Good Morning!
Another week has come, with relatively few AWS announcements. Every week can’t be re:Invent, I suppose.
If you enjoy playing CloudFormation games, I’m hiring a direct report; check it out and consider applying if that sounds like something you’d enjoy.
From the Community
Happy ten year anniversary to Cloudonaut; they’ve been at this longer than I have!
Today I learned about git worktrees. Holy crap. I want to start using this.
If you’re having trouble with Amazon VPCs (and who isn’t?), let a cartoon duck help explain them to you.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: 2025’s AWS Release of the Year
Screaming in the Cloud: Replay- A Conversation between Cloud Economists with Amy Arambulo Negrette
Choice Cuts
Amazon Bedrock Flows announces preview of multi-turn conversation support – This beats the DnD-esque multi-turn conversations you have when opening AWS Support tickets. Your database suddenly stopped databasing; please roll for initiative.
Amazon CloudWatch allows alarming on data up to 7 days old – This is aptly timed, as I too am alarmed at the events of the past 7 days.
Amazon S3 Tables are now available in five additional AWS Regions – To be specific, Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), Europe (London), Europe (Stockholm), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo). This is something AWS needs to get on as they continue to invest in building new regions every 40 miles or so; it’s hard to reason about "S3" when what "S3" does changes depending upon which region you’re in.
AWS Client VPN announces support for concurrent VPN connections – "For example, software developers using AWS client for VPN can now connect to development, test, and production environment[sic] concurrently." Uh… perhaps think it through before bridging production into your development environment, no?
AWS CodeBuild now supports test splitting and parallelism – Unfortunately for you, your shitty codebase does not.
AWS Marketplace introduces 8 decimal place precision for usage pricing – Who the hell is going to open a ticket over a millionth of a cent to– This specific release commentary is sponsored by The Duckbill Group, where we fix the horrifying AWS bill, negotiate AWS contracts, help staff up your FinOps practice, and help build a FinOps strategy. To learn more, click the link or just reply to this email. I’ll get back to you as soon as I finish quibbling with AWS over a millionth of a cent.
Announcing AWS User Notifications GA on AWS CloudFormation – This supports notifications via the Console Notifications Center, email, AWS Chatbot, or mobile push notifications to the AWS Console Mobile App. Well that won’t do. I demand that my notifications arrive via singing telegram:
Deploy, deploy, deploy your stack,
It’s failing all the way!
Errors scream, like a bad dream,
Cloud ruins your whole day.
Check your YAML, tweak your code,
Still it won’t comply!
CloudFormation’s love is cold,
Guess it’s time to cry.
Did you know there’s a podcast version of this newsletter? Yes, I sang this there. Check it out if you hate yourself.
Enhance the resilience of critical workloads by architecting with multiple AWS Regions – This is a great article, but I do think there are cases where skipping the "multiple AZ" phase and going straight to "multiple regions, one AZ per" makes sense. Heck, it’s not like it’d cost any more from a data transfer perspective among the primary AWS regions…
Introducing cross-account targets for Amazon EventBridge Event Buses – Add this to my ever-growing list of "you have an AWS account, I have an AWS account; I want to send a message from mine to yours" services.
Diving deep into the new Amazon Aurora Global Database writer endpoint – Speaking of multi-region architectures, this is worth perusing if you’re using actual databases instead of my pretend databases.
AWS and NANOG join forces: Unlocking IPv6 potential with the IPv6 Clinic at NANOG 93 – I gave the keynote at NANOG 91, wherein I dunked gently upon the cloud providers’ lackadaisical approach to IPv6 deployment. Now I’m wondering how much of that gentle ribbing was taken seriously.
Issue with AWS Sign-in IAM User Login Flow – Possible Username Enumeration (CVE-2025-0693) – Interesting, apparently there used to be different delay lengths if an IAM user existed vs. if it didn’t. AWS has fixed this by adding a delay to all failed login attempts, which frankly? Learn not to typo your own name. Nice find!
Tools
Ooh, isd is apparently a better way to work with systemd units, a syntax I have never picked up mostly due to hating the direction it went.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
