AWS Morning Brief

Want to give your ears a break and read this as an article? You’re looking for this link.SponsorsGravitationalLinodeNever miss an episodeJoin the Last Week in AWS newsletterSubscribe wherever you get your podcastsHelp the showLeave a reviewShare your feedbackSubscribe wherever you get your podcastsWhat's Corey up to?Follow Corey on Twitter (@quinnypig)See our recent work at the Duckbill GroupApply to work with Corey and the Duckbill Group to help lower your AWS bill

AWS Morning Brief for the week of November 23, 2020 with Corey Quinn.

LinksFollow Last Week In AWS on TwitterTranscriptCorey: Gravitational is now Teleport because when way more people have heard of your product than your company, maybe that’s a sign it’s a time to change your branding. Teleport enables engineers to quickly access any computing resource, anywhere on the planet. You know, like VPNs were supposed to do before we all started working from home, and the VPNs melted like glaciers. Teleport provides a unified access plane for developers and security professionals seeking to simplify secure access to servers, applications, and data across all of your environments without the bottleneck and management overhead of traditional VPNs. This feels to me like it’s a lot like the early days of HashiCorp’s Terraform. My gut tells me this is the sort of thing that’s going to transform how people access their cloud services and environments. To learn more, visit goteleport.com.Pete: Hello, and welcome to AWS Morning Brief. I am Pete Cheslock, and I'm also here, again, with Jesse DeRose. Hey, Jesse, how's it going?Jesse: Not too bad. Thanks for having me.Pete: It is part two of AWS Storage Day. If you haven't had the chance to listen to last week's episode, Jesse and I dove into some of the new features really focusing on what we would think is the biggest feature of AWS Storage Day, which was the S3 Intelligent Tiering. Go back and listen to it if you didn't hear about it. But essentially, Amazon keeps extending out features [00:01:34 unintelligible] this Intelligent Tiering platform. And we talked a little bit about it last week. But there were a lot of announcements as part of Storage Day, some pretty impressive, and some that were maybe a little underwhelming. We'll let you be the judge of that because some of these things could be incredibly important for you as—maybe—someone who operates on Amazon. So, now what we're going to do is we're going to dive into some of the other features, not only additional interesting S3 features, but there were a lot of new features announced around EBS, and EFS, and FSx, and all of the different ways that you can interact with AWS storage. I don't want to call it the biggest feature of this section because I think—let's be honest—they're all equally meh features, right, Jesse?Jesse: Yeah.Pete: I think that's going to be the common thread. Again, you might look at some of these features and go, “Finally, my life is so much better because they've announced this feature.” But I got to say, outside of Intelligent Tiering, Storage Day felt a little weak. But let's dive in anyway. S3 Replication; if you are replicating your data from one S3 bucket to another bucket, another region, which maybe you need to do for compliance reasons, disaster recovery reasons, some of the new features they added are around replication metrics and notifications. Now, previously, these metrics and notifications were only available if you used the Time Control Replication, and that is a additional charge to get a predictable SLA for your data to be backed up. They made these metrics now available for anyone, so that's actually awesome to hear that they’ve really just extended that out and are kind of giving you something for free. Additionally, they now replicate delete markers, which I swear I looked at a bunch of documents to understand better what delete markers mean, and the best I got to it, I don't actually really understand the problem from before, other than as you delete a version of something in the source, the delete marker moves over. But then maybe the previous versions are in the destination. That was my gist of it, Jessie, what was your gist of that one?Jesse: Yeah, I struggled a little bit with some of these previously because S3 replication always felt like this magical hand-wavy feature where you turned it on and then just waited, and eventually your objects would show up in your destination bucket or destination folder. But there wasn't really any clear path to what was going on behind the scenes. So, I'm really excited to see that now these metrics and notifications are available to everyone, not just to folks who were using the Replication Time Control feature, and allows everybody to more easily understand how their data is replicating between S3 buckets behind the scenes. So, I feel good about this one. I feel like this is definitely a step in the right direction. I'm really excited to see that this is now broadly available for everybody that's using S3. I think it will make using S3 Replication easier for a lot of folks who need it for business purposes or any other use case.Pete: Yeah, absolutely. Another really awesome feature—I was actually excited for this because, of course, it must affect me in my day-to-day—S3 object ownership is now available for all the Amazon regions and amazingly supported by CloudFormation, which I feel like is always an afterthought. But what this allows you to do is you can use this feature too, when you upload files, it'll make sure that the ownership is assumed by the bucket you've uploaded it into. And so this gets around a lot of hairy issues that come into S3 permissioning, IAM permissioning. I mean, S3 permissioning, in general, predates IAM. I don't know how many people actually know that. And I think because of it, there are some really gnarly edge cases people run into, and this is a big problem solver.Jesse: I am really, really excited about this feature release, I cannot say how many times we've run into this edge case with some of our internal tooling because we have effectively copied or synced data from a client's S3 bucket into our S3 bucket, and we don't gain ownership. And that becomes such a permissioning headache to be able to do anything with that data once we have it in our S3 bucket. So, I'm really excited to see that object ownership is now not only a first-class citizen but now is also built into and supported by AWS CloudFormation.Pete: Yeah, absolutely. Another new feature: it has to do with Outpost actually, and you can get S3 on Outposts now which, that's truly amazing if you think about it. Now, I don't know of anyone who actually is using Outposts, and I would love to chat with someone who can, if they're even allowed to, or if they're stuck under an NDA. But what an Outpost allows you to do is essentially purchase a rack of AWS; it's a rack of servers and storage with Amazon APIs. If you really just think about that for a second, that's pretty impressive. And if you are going to do hybrid cloud, and you have maybe some data locality requirements like you really need data in a specific location and that's not a region that Amazon supports, or you have data centers, or there's always some requirements, you can now get S3 on there. And they said that they can support 48 or 96 terabytes of S3 capacity per Outpost. What that actually means—like, is that a rack? Is that a whole rack? Is that just a single S3 configuration? Hard to really know. There's no API to go and provision an Outpost yet.Jesse: Yeah, I'm really curious about this one to see how folks end up using it because I'm super excited that this is a feature that's now available. I love the idea of Outposts, even though it may not be a business use case for us internally. But I'm really curious to see how thi...

