With Mountpoint for Amazon S3, your applications can access objects stored in Amazon S3 through file operations like open and read. Mountpoint for Amazon S3 automatically translates these operations into S3 object API calls, giving your applications access to the elastic storage and throughput of Amazon S3 through a file interface.
Early alpha. Written in Rust by the AWS team.
Corey Quinn:
Countless volumes have been written about the various benefits of serverless, a task made even easier by it being such a squishy, nebulous term that’s come to mean basically whatever the author wants it to mean. This has been a boon for AWS’s product teams, who’ve gone from creating services that are clearly serverless such as DynamoDB, Route 53, IAM, and others to instead slapping the “serverless” moniker on things that are clearly not very serverless at all, like OpenSearch and Aurora.
Ben Hoyt shares his experience switching two of his side projects from on an EC2 instance to Fly.io:
It took me about an hour to figure out the basics of Fly.io and move the simpler project, and a couple of evenings to move the more complex one. Fly.io handles the annoying reverse proxy and SSL stuff, deployment is as simple as
fly deploy, and there’s a nice dashboard on Fly.io to show me what’s going on…I’m only a few weeks into using Fly.io to host my side projects, but I’m very happy with their product so far. I was quite happy to delete the 500 lines of Ansible scripts, systemd unit files, and Caddy config files.
It also made me smile to finally stop the EC2 instance and bump my AWS bill down from $9 per month to about 10 cents per month (I still use S3 for user-uploaded images and for backups). I have nothing against EC2 and would use it again for certain things, but for small web applications, Fly.io seems like a great fit.
Ruby on Jets allows you to create and deploy serverless services with ease, and to seamlessly glue AWS services together with the most beautiful dynamic language: Ruby. It includes everything you need to build an API and deploy it to AWS Lambda. Jets leverages the power of Ruby to make serverless joyful for everyone.
I’m not (yet) big on serverless things, but if I were, I’d love to run some Ruby code there.
This is a must-read thriller!
Costs were dropping by 90% as promised. He was paid 50K$. Then he disappeared. Completely.
The happy IT director wanted to give more assignments to this genius. But he vanished. Didn’t answer emails, voicemail on the phone number closed LinkedIn account. Gone.
The truth, sometimes, is stranger than fiction…
Amazon CTO, Werner Vogels:
Today, I am publishing the Distributed Computing Manifesto, a canonical document from the early days of Amazon that transformed the architecture of Amazon’s ecommerce platform. It highlights the challenges we were facing at the end of the 20th century, and hints at where we were headed.
25 years later. This is super cool!
Zsot Varga explains how Prerender saved $800k annually by removing their reliance on AWS and building in-house infrastructure to handle traffic and cached data. This was no minor migration, and it took months to pull off, but it’s a solid lesson in testing your assumptions.
The cloud (which is AWS in most cases) is the default for most businesses today. That’s a good starting place for many reasons, but once you get up and going you may find it’s not the best choice for your business, like the folks at Prerender learned.
When we had Paul Copplestone from Supabase on The Changelog I asked him what a cloud native Postgres would look like. He replied,
Decoupled compute and storage. So the idea is that you should be able to attach the compute part of it to a storage, hopefully like an infinite storage; you know, anything that is infinitely scalable. If you can do this, and in particular, if the compute can start up very fast, maybe in, say, a hundred milliseconds via some sort of HTTP response, then that’s cloud native, yeah.
Enter Neon, which sells itself as:
The multi-cloud fully managed Postgres with a generous free tier. We separated storage and compute to offer autoscaling, branching, and bottomless storage.
Behind this new business from MemSQL co-founder Nikita Shamgunov is the linked (Apache-licensed) server written in Rust.
As it gets easier and easier to deploy to the cloud, and with increased concern about data sovereignty, regional architectures are becoming more common. This article gives you an overview of how we easily maintain our regional services on AWS at Apptrail.
Avi Lumelsky shares his journey finding and reporting databases with sensitive data about Fortune-500 companies, hospitals, crypto platforms, startups during due diligence, and more.
His major entry point: misconfiguration
This is super interesting to see bare metal Mac mini’s attached through Thunderbolt to the Amazon EC2 infrastructure. Really makes me wish I had a reason to use them. 😂
Shawn (swyx) Wang lays out Cloudflare’s strategy to disrupt the cloud from the outside in:
While the tech industry is used to come-from-below disruption, and the software industry is increasingly grasping class-for-the-masses atomic concepts, I believe Cloudflare is writing a new playbook that is the little-guy counterpart of the embrace, extend, extinguish model used by Microsoft.
Chris Fidao:
I’ve been using AWS “professionally” since about 2015. In that time, I’ve made lots of mistakes.
Other than occasionally deleting production data, the mistakes all arose from ignorance - there’s so much to know about AWS that it’s easy to miss something important.
