Welcome to issue number 155 of Last Week in AWS.

Stay safe. Stay home, if you're able to do so. And now, your Monday morning levity around cloud computing releases...

In the beginning open source solutions are great. You can’t beat free... especially when OS gives devs flexibility & helps the community. But that's the beginning... how much will free cost as you scale?

In The Open Source Observability Landscape, see the costs & benefits of popular tools Jaeger, Prometheus, & ELK. Learn how Honeycomb coexists with these to provide critical observability when you scale. Sponsored

Forrest Brazeal of A Cloud Guru praises the greatest cloud service of all time, S3. I'd argue that Route 53 was robbed, but S3 is of course the eighth wonder of the world.

Serhat Can talks about about why AWS's Global Infrastructure matters, and helped them along on their journey.

Tim Allen Wagner (formerly the AWS GM of Lambda; when he quit Serverless became Fatherless) posts his re:Invent 2020 Serverless Wishlist. Mine is that we actually have a re:Invent 2020.

I discovered that within the depths of the DynamoDB Streams documentation there's a demo project that comes for my side project, Twitter for Pets. I am enraged and now consider AWS to be a competitor.

An exploration of how Zoom, Netflix, and Dropbox are staying online during the pandemic. Hint: THEY ARE SETTING FIRE TO MOUNTAINS OF CASH TO EXPAND THEIR RESPECTIVE INFRASTRUCTURES.

I played around with GCP recently, and am saddened to report that on a technical basis it's good enough that it's really hard to snark about.

For the first time I was cited in the Wall Street Journal. When did people start taking me seriously?!

If you've got an interesting job for this newsletter's eminently employable subscribers, get in touch!

No one likes managing EC2 instances, so you might like managing the team that replaces them with containers. That's right, the Fargate team is hiring three Software Development Managers. People-focused servant-leaders are encouraged to apply. Help bring about an end to the Serverless vs. Containers war that doesn't need to be fought in the first place. One last point: every team at AWS has internal principles that embody their culture, but this team publishes theirs on GitHub. I wonder how they'd take pull requests?

Running a business is hard. Your cloud doesn’t have to be. DigitalOcean is the cloud that offers transparent, predictable pricing - even for Kubernetes clusters, which you'd have thought was impossible! You also won't need 12 weeks of cloud school to absorb a zillion ancillary services just to be able to SSH into an instance. Is this the kind of simplicity you need out of your cloud provider? Check out DigitalOcean today. Sponsored

Amazon EKS Updates Service Level Agreement to 99.95% - Let's not kid ourselves here. The control plane isn't why your Kubernetes-hosted application is having availability problems.

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams now supports scaling up to 10,000 MB/s throughput with a single API call - Amazon Kinesis Data Streams now supports draining your entire corporate bank account with a single API call

Amazon Redshift now recommends sort keys for improved query performance - Soon, Amazon Redshift will recommend going for a walk to calm down, getting a full eight hours of sleep, and just signing your entire estate over to Amazon Redshift.

AWS App Mesh adds support to connect services deployed in multiple AWS accounts into a shared mesh - The alternative of course was historically to use many different app meesh to achieve the same thing.

AWS Cost Explorer now offers Savings Plans Recommendations for Member/Linked Accounts - Freaking finally. Do you have any idea how painful it can be to go account by account to get these?! Painful enough that we had to write something custom to do it for us. I'm thrilled to be spacklepunched by AWS on this one.

AWS Data Exchange Released Multiple Console Enhancements Making It Easier for Subscribers and Providers to Interact with Data Sets - I would attempt to explain the console enhancements in words without a single screenshot, but I'm afraid AWS has beaten me to that particular punch.

AWS Global Accelerator launches TCP Termination at the Edge - Meanwhile, due to unprecedented demand, several other cloud providers this week launched TCP Termination on the Floor.

AWS Managed Services expands big data capabilities with support for Amazon Sagemaker, AWS Lake Formation, and Amazon CloudSearch - You're going to wonder whether "CloudSearch" is real or not until you click that link.

AWS Outposts is now Supported in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions - AWS is now shipping racks to governments just in time for those governments to have nobody in the offices. It's not their fault any, but wow was the AWS timing on this one unfortunate...

AWS Service Catalog quotas can now be managed through AWS Service Quotas - Another release to the tune of "AWS Service Discovers Other AWS Service And Becomes Romantically Involved."