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AWS Morning Brief for the week of November 16, 2020 with Brooke Mitchell.

LinksFollow Last Week In AWS on TwitterTranscriptCorey: This episode is sponsored in part by Catchpoint. Look, 80 percent of performance and availability issues don’t occur within your application code in your data center itself. It occurs well outside those boundaries, so it’s difficult to understand what’s actually happening. What Catchpoint does is makes it easier for enterprises to detect, identify, and of course, validate how reachable their application is, and of course, how happy their users are. It helps you get visibility into reachability, availability, performance, reliability, and of course, absorbency, because we’ll throw that one in, too. And it’s used by a bunch of interesting companies you may have heard of, like, you know, Google, Verizon, Oracle—but don’t hold that against them—and many more. To learn more, visit www.catchpoint.com, and tell them Corey sent you; wait for the wince.Pete: Hello, and welcome to AWS Morning Brief. I am Pete Cheslock. Corey, while being back from his paternity leave, is still not here. We are having too much fun. And by we, I mean I'm joined again with Jesse DeRose. Hey, Jesse. Jesse: Thanks as always for having me, Pete. Pete: It's so much fun to again chat with people outside of my little family unit, that we've just decided not to give this back to Corey. And luckily, Corey has many other podcasts that he does, he was pretty happy to give it away.Jesse: I feel like you should never talk about your children that way, but he's got a plethora at this point. So, he's willing to kind of share the wealth.Pete: Exactly. And if you notice, we have a new theme song that came out, I think it was last week was the first week that we brought in the new theme song, which is I think much in line with a previous episode where we talked about ’80s breakdancing movies that the new theme song kind of has that vibe to it.Jesse: I hope you're wearing the Members Only jean jacket that I sent you, along with the shades to match the uniform.Pete: Yeah. I mean, I was born in ’80, so the ’80s for me, I was very young. I'm kind of waiting for the ’90s movies to come around again because I want to rock out my JNCO jeans and my wallet chain. Jesse: [laugh], yes.Pete: And all that good stuff.Jesse: I am ready.Pete: Exactly. Well, what are we talking about today? Well, earlier this week, AWS Storage Day 2020 happened on Tuesday. If you were a part of that, it was a free online event. As Amazon called it, a full day online event. Except it was only about four hours long, so kind of mailing it in on that one, huh?Jesse: Can we start discussing that with our boss and say that a full day of work is technically just four hours? Can we just start working with that going forward?Pete: Yeah, we'll just say it right now. So, hey, Corey, we're done for the day. Put in the old college four.Jesse: [laugh]. That's what you say, “I put in the old college try. I just did my full day of four hours, according to AWS. So, this has been great. I'll talk to you tomorrow.”Pete: Exactly. Well, Storage Day this year—it's the second year in a row if I'm remembering it correctly. 2019 was the last year they did that—and I feel like this kind of ties into the fact that there's just so many announcements that happened around re:Invent, that leading up into re:Invent, you have a lot of announcements to maybe soften the blow for a lot of folks. And Storage Day, really is just this whole day—well, four hours worth of a whole day—talking about everything related to storage. And we're talking about things like S3, EBS, EFS, FSx, for the five huge enterprises that probably use FSx. Although if you actually do use FSx, I'd be curious to hear about how you like it and what you think of it because we don't really hear a lot of people using it. But these are all the services, plus many more, that Amazon talked about as part of its Storage Day.Jesse: Yeah, it was a really interesting discussion. I greatly appreciate that AWS broke out this discussion prior to AWS re:Invent, but they dropped a lot of knowledge on us all at once, and in, like, rapid-fire succession, I was really, kind of… not necessarily surprised, but there's a lot of information that they