Good Morning!
The Last Week in AWS Charity T-Shirt Sale is closing soon; get your snarky GenAI shirt before they’re all gone. All proceeds benefit our friends at 826 National.
From the Community
I Followed the Official AWS Amplify Guide and was Charged $1,100 is the kind of story you hear from time to time. Good resolution here, but also a useful cautionary tale.
StackExchange is going to the cloud. With their traffic tanking due to GenAI, I imagine they absolutely want to be able to scale things down. Also, "we’ve used Azure for ages in our corporate environment, so for production we selected Google Cloud" is outright hilarious.
I opine on The Cold, Hard Truth About Your Cloud DR Strategy.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: Charity T-Shirt Season
Screaming in the Cloud: Burnout and Breaking the Internet with Serena DiPenti
Screaming in the Cloud: Learning the Joys of Reading and Writing with Laura Brief
Choice Cuts
Amazon DataZone updates pricing and removes the user-level subscription fee – Some edge-case users will now pay more than they did last month, as 100K free requests a month have now dropped to 4K in return for the waiving of the per-user fee.
Amazon DynamoDB reduces prices for on-demand throughput and global tables – The first DynamoDB price cut since 2013 hits, and it’s great for those on-demand tables. Time for me to rerun some numbers…
Amazon DynamoDB introduces warm throughput for tables and indexes – Ooh, you mean we can (finally) find out what the actual limits are for when a table will stop accepting reads or writes? Without having to fly to Seattle and make someone extremely uncomfortably by asking them from well within their personal space? For free?! Plus you can set that value higher for a one time fee? WHY ARE WE STILL TALKING? Take my money already!
Amazon EBS now supports detailed performance statistics on EBS volume health – Another free enhancement to a service we all use, but regrettably gets little attention. I like this new AWS!
Amazon Q Developer plugins for Datadog and Wiz now generally available – …nevermind, I lied. "I don’t want to use Datadog or Wiz’s consoles, because they’re very good at interface design. No, I hate myself, and want to interact with those services via the AWS console. And also AI for some godforsaken reason."
Amazon S3 now supports up to 1 million buckets per AWS account – Oh snap, new database just dropped. At $19,960 a month, I think they’re charging too much for a database that only supports 1 million rows. But it’s worse–this is per account! That means this database costs almost $20K per shard. That’s just a bit too much for a database if you ask me.
AWS Backup now supports copying Amazon S3 backups across Regions and accounts in opt-in Regions – This is neat and also you probably don’t want to do this at scale. Using AWS Backup to cover an S3 bucket costs twice as much per GB as storing it in S3 does. I get that it conforms with your policies, but when you scale up, it absolutely won’t conform with your fiscal responsibilities. There are better ways.
AWS CloudTrail Lake announces enhanced event filtering – I keep hoping they’ll announce that CloudTrail Lake is now the default trail destination, but so far no luck. I love that thing.
How and why you should move to Cost and Usage Report (CUR) 2.0? – I’m Ron Burgundy? I wonder if this guidance will hold in a few years, or if folks will be recommending the FOCUS standard instead.
AWS BuilderCards second edition at re:Invent 2024 – Ooh, the saddest tabletop game for folks who don’t get invited to parties a second time gets an update. From the actual FAQ asking why doesn’t the game feature 200+ AWS services, the obvious answer is "because a lot of them are complete nonsense, Jan."
Accelerate your third-party Amazon EKS add-on onboarding using Conformitron – It’s been known for decades that naming things is one of the hard problems in computer science, and AWS still trots out "Conformitron" with a straight face.
Python 3.13 runtime now available in AWS Lambda – This is WAY faster than previous versions have been. Instead of a year, Python 3.13 was only released a little over a month ago.
Deploy the Cost Optimizer for Amazon WorkSpaces in a highly-regulated environment. – If you’re using Amazon Workspaces at scale in an environment that isn’t highly regulated, please hit reply and let me know about it. I’m having trouble envisioning the use case.
Introducing the Live Event Framework: Live Streaming with Ad Insertion on AWS – If you don’t insert ads into the AWS re:Invent keynote livestream then you’re just–wait, I just realized that’s what the guest speakers are. Nevermind, carry on.
Introducing kro: Kube Resource Orchestrator – I’m really hoping someone releases a companion project called "Magnon."
AWS Snow device updates – Along with Elastic Transcoder and Elemental MediaStore[https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/media/support-for-aws-elemental-mediastore-ending-soon/], this week’s AWS service deprecations include the beloved SnowCone, still the heaviest Amazon Kindle with the shortest battery life (.1 seconds) ever released. I want one for my memorabilia wall.
Tools
delta is a prettier differ for your terminal.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
