Good Morning!
It’s been a while since I explicitly mentioned it: I fix horrifying AWS bills for a living. If you’re staring down the barrel of an unfortunately complex bill, or gearing up to renew / renegotiate private pricing with AWS, feel free to reach out; it’s what I do over here…
From the Community
Eleventeen ways to delete an AWS resource is an article I’ve been collecting examples for in the hopes of one day writing it–this beat me to the punch and is way better. Please, for the love of god show some consistency so you stop confusing customers.
A lovely dive into Egress Traffic and Using AWS Services via IPv6. Until this improves, it’s impossible not to view the IPv4 charge as a tax customers can’t escape.
I missed that Data Firehose now speaks Iceberg, because I am not a data person. Fortunately Paul Symons is, and he wrote about it.
Podcasts
Last Week In AWS: I’m back!
Screaming in the Cloud: Keeping the Cloud Reasonable with Shlomo Dubrowin
Screaming in the Cloud: Replay – Letting the Dust Settle on Job Hopping with Brian Hall
Choice Cuts
Announcing Storage Browser for Amazon S3 for your web applications (alpha release) – Ooh, this is shiny enough that I’ll forgo the semi-obvious "Uber for Windows Explorer" joke and instead say that I wish this existed when I was building a thing a year ago.
Building a privacy preserving chatbot with Amazon Bedrock – Show me your chatbot, I’ll show you a bad user experience and/or crappy documentation that you’re papering over with a chatbot.
Faster development with Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon Q Developer – This falls into a common trap for demonstrating GenAI solutions. The query used in the example is "using YAML cloudformation, create a dynamodb table with a string partition key called ‘devicelD’ and a numeric sort key called ‘readingTime’. Use on demand billing mode." This has too much expertise baked into it; it’s clearly crafted by someone with in-depth awareness of how DynamoDB works along with its terminology. The way a mere mortal might phrase this would be "create a database with deviceID and a corresponding value called Reading Time." The better coding assistants would get to the same place with iterative feedback of the form "do it in CloudFormation" and "how much is this going to cost me?" They’ll get there; historically, Q has been very lax at actually getting there unless you tell it PRECISELY what you want. Folks who can be that precise are generally not the intended audience for these things, are they?
Linux Support Updates for AWS CLI v2 – There’s a new glibc minimum version requirement. If you’re using ancient operating systems but expect to use the latest AWS CLI, you a) are about to have a worse time of it, and b) make extremely confusing choices that I cannot fathom.
Optimizing Amazon S3 data transfers over Direct Connect – This offers three approaches for shoving data into S3; Direct Connect is but one of those approaches. Worth the read.
New whitepaper available: Building security from the ground up with Secure by Design – When Paul Vixie puts his name on something, you want to take the time to read it carefully. This is a great read.
Summary of the AWS Service Event in the Northern Virginia (US-EAST-1) Region – Apparently Amazon Kinesis Data Streams fell into the sea while I was out on sabbatical. This features enough words that I expect it must have been headline news? AWS rarely goes into this level of detail / impact description.
There’s now a one-click button to opt out from all supported AWS AI services that (barring an agreement with AWS to the contrary) you should go click immediately.
Oracle and Amazon Web Services Announce Strategic Partnership – Oracle has been talking about this a lot, while AWS has been mumbly at best. It’s good for customers.
Tools
In "things that I wish were first party but aren’t" news, this CloudTrail EventName Search is extremely handy.
stu is a shell interface to S3; how convenient, as I was just looking for something like this earlier in the week.
… and that’s what happened Last Week in AWS.