shared all at once. And I have to admit that after sitting through this presentation, I now have a greater appreciation for Apple's slow presentation style. As much as I hate it; as much as I hate sitting for an hour and a half for one announcement while they toot their own horn, I have to say that the buildup and getting me involved in the story and bringing me along with them. It works, it absolutely works. And it was kind of hard for me to pick up on all the things that went on during AWS Storage Day this year because there was a lot of things going on.Pete: And honestly, the fact they give so much information is really amazing in, I guess, both their ability to tout, in many cases, minor feature changes that most SaaS businesses would just turn on and maybe blog about. But this is—obviously the engine of AWS is so good at discussing their wins. But you're right, it's just a huge amount. On Monday, Jeff Barr of course, wrote the blog post with a lot of these details, linking to countless other blog posts. And I think it really speaks to just how, probably every, or nearly every Amazon service ties into storage in some way. It's a huge, huge part of this ecosystem. Jesse: Absolutely. Pete: So, as you can imagine, there were so many new features that we're not even going to be able to cover them all throughout the course, but we did want to call out some of the big ones, or at least what we thought were the biggest ones, the most interesting new features, new product announcements that came out, and also just touch on some of the other things that we thought were pretty interesting as well. And yeah, there was a lot of fun stuff. I think the biggest one that was announced was the S3 Intelligent-Tiering, which is a class storage tier within S3, adds additional levels of archive access. So, if you imagine Intelligent-Tiering, you know, you have the automatic tiering of data from frequently accessed to infrequently accessed as things age out, they essentially automate that for you. So, as things are not accessed, you just start automatically paying less for them. And anything automatic in a cost savings world is going to help you save money. If you don't have to think about it and it just does it for you, it's fantastic. Well, Intelligent-Tiering added in these additional tiers—which they are Glacier—level tiers. They are additional places that your data can eventually move to as they start aging out based on a whole series of criteria. But there's caveats. There's more caveats now. Before, one of the interesting things that we actually learned as part of this—because it was buried in a pricing page footnote—is that when you store something into Intelligent-Tiering, there is a minimum storage time period that you will get charge...

Want to give your ears a break and read this as an article? You’re looking for this link.SponsorsnOpsLinodeNever miss an episodeJoin the Last Week in AWS newsletterSubscribe wherever you get your podcastsHelp the showLeave a reviewShare your feedbackSubscribe wherever you get your podcastsWhat's Corey up to?Follow Corey on Twitter (@quinnypig)See our recent work at the Duckbill GroupApply to work with Corey and the Duckbill Group to help lower your AWS bill

AWS Morning Brief for the week of November 9, 2020 with Jam Leomi.

Dive into the world of AWS certifications, where humor and insightful debates collide! The hosts explore the growth and significance of these credentials in tech, discussing their pros, cons, and value as both career boosters and potential profit schemes. Personal stories reveal practical applications of knowledge gained through certifications, while the need for a cloud economics certification comes humorously to light. With industry trends evolving, the discussion insists on balancing theoretical knowledge with real-world experience for true professional credibility.

Want to give your ears a break and read this as an article? You’re looking for this link.SponsorsnOpsLinodeNever miss an episodeJoin the Last Week in AWS newsletterSubscribe wherever you get your podcastsHelp the showLeave a reviewShare your feedbackSubscribe wherever you get your podcastsWhat's Corey up to?Follow Corey on Twitter (@quinnypig)See our recent work at the Duckbill GroupApply to work with Corey and the Duckbill Group to help lower your AWS bill