AWS has been very publicly insecure about the perception that it’s lagging behind in the Generative AI space for the past year. Unfortunately, rather than setting those perceptions to rest, AWS’s GenAI extravaganza at re:Invent 2023 seemed to prove them true.  Of the 22 GenAI-related announcements, half of them are still in preview. Many were seemingly developed in crash programs launched since ChatGPT was released a year ago. All distracted AWS from resolving more relevant challenges that customers are facing. Amazon Q: Quartermaster or omnipotent being?  Nowhere is this more eviden ..read more

Let’s begin with the tl;dr: At this year’s re:Invent, I’m hosting a photo scavenger hunt with significant prizes for “most items found” and “most creative entry.” Sign up through my webapp at findme.lastweekinaws.com. The rest of this post details how I built this app. I am bad at programming I’ve often said that the two programming languages in which I’m fluent are “brute force” and “enthusiasm.” Never have I felt that to be more true than when wandering into the mists of TypeScript. Even the name is terrible! If it were honest about how developers write code today (copying it off of Stack Ov ..read more

AWS has been making a lot of noise about generative AI, emphasizing risk mitigation and the need for control over your data. Unlike its competitors, AWS doesn’t train its models on “the entire internet, regardless of various intellectual property restrictions.” This is laudable! (Though unlike the other large cloud providers, AWS currently doesn’t offer indemnification against intellectual property infringement claims when using its AI services, but that’s not the bone I wish to pick today.) What I want to draw your attention to is the hidden catch AWS clearly hopes you won’t notice: It is tra ..read more

AWS re:Invent looms larger on the calendar with each passing day, promising not just an avalanche of new services but also–let’s face it–some truly perplexing names. However, the oddity of AWS service names is low-hanging fruit. The true enigma lies in their labyrinthine pricing dimensions. Gone are the days when “instance hours” and “gigabyte months” were the only units of cloud measurement we had to worry about. Now, we grapple with constructs like “I/O Operations” and “LCUs,” which depend on multiple dimensions tied to your choice of Load Balancer. The downside of these obscure metrics is n ..read more

The AWS re:Invent session tracker leaves much to be desired, a point that many in the community have lamented for years. Its glaring shortcomings range from the absence of a calendar view to a lackluster search function and the inability to share links to individual sessions. Frustrated attendees have long been in need of a better solution, and several community members rose to the challenge. Notable contributors include AWS Serverless Hero Luc van Donkersgoed and Raphael Manke, who have developed alternative session viewers to enhance the conference experience. These third-party solutions wer ..read more

My Route53 database is humming along nicely, my podcast interview backlog is full, and I’ve outsourced my thinking to ChatGPT, so I have some unprecedented free time to build a side project. Awesome! What cloud provider should I use? The obvious and correct answer is “the one you’re already familiar with,” which for me and many others is AWS (due in no small part to their 5-year head start). But if AWS isn’t an option for whatever reason, and we turn the decision into an open field, a whole mess of questions arise. Reliability To start, I’m going to care if the potential provider’s offering is ..read more

Picture this: You’re in your swivel chair, feet propped up on your standing desk because you are a glorious acrobat, and you’re looking over your company’s Amazon EC2 fleet utilization report. You’re captivated by the custom colorful dashboard, carefully tuned to a 1st-grade reading level. You see the overall number in its soft, non-threatening font, and you say to yourself, “We’re operating at 70% capacity — we’re golden!” That metric is usually nothing more than a feel-good security blanket that doesn’t give you better insight into the efficiency of your spend. Why? Because the number at the ..read more

Jeff Barr recently posted his annual Prime Day by the numbers blog post, and I was immediately inundated by questions around “How much did this cost?” There are a few answers possible, none of which are quite correct. There’s an argument that in absolute terms the answer is “zero,” because it’s simply money transferring from one part of Amazon’s balance sheet to another — but that’s unsatisfying. There’s the internal chargeback costs that AWS charges Amazon for services that would be subject to (at a minimum) significant discounting just due to volume, but also quite possibly modified at some ..read more

Price hikes are rare for AWS, but today, a Friday, my birthday, the cloud provider announced that it’s going to begin charging for public IPv4 addresses, by which they mean IP addresses that aren’t in RFC 1918 space. And you know what? I’m absolutely here for it. It may sound more than a little odd that I’m cheering for customers being charged more money for something that they’ve previously been getting for free. After all, historically only unattached Elastic IPs would cost you anything, and even they would stop costing you anything once they were attached to an instance or load balancer, as ..read more

“All these regions are yours except us-west-1; attempt no workloads there” For most of 2009, AWS looked very different from today. Notably, it comprised two regions: us-east-1 and eu-west1. Then, AWS made a curious announcement: a new region in Northern California, dubbed us-west-1, was now available for customer use. Clearly, this looked like one of AWS’s flagship regions. It would be another two years before AWS launched us-west-2 in Oregon. A number of companies discovering AWS between 2009 and 2011, especially those based on the U.S. West Coast that wanted to be close to their region for ..read more