Welcome to issue 174 of Last Week in AWS.

Last week featured me on Twitter answering questions about public speaking and sharing ancient sysadmin wisdom from the ancient sysadmin times. Truly, these are the best of times.

​In other news, over at the Duckbill Group (the consultancy I run with my business partner Mike Julian), we regularly find and fix downright ludicrous, verging- on-customer-hostile AWS bills. Let’s make your AWS bill less horrible. Whether you’re looking to increase your startup’s runway, improve the profitability of your established company, or just get better control over your top 5 biggest spends, The Duckbill Group can help.

Have you heard about ChaosSearch, the fully managed log analytics platform that leverages your Amazon S3 as a data store? According to the CTO at Armor, a global cybersecurity company with more than 1,000 customers in 42 countries, “ChaosSearch is a critical piece of our infrastructure for processing tens of terabytes per day of our customers’ log data.” And at Hubspot, the Engineering Lead said “We are able to process and analyze 10's of terabytes a day of Cloudflare log data to identify and fend off DDoS attacks on behalf of our customers at a fraction of the cost of our previous self-hosted ELK Stack.” So take it from me, or take it from them - either way, take a look at ChaosSearch today!Sponsored

What the various consequences of memory allocation are for Lambda functions.

A recounting of the various ETL options in AWS.

I keep hoping for a super simple API Gateway authentication model that doesn't require me to constantly reauthenticate. This path comes close, but it's not there yet.

The worst part about some of AWS's service names is that they're apparently not even original.

Trend Micro Cloud One. It’s a security services platform for organizations building in the cloud. It’s also an automated, flexible, all-in-one solution to protect workflows and containers with cloud-native security. But to you... it’s more time to focus on what you do best— building great applications. Learn more

I find myself consulting Jerry Hargrove's AWS History frequently when I need to figure out just how long a service has been around without tagging, CloudFormation support, or a discernible use case.

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

Do you hold a US Security Clearance? Do you want to build exciting things? Steal exciting secrets? Make big trouble for Moose and Squirrel? Check out the AWS Cleared Jobs and see if AWS might have a role that's up your alley. Many restrictions apply; see page for details.

OpenEye Scientific is looking for a Backend Developer to be part of a team responsible for developing OpenEye’s cloud platform, Orion, a state of the art elastic workflow scheduler and orchestration system. Orion is a container-based scientific workflow system written in Go and Python. While there are some interesting workflow and container orchestration systems out there and also Kubernetes, none deliver the flexibility in using legacy applications and toolkits, ease of use, scalability, and reliability that they are targeting. Their system is made up of Floe, a Python workflow framework, and a cloud-based workflow runtime and user interface leveraging many technologies, including Django, Docker, and AWS.

Bridgecrew is the developer-first infrastructure security platform for both your public cloud and infrastructure-as-code. If you’re drowning in “Fix missing encryption” Jira tickets, you gotta check them out. They embed throughout the developer lifecycle—from commit to CI/CD to cloud—and they don’t just find issues. They give you the actual code to fix them via pull requests or automated playbooks. The best part? Their platform is free to use up for to 100 cloud resources—just sign up on their website. Sponsored

CodeGuru Reviewer now has Full Repository Analysis Support - Yes, CodeGuru will charge you per line of code in that repository you point it at, but don't worry; you get a 20% discount on everything over your first $15,000 a month!

New AWS Solutions Consulting Offer – VPC-In-A-Box℠ - A company with vision, a sense of humor, and a larger marketing budget than a small child's weekly allowance would have launched a "VPC-In-A-Box" offering with a Justin Timberlake / Andy Samberg music video.

Register for AWS Container Day to Learn About Kubernetes, Amazon EKS, AWS Fargate, Bottlerocket, and More! - There are many things to appreciate about AWS Container Day (in one week), no matter who you are. For me, it's the blog post listing a full agenda for a worldwide event without bothering to tell anyone what time zone it's in.

Automating cross-account actions with an AWS CDK credential plugin - When even their vaunted CDK needs a special plugin to speak cross-account, I give up.

Optimizing the cost of running AWS Elastic Beanstalk Workloads - Whereas you can optimize the entire experience of running AWS Elastic Beanstalk workloads by migrating them all to Heroku instead.

Reach more players using AWS Global Accelerator - This headline really speaks to AWS's entire gaming service philosophy: "Don't hate the player; hate the name."

Verizon and AWS deliver mobile edge computing to customers in Boston and the Bay Area - Some of the worst conspiracy theorists in the world will come out of the woodwork for AWS's 5G offering, instead of focusing on the real problem: the terrible us-west-2-wl1-sfo-wlz-1 for my local San Francisco Wavelength Zone. 5G's higher throughput is apparently necessary to get its complete name out to customers.

Building a Pictionary-style game with AWS DeepLens and Amazon Alexa - This post features some hilariously bad drawings that--oh, wait. Whoops. Those are the AWS service icons. My bad.

Unbox and start streaming live video with AWS Elemental Link - If you work hard enough at online video streaming, maybe you can one day produce events as awesome as AWS's online summits, which-- BUFFERING -- are renowned for... CONNECTION LOST

Amazon EC2 instance port forwarding with AWS Systems Manager - Security folks rejoice with a resounding "wait, Systems Manager can do what now? But that means our compliance attestations--"

Building a cloud-ready workforce: Utah announces plan to train and certify 5000 residents in cloud computing - While I'm a huge fan of better vocational training programs, I'm not sure that using public funds to pay for vendor specific training offerings from that vendor is the best way to get there.

Migrating your rules from AWS WAF Classic to the new AWS WAF - My preferred approach is not to migrate the WAF rules at all; if AWS wants me to move they'll eventually get so tired of sending me emails about it that they'll offer to just do it themselves for free. We call that "their opening position."

Secure deployment of Amazon SageMaker resources - You can tell AWS's security story is improving, because this post only includes six additional AWS services beyond SageMaker itself.

Cross-account bulk transfer of files using Amazon S3 Batch Operations - This is EXACTLY what I've been looking for to shove those 2 exabytes of data into that S3 bucket that you've forgotten to secure. I bet you'll remember after that monthly bill shows up...

Building dashboards for operational visibility | Amazon Builders' Library - It's hard to believe something about representing important data well came out of a company with the AWS console.

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A fun standalone service to dip your toes into the river of Serverless is this image optimizer.

An early attempt at helping to fix your complete lack of resource tagging.

How the hell does Segment have a secrets manager named chamber that doesn't feature a single Harry Potter title reference?

StackExchange's opinionated DNSControl is a modern day retelling of phpmyadmin for a better database.