Good Morning!
It’s begun! Are you at re:Invent? Find me here:<br>
- 🎤 I’m giving a talk on Thursday at noon thirty: COP218, wherein I opine on a bunch of new enhancements to AWS’s cloud financial management tooling.<br>
- 💬 Drop In Office Hours with Mike & Corey <br> Tuesday, 3 PM | Venetian Hotel, St. Mark’s Square <br>
- 🎉 “Can’t Beat Corey” Game Show (Name the most AWS services in 60 seconds)<br> Wednesday, 3 PM–4 PM | Venetian Expo Hall, Duckbill Booth #1590 <br>
- 🍸 The Duckbill Group & RedMonk Drinkup<br> Wednesday, 7 PM | Atomic Liquors <br> RSVP here if you want a calendar invite <br>
Are you not at re:Invent? Oh my god, you must be so happy! What’s it like?
From the Community
This quick attempt at building an AMI lineage is a pretty quick turnaround on last week’s AMI Lineage announcement…
Once again it’s time for Chris Farris’s AWS pre:Invent 2024 summary, which you should read if for no other reason than it includes the term "GenAI wankshow."
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: The pre:Invent Crush
Screaming in the Cloud: Best Practices for Securing AWS Cloud with Eric Carter
Screaming in the Cloud: Replay – Finding a Common Language for Incidents with John Allspaw
Choice Cuts
Amazon CloudWatch adds context to observability data in service consoles, accelerating analysis – This is super interesting–since its inception, CloudWatch has operated in a place that’s almost entirely devoid of context from the underlying resources it represents. I’m curious to see how this changes my interaction model with the venerable service.
Amazon Cognito introduces Managed Login to support rich branding for end user journeys – Oh man, FINALLY. "Just handle the login bits for me and don’t make me think about it" has always been something of a pipe dream; if this delivers on even half of what it promises, I’m all for it.
Amazon Cognito now supports passwordless authentication for low-friction and secure logins – Whoa, there’s a company that really needs to implement this. I’m talking of course about AWS’s console logins, where passkeys are still stubbornly relegated to the status of being an additional factor.
Amazon Connect Email is now generally available – Ah yes, everything except Microsoft Outlook evolves until it one day can send email. For customer service situations like Connect is targeting it’s probably a net win, since this email could have been a fistfight.
Amazon EBS announces Time-based Copy for EBS Snapshots – How many folks have kluged together horrible hacks to meet RPO targets? Those folks will be thrilled to learn that they can toss that bathwater out, baby and all, to implement this for a sliding scale price that varies depending upon how soon you need it. That said, the final tier is "48 hours." What the hell kind of snapshot copy operation in AWS doesn’t complete within two days? I’m scared that I’m about to learn something I was happier not knowing…
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling introduces highly responsive scaling policies – Ooh, instead of delivering you the capacity you need twenty minutes after you needed it, it sounds like that’ll get cut down significantly as Auto Scaling tracking policies learn what your traffic patterns look like over time.
Amazon EC2 Capacity Blocks now supports instant start times and extensions – I really hope that the GPU availability story increases to the point where this is forgotten as the arcane kluge it currently is.
Amazon ECR announces 10x increase in repository limit to 100,000 – And another free database from AWS begins to take shape, since ECR charges only per gigabyte, not per repository. I suspect that’s about to change once I deploy my latest monstrosity…
Amazon EFS now supports up to 2.5 million IOPS per file system – EFS increasingly resembles a region-wide filesystem that’s fit for most purposes. Hmm…
Amazon S3 now supports enforcement of conditional write operations for S3 general purpose buckets – Ooh. Go ahead, tell me again that S3 isn’t increasingly looking like an actual database…
Application Signals provides OTEL support via X-Ray OTLP endpoint for traces – I’ve read that sentence five times and still don’t know what the hell it’s trying to say.
AWS delivers enhanced root cause insights to help explain cost anomalies – Steven. The ultimate root cause of your latest stratospheric "cost anomaly" was you hiring Steven.
Enhanced Pricing Calculator now supports discounts and purchase commitments (in preview) – I like this thing. To learn more about why, catch my re:Invent talk this Thursday: COP218.
AWS PrivateLink now supports cross-region connectivity – Where is it, where is it, they always bury this… ah! Here we go: "There is no premium for accessing a service in another region." That’s the right answer! Good work, AWS.
Announcing the new AWS User Notifications SDK – Ah, another way for Amazon to shove ads at customers. I know, you think I’m kidding and being sarcastic–but the AWS Chatbot recently started pitching Bedrock Agents in the Slack channel it’s configured within, so commentary like this is what you thirsty bastards in Marketing get. There’s a time and a place for upsells; "hey, your site is down" notifications ARE NOT IT.
Announcing new feature tiers: Essentials and Plus for Amazon Cognito – Cognito’s pricing always felt weird to me. A free tier of 50K users was nutty. This pricing change feels a lot more reasonable. I know some folks have gotten salty about this, but in every real-world example I’ve seen it’s a net positive. Cognito is actually starting to look like something other than an easy punchline. Time marches on…
Announcing Savings Plans Purchase Analyzer – I remain devastated that I can’t find anything to quibble about in this release; it’s awesome along every axis. Your thoughts are appreciated in this sad time.
Data Exports for FOCUS 1.0 is now in general availability – How AWS was dragged into supporting a community-driven cloud cost billing standard is beyond me, but I’m sure glad it happened. Thanks, FinOps Foundation!
Introducing a new experience for AWS Systems Manager – What, it works the first time now? It’s always been very tetchy to get it to do even the most basic things…
Introducing generative AI troubleshooting for Apache Spark in AWS Glue (preview) – Soon, the issue will be "you’ve outsourced so much to AI that it’s become dizzyingly complex to the point where a human can no longer reason about the entire system." Just a guess.
Understanding how certain database parameters impact scaling in Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 – This and Understanding how ACU minimum and maximum range impacts scaling in Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 seem to be the same blog post, right? Same AWS blog, same publication date, same two authors, same concepts and stories–but no! They’re completely different! What kind of A/B test is this, exactly?
Analyzing your AWS Cost Explorer data with Amazon Q Developer: Now Generally Available – Finally. FINALLY! It’s aware of usage types! It gives deep-links into Cost Explorer so you don’t have to subject yourself to drop-down configuration level hell! Sure, it still gets some things wrong, but it’s way more approachable than it was, for anyone who hadn’t tried it during preview and was put off by how incomplete it was…
Your guide to AWS for Advertising & Marketing at re:Invent 2024 – re:Invent has become little else except for Advertising & Marketing. On that note, come by our booth in the expo hall; "The Duckbill Group" is for the first time renting a booth at tremendous expense from AWS. This should be… an experience.
AWS IoT Services alignment with US Cyber Trust Mark – empty
Streamlining AWS Organizations Cleanup Strategies – This is way more reasonable than the only other working strategy I’ve found, which is "burn it all to the ground and start over."
Tools
Why did nobody tell me about Atuin and its magical shell history before? This is great!
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
