Mailing List Cleanup - Last Week in AWS (Part 1)

(This is part of an open ended series of posts where I write down random things I feel are sharable from the years of mailing lists I’ve not caught up on…)

Ok. I’ve declared bankruptcy on Corey Quinn’s Last Week in AWS a couple times. But let’s just slog through the 108 weeks that I’ve neglected since the last time. Some of the accouncements are 18 months old, but what the heck, his commentary is worth the price of admission.

Let’s see what he linked to beyond just the choice cuts from the firehose of the AWS annoucement blog for the ones from 2024

• ‘What’s the time, Mister Cloud?’ is a super nerdy look at Time in the cloud. So good. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
• How we’ve saved 98% in cloud costs by writing our own database – click-baity title, but sometimes you do have a very specific edge case, that upon full inpection means you need to build something ridiculously specific. Sometimes. And by sometimes, I mean almost never. No matter how much ‘fun’ the developers think it would be.
• XScreenSaver for Android • Privacy Policy – I love jwz. I first was introduced to him via the (Tent of Doom)[https://www.jwz.org/tent-of-doom/]
• I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again – this made me laugh when it first came out, and spoiler, it still does.
• Ten Ways to Improve Your AWS Operations – Top X of anything is suspect, but these are pretty good
• Ball – I’m not saying that the next time I’m in charge of controlling macbooks that I’ll deploy this to everyone, but I’m also not saying it.
• Slashing our AWS Bill at Levels.fyi – It is not surprising that he included this since his company’s specialty is cloud bills. I’m willing to bet a couple jobs at a lot of companies doing RIFs could be saved if they looked at their cloud spend critically. And that’s all I’ll say about that.
• Jeff Bezos’s famed management rules are slowly unraveling inside Amazon. Can they survive the Andy Jassy era? – I actually really like the management rules. But the problem with top-down big-C Culture like this is it becomes cult-y and hard to sustain.
• how we reduced our cloud spending by 20% – another pick-low-hanging-fruit-to-save-money article, this time from DuoLingo. It shocks me (ok, it doesn’t really) the waste that happens at big companies.