AWS Systems Manager announces enhanced AWS Resource Groups view - Another visual change without an image to show us what it looks like.

Introducing AWS Solutions Consulting Offers - A boon to AWS partners everywhere, once they finish running the sadistic gauntlet that is the AWS Partner Network's qualification requirements.

Introducing Voicemail for Amazon Connect - A direct quote: "The solution deploys Amazon Kinesis Video Streams, Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, AWS Lambda, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon S3, Amazon API Gateway, Amazon Transcribe, and Amazon CloudFront, and uses Amazon Cognito for authentication." To hell with everything about this; I'm digging my old answering machine out of the attic instead! Who the hell writes that sentence and thinks "oh yes, this is a thing customers will LOVE to deploy and maintain themselves!?"

Updated Classroom Course: DevOps Engineering on AWS - This sounds awesome if any of us get to set foot inside a classroom ever again.

Use Amazon VPC Endpoint Policies for granular control of Amazon EC2 APIs - While very handy, the complexity increase this is going to introduce to customer accounts promises to be an absolute blast for the rest of us.

Announcing Tier Support for APN Partners Impacted by COVID-19 | AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog - "We're freeing partners up from our sarcastically onerous requirements to focus on actually running their businesses" really says something about the AWS partner network--but I don't think it's what they want to be saying.

BuildforCOVID19 Global Online Hackathon | AWS News Blog - I have no snark here, as this is neither the time nor the place for it.

New, Low-Cost HDD Storage Option for Amazon FSx for Windows File Server | AWS News Blog - This enhancement makes a lot of sense--Windows filesharing has always been painfully slow, so why pay extra for fast disks?

Introducing the Amazon Chime SDKs for iOS and Android | Business Productivity - I'd never considered Chime as the messaging system for other apps before. Usually I just think of it as a chat service, a videoconferencing tool, or a sad punchline.

Building a trash sorter with AWS DeepLens | AWS Machine Learning Blog - You are of course forbidden from using the DeepLens Trash Sorter to disambiguate between the good parts of AWS and the other services which (due to sympathy during this troubled time) I will not call out by name today.

Automating AWS Security Hub Alerts with AWS Control Tower lifecycle events | AWS Management & Governance Blog - Join us next week for the sequel, "automating the deletion of noisy AWS Security Hub Alerts with AWS For God's Sake Leave Me Alone."

Duplicating infrastructure on AWS | AWS Management & Governance Blog - This blog post contains 681 words about duplicating infrastructure and not a one of them is "cost."

Remediate drift via resource import with AWS CloudFormation | AWS Management & Governance Blog - Let me cut to the chase of this article: the way that resource importing + drift remediation work is "abandon the resource in CloudFormation, update the template, then reimport it." That only sounds terrible because it is.

Earth observation using AWS Ground Station: A how to guide | AWS Government, Education, & Nonprofits Blog - It feels like this blog post could have been an email to the half dozen companies currently using or exploring using AWS Ground Station. The rest of us wonder how we got onto this mailing list in the first place.

Use AWS Lambda authorizers with a third-party identity provider to secure Amazon API Gateway REST APIs | AWS Security Blog - Using a third party identity provider with Serverless is simple and straightforward after you wire together a half dozen other things to take advantage of them. "Serverless Computing: No, YOU fix it!"

Six Ways to Reduce Your AWS Bill | AWS Startups Blog - I disagree with none of these, but as a Cloud Economist I may have a seventh way in mind.

This issue is sponsored in part by my friends at CHAOSSEARCH! You know, Mom always said “Log analytics shouldn’t break the bank!” and finally someone has listened! CHAOSSEARCH is a fully managed log analytics platform that leverages your AWS S3 as a data store. Their revolutionary technology radically lowers costs for analyzing log data at scale, and they pass those savings on to you! If you are tired of your ELK Stack falling over, or tired of paying over-the-top prices to the current litany of ho-hum log analytics vendors out there, try CHAOSSEARCH today! So check them out and tell them Corey sent you so they can sigh exasperatedly and ask you what I said this time… Sponsored

A Python library that makes it easy to work with DynamoDB Single Table patterns.

Cloud Pegboard has a new extension for Chrome that enhances the AWS console. Nowhere to go but up, I suppose...