AWS Wishlist and Chrismahanukwanzakah Part 1

Dec 25, 2020

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Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Linode. You might be familiar with Linode; they’ve been around for almost 20 years. They offer Cloud in a way that makes sense rather than a way that is actively ridiculous by trying to throw everything at a wall and see what sticks. Their pricing winds up being a lot more transparent—not to mention lower—their performance kicks the crap out of most other things in this space, and—my personal favorite—whenever you call them for support, you’ll get a human who’s empowered to fix whatever it is that’s giving you trouble. Visit linode.com/screaminginthecloud to learn more, and get $100 in credit to kick the tires. That’s linode.com/screaminginthecloud.

Pete: Hello and welcome to AWS Morning Brief. I am Pete Cheslock. I'm joined yet again with Jesse DeRose. We are also excited to re-invite recurring guest for number two, Amy Negrette. Say hello, Amy.

Amy: Hello.

Pete: So, we are here. This is Christmas. Or should I say Christmahanukwanza.

Jesse: So, close. That works.

Pete: So, close. But it's the Christmahanukwanza episode—Hanu—hanukwanza—

Jesse: Christmashanukwanzika.

Pete: And if you thought Hanukkah was spelled a bunch of different ways, Christmahanukwanza is spelled a lot of different ways. And we are here to talk about the #amazonwishlist, which is honestly one of my favorite hashtags to follow on Twitter—#awswishlist. It is pretty popular, it's heavily used.

Jesse: It was actually so heavily used that they made a specific @awswishlist account, basically, specifically to follow a lot of these hashtags, and to re-highlight a lot of these hashtags, especially when some of the wishes are actually fulfilled.

Pete: Yeah, I think it's a great thing, and if I was an Amazon product manager, I would love this too because just talk about making my job a lot easier, I guess.

Jesse: One thing that I do want to call out, I was looking through a number of the tweets going around for the hashtag#awswishlist, and I noticed that there was some of the responses from AWS folks, which one I'd love to say thank you, AWS for actually taking this seriously and actually responding to folks in conversation on Twitter for these wishlist items. There was one that I found where the person directed the original poster to an AWS support page, which was basically AWS’s, like, ‘Contact Us’ page. And the Contact Us page basically said, “Hey, if you have some questions, here's what you should do. I have some questions that could help improve an AWS product or service, how can I send feedback to AWS?” And all the answers were, “Click the feedback button on the page that you're on, either in the AWS console or the AWS documentation, or contact AWS support directly.” So, close—

Pete: Did you just tell me to go F myself there, Jesse? [laugh].

Jesse: [laugh]. I didn't maybe say it in so many words, but I think I did.

Amy: I absolutely love it when a support page says, “Maybe you should just do it yourself.” And I'm like, “Well if I did, I probably wouldn't have been here in the first place.”

Pete: Exactly. So, what we decided to do, what we thought would be kind of fun, is to troll through the Twitter #awswishlist hashtag and take a look at what people were saying, especially because it's a lot busier around the pre to current re:Invent time. And so independently each of us put together a list of things that—I mean, at least I could speak for myself—I thought were interesting, or things that I thought would be cool to have. And yeah, we're just going to talk about them and see from there. So, we'll include a link to each of these tweets in the [00:04:18 show notes] so you can check them out, and also so you can see the conversation on them.

What was also cool, I just want to call out is that some of these that we saw on there, at least that I saw have been resolved by re:Invent time. One was AWS CloudShell that was announced recently at re:Invent, someone was saying I want is this AWS CloudShell thing because other vendors have this: Azure has this, Google has this. So, here's a scenario where Amazon was catching up. So, I thought that was pretty cool to see. So, I'm going to kick it off because, whatever, I'm here, and I got my list in front of me.

So, this is actually related to the CloudShell one, which I thought was interesting. So, there was some conversation online about CloudShell, and this is maybe potentially allowing people to remove the need of having a bastion host, which, how cool is that you don't have to run those anymore?

Jesse: Oh, yeah.

Pete: And so there was a question around, “Well, does my identity get a home directory?” Which sounds like the answer was “Yes.” But the question mark there had to do when using AWS SSO because it has to do with the IAM principle, it's what comes back from the sts get-caller-identity. So, if you are using one of the different Federation technologies, your actual identity could be different for each one. And so that's a wishlist item that I could definitely be on board with because if you're dealing with IAM roles or Federation, and your home directory is never the same, that can be kind of annoying.

Jesse: I cannot tell you how many times I have downloaded a file or put a file somewhere on a bastion host, gone away to a different project, come back to it, or SSH’ed into the same bastion host and wondered why it wasn't there anymore, only to realize that I was on a different bastion host in a different environment, or that the data had been purged every so often for security or cleaning purposes. I would absolutely love clean roles and just really, really well defined boundaries on this. Coming from somebody who uses different AWS accounts on a regular basis for the different clients that we work with, I would just love to see this really kind of clean structure of AWS, IAM usage, and user management and security.

Pete: And, Jesse, we saw similar issues, I believe, when we were playing around with QuickSight, and Federation, and IAM so—

Jesse: Oh, yes.

Pete: Hopefully that gets a little bit fixed up. But anyway, I thought that was a pretty interesting one. Amy, what did you find in your discovery of the Amazon wishlist hashtag?

Amy: I did find one for X-Ray support in API Gateway HTTP API. Again, one of the worst, longest names of any service, and EventBridge, which surprisingly, one that this hasn't happened yet, but two, [00:07:12 unintelligible] for me is kind of a double-edged sword where it's one of those services that everyone needs, but als...