AWS Wishlist and Chrismahanukwanzakah Part 2

Links

• #AWSWishList
• @AWSWishList Account
• Follow Pete + Jesse on Twitter

Transcript
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Pete: Hello and welcome to the AWS Morning Brief. I am Pete Cheslock.

Jesse: I'm Jesse DeRose.

Pete: We are welcomed yet again with Amy Negrette.

Amy: Hello.

Pete: We are here. We made it. It is actually 2021.

Jesse: I can tell you flying cars: definitely a thing. World peace: we're close, we're so close.

Pete: We're so close. Well, guess what? We made it, we survived 2020. And with it, we brought with us part two of the #awswishlist. So, this is where we went through—especially as leading up to re:Invent and getting through re:Invent—we went through and looked at the Twitter hashtag of #awswishlist so that we could pick out some of our favorite things, some #awswishlist items that we think are important to us, or just interesting in their own right. We'll include the link to these tweets in the [00:01:57 show notes]. 

So definitely go check that out, and you can check out the conversation, or maybe follow some of that to see when things actually come around. But yeah, we'll just walk through some of the things we found that were pretty interesting and chat about why we hope Amazon includes them into a future release. So, one thing that I saw which I thought was pretty interesting because I run into this problem also, is a way of downloading data from various third party locations directly into S3, Dynamo, or some sort of data store location. Essentially, it'd be awesome to just completely get rid of having services around, or Fargates, or Lambdas set up for downloading data from places that—how cool would it be? And this is, again, not an enterprise-y type feature, but just, like, a personal thing of how cool would it be to be, like, I want to take this ISO from a place and just put a URL in S3 and say, “Put that thing in this thing,” and call it a day. So, again, a personal complaint of mine plus, also, someone else tweeted it, so there's two people out there that want this—at least—so therefore Amazon, you got to build it for me.

Amy: Those are the rules.

Pete: Those are the rules. Right. Right, Amy, those are the rules. 

Jesse: And I feel like, let's be honest, that ISO that you want to download anyway is probably living in S3 somewhere else anyhow. So, it's just moving bucket to bucket.

Pete: Someone has that, you know, Slackware ISO that I've been looking for, from, you know, 2001. It's in someone else's bucket; just let me have it myself. Exactly. Amy, what did you find in your discovery of the #awswishlist hashtag?

Amy: This is a thing that I think really should be on any of these on-demand pay-as-you-go services because AWS really targets those [00:03:48 unintelligible] markets for a lot of their serverless deployments. And this actually came from one of my friends who had this problem on Twitter, where you need to be able to set a maximum on on-demand spend, let's say in his case, Dynamo. So, you don't hypothetically build in a loop and spend a whole bunch of money. 

Pete: Yeah.

Amy: And really, it should be in anything that does that. If it's not telling you something where I'm only wanting to run this much because it's on-demand, then you should be able to control that spend somehow.

Pete: And with the—what is it—millisecond billion on Lambda, you can get really granular bills for your poorly architected Lambda functions. 

Jesse: I feel like computers are the best because they'll do exactly what you want them to do, except for when they do what you tell them to do and not what you actually want them to do, and that drives me absolutely insane. So, I'm with you. I think that this is a great opportunity.

Amy: That problem will be solved when the robots take over.

Pete: [laugh]. One of my favorite discoveries of doing our kind of Duckbill cost optimizations where we dive into people's spend and help them architect things new was finding a Lambda function that was taking longer and longer to execute—meaning, costing more money—by putting more and more data into a poorly configured Dynamo table that was also causing it to take longer and longer. And so not only did you have a Dynamo table that was poorly configured, taking this data and taking longer to do it, you were just getting a hit on both sides. It happens.

Jesse: That hurts my soul. 

Pete: So, what’d you find, Jesse? What was some of the good wishlist items that you're hoping for in 2021?

Jesse: So, I come from a background of a lot of infrastructure as code I've worked a lot with Terraform, I know enough about Chef to be dangerous to your production environment. One thing that I saw a couple people tweet about that I would love to see is mock AWS API endpoints for, effectively, unit tests for a lot of infrastructure as code. Because if you think about when you're building infrastructure as code, the only way that you can really test it is by running it, by actually seeing, “Can I actually create the resources that I think I'm creating with this infrastructure as code content?” So, I would love to see maybe a feature flag for AWS services through the API where you can say, “Hey, don't actually create this RDS database or this EC2 instance, but just return the results as if I did create it. Maybe leave the Instance ID blank or something like that.” And then you, in writing your unit tests, can confirm all the details that you would expect to see in that response. 

Pete: I feel like there was a—Atlassian, maybe, had a project that was something like this, some sort of a way of unit testing these things. Again, it was something on GitHub, so even if it was associated with a large publicly traded enterprise, I'm sure it's fallen into disrepair at this stage.

Jesse: [laugh]. I will say I found an open-source tool looking into this one, called LocalStack that allows you to basically spin up an instance on your local machine that acts as the AWS API endpoint so that it actually creates this mock endpoint for you locally on your machine. But effectively, I'd love to see th...