Good Morning!
Not much to report on the cloud front, and I’m pointedly ignoring what’s going on the rest of the world more broadly speaking. How’s everyone holding up?
From the Community
The Answers for AWS community survey results are here; go check them out. I like that Route 53 and S3 Tables both made an appearance as "non-conventional databases."
– 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: AWS “Don’t Mention TikTok” for Containers
Screaming in the Cloud: Kicking Off a Tech Career as a Preteen with Alex Zenla
Choice Cuts
Amazon Bedrock launches Session Management APIs for GenAI applications (Preview) – Ah, just in time to replace the thing you spent the last month building yourself out of popsicle sticks. Once again, my habit of dragging my feet to adopt new services pays off!
Announcing Amazon GameLift Streams – If you’re used to talking about GameLift, exactly what it is that you’re talking about got more confusing last week. I think it streams content, but they’re overloading the GameLift name so all bets are off.
Amazon Q Developer announces a new CLI agent within the command line – Half a century in, someone has finally fixed the biggest flaw in *nix shell environments: they don’t interrupt you while you’re trying to get something done.
AWS Secrets Manager increases the API Requests per Second limits – "At no additional cost" AWS Secrets Manager now lets you, by default, incur up to 25¢ per second on API calls.
AWS Transfer Family announces reduced login latency for SFTP servers – AWS Transfer Family has reduced the service side login latency from 1-2 seconds to under 500 milliseconds. I’m sorry, but if you’re interfacing with S3 via SFTP in the year of our lord 2025 I kinda suspect that an extra second and a half of latency might not be the first place you want to go looking for workflow enhancements.
IAM Access Analyzer now supports Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) – "Wait, you mean we have to worry about a whole second network in our security plans? Well, balls."
Streamline your AWS Marketplace renewals – I want to be snarky here, but the features they’ve implemented are legitimately helpful for a whole host of Marketplace use cases, and benefit buyers and sellers alike. Okay, FINE AWS Marketplace team; you escape unscathed just this once.
Introducing an enhanced local IDE experience for AWS Step Functions – This is a nice change–I confess, I’d completely forgotten about Step Functions Workflow Studio. It’s been a while since it surfaced in the feed. Good service, great interface, few working examples in the wild thus far.
End of support notifications and enhanced discoverability for Amazon EKS – You must be joking. To get end of support notifications (note that Extended Support multiplies your hourly cluster fee sixfold) you’re supposed to build your own solution? Wild idea, maybe the EKS service could provide this functionality out of the box under the aegis of customer obsession?
The end of an era: the final AWS DeepRacer League Championship at re:Invent 2024 – The wildly popular DeepRacer league has come to an end, as Google changes its focus once again–I’m sorry, I’m being told it was an AWS service. Really? That feels way more Googly than Amazonian to me…
Securely onboarding countries to the AWS Cloud – This surprisingly interesting post answers the question "What if an enterprise cloud migration were twenty times more complicated and expensive?"
Tools
awskillswitch is the cloud/serverless equivalent of charging into your datacenter in a full-blown panic and yanking the power cable out the back of the server rack like you’re rip-starting a lawnmower.
This AWS IAM Visualizer is surprisingly handy at clarifying an increasingly arcane permissioning system.
It’s time once again to point folks to the Region Comparison Tool, whose existence I’d completely forgotten about until I needed to disambiguate a bunch of AWS services from AWS "services."
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
