah, use this if you want recommendations you can’t take advantage of without leaving bushels of money on the table, I guess.

AWS CloudFormation Linter (cfn-lint) v1 – cfn-lint v1 has some breaking changes from the older cfn-lint. What in the wide world of sports is going on with this versioning scheme?

… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.

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