Here’s a collection of the most commonly missed things when using AWS with Laravel Forge!
Learning from your mistakes is powerful. Learning from other people’s mistakes can be just as powerful without the major drawback of, you know, feeling all that pain!
Amazon EKS Anywhere is a new deployment option for Amazon EKS that enables you to easily create and operate Kubernetes clusters on-premises with your own virtual machines. It brings a consistent AWS management experience to your data center, building on the strengths of Amazon EKS Distro, the same distribution of Kubernetes that powers EKS on AWS. Its goal is to include full lifecycle management of multiple Kubernetes clusters that are capable of operating completely independently of any AWS services.
You may have heard that Dark Sky (the beloved weather app for iOS) was acquired by Apple and its accompanying developer API will be shut down soon, which left a lot of devs scrambling for alternatives. Enter the PirateWeather API:
Weather forecasts are primarily determined using models run by government agencies, but the outputs aren’t easy to use or in formats built for applications. To try to address this, I’ve put together a service (built on AWS Lambda) that reads public weather forecasts and serves it following the Dark Sky API style.
It’s in beta at the moment, but it appears the author has put a lot of thought into it.
From the AWS open source blog:
Today, we are introducing the OpenSearch project, a community-driven, open source fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana. We are making a long-term investment in OpenSearch to ensure users continue to have a secure, high-quality, fully open source search and analytics suite with a rich roadmap of new and innovative functionality. This project includes OpenSearch (derived from Elasticsearch 7.10.2) and OpenSearch Dashboards (derived from Kibana 7.10.2). Additionally, the OpenSearch project is the new home for our previous distribution of Elasticsearch (Open Distro for Elasticsearch), which includes features such as enterprise security, alerting, machine learning, SQL, index state management, and more. All of the software in the OpenSearch project is released under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (ALv2).
Did you listen to our epic Elastic vs AWS episode on The Changelog? I’d really love to hear from the community on this subject…is this a good thing or a bad thing for open source at large? Why didn’t AWS just work with Elasticsearch (the company)?
We plan to rename our existing Amazon Elasticsearch Service to Amazon OpenSearch Service.
Serverless Stack Toolkit is an extension of AWS CDK that makes it easy to build serverless apps. It features:
Ever since AWS took Elasticsearch and decided to sell a managed version of it there has been controversy around AWS and Elasticsearch. Now that the software created by Elastic is being switched to the Server-Side Public License
(SSPL), which is not a very permissive license, AWS is going ahead and forking the projects.
The debate rages around this. Few people feel sympathy with the behemoth that is AWS, but they don’t seem to be in violation of any licenses. Elastic have definitely worked hard on Elasticsearch and arguably deserves an opportunity to profit from their work. This new license raises significant concern though.
I don’t think we’ll see this settle anytime soon, just like the issue of open source sustainability is neither easy nor straightforward.
JuiceFS is an open-source POSIX file system built on top of Redis and object storage (e.g. Amazon S3), designed and optimized for cloud native environment. By using the widely adopted Redis and S3 as the persistent storage, JuiceFS serves as a stateless middleware to enable many applications to share data easily.
serverless.tf is an opinionated open-source framework for developing, building, deploying, and securing serverless applications and infrastructures on AWS using Terraform.
This started as a response to the “accidental complexity of many existing tools”, which I definitely felt when I tried the Serverless framework awhile back.
Infracost shows hourly and monthly cost estimates for a Terraform project. This helps developers, DevOps et al. quickly see the cost breakdown and compare different deployment options upfront.
The primary objective of this boilerplate is to give you a production ready code that reduces the amount of time you would normally have to spend on system infrastructure’s configuration. It contains a number of services that a typical web application has (frontend, backend api, admin panel, workers) as well as their continuous deployment. Using this boilerplate you can deploy multiple environments, each representing a different stage in your pipeline.
there are a lot of AWS services available. And I do mean: a LOT. Currently, there are 163 (!) different services that are available from the Amazon Dashboard, each with their own way of working, difficulties, catches and best practises.
What follows is one-line descriptions of all 163 AWS services. MSK? Kafka as a service. Amazon Connect? AWS call center platform. And so on.
You’ll learn DynamoDB, Elastic Beanstalk, Serverless and more. Quincy and the gang keep cranking out the hits with free online training videos for developers of many stripes. They now have free courses for 3 out of the 12 AWS Certifications.
Do you have an AWS account? Great. Do you want to run cron jobs in the cloud?
Cronyo provides A simple CLI to manage your cron jobs on AWS.
In addition, Cronyo can instantly deploy a couple of super-simple, helpful and secure lambda functions to perform HTTP GET/POST requests for you. So if you need to trigger any webhooks on schedule, an AWS account and Cronyo is all you need :)
