Earlier this morning, AWS released PartyRock, an Amazon Bedrock Playground. In short, this is a fun little playground that lets you create miniature apps using both text and image generation. Through the Community Builders program, I got access a couple of days ago and have been playing around with it. As a spoiler, it’s the most fun I’ve had playing with AWS tools for a very long time. So, grab your air guitar and have a look at what this most resplendent app actually does.
In January last year there was an announcement for the X2iezn instance type going GA. When I saw that, two thoughts went through my head: ‘How do I pronounce this on a podcast?’ and ‘What does that even mean’? This post tries to explain the second part of that.
For this episode, Arjen is joined by Jason and Matt to discuss the news from the first quarter of 2023. As that is a bit much, they decide to focus on the Melbourne region first and then pick some of their favourites round-robin style.
At the Community Builders APJ Open Mic night in April, I gave a demo of fog.
At the Serverless meetup in February I gave an overview of what was announced at re:Invent (and in the pre:Invent period). I tried to keep it entertaining instead of a simple rundown, so have a look and hopefully you'll see something interesting.
If you’ve attended a conference before, you know that the most exciting things don’t necessarily happen in the sessions themselves. Unfortunately, I’m not in Las Vegas, so I can’t enjoy the hallway track. Still, AWS is kind enough to offer an alternative by releasing some of its announcements outside the keynotes. Best of all, you can see these announcements happening throughout the day without needing to get up at 3 am! Below are some of the announcements that stood out to us.
Over on the CMD blog, my colleagues and I have been writing about the announcements at re:Invent. It’s been quite a busy week. Obviously I recommend you read the one that just went up where I discuss some of the interesting items that weren’t mentioned in keynotes: 2022 AWS Re:Invent; Important Highlights Between The Keynotes
In addition to that however, here are some others that my colleagues wrote and you might find interesting:
Every year as we get closer to re:Invent, AWS starts releasing the big items that didn’t quite make the cut for the major announcements. That doesn’t mean these releases are less interesting than what will be released at re:Invent; just that they don’t necessarily fit the narrative for the conference. In fact, some of my favourite announcements in previous years happened during this time. So, with re:Invent now only a couple of days away, let’s look at some of the gifts AWS brought us during pre:Invent.
Over on the CMD blog, I wrote a post discussing some of the highlights from the pre:Invent period. For obvious reasons I couldn’t exactly fit all announcements into a single post so some of your favourites may be missing, but maybe you’ll enjoy some of these as well. It’s available to read on the CMD Solutions blog.
In addition, last night at the Melbourne AWS User Group I discussed some of these same items in our usual What’s New section. If you’re interested you can have a look at that too.
We’re now in the second half of 2022, which means that the new Melbourne Region for AWS can open up any day now, so it’s a good time to have a look at the implications for an APRA-regulated business. This post builds upon the excellent posts written by my colleagues about the new AWS Melbourne Region and moving to AWS as an APRA regulated business.
A different kind of article for me, less technical and instead focused on the opportunities provided by the upcoming region for strictly regulated businesses. It’s available to read on the CMD Solutions blog.
Once in a while AWS releases a feature that people have been demanding for a long time, and they did so again when they added the ability to close accounts from your Organization management account. Let’s have a quick look at why it’s so good to have this ability, how it actually works, and what this will enable us to do.
My first post on the CMD blog since I officially joined them has gone up. In it I’m talking about the new(-ish)1 close-account API that many of us were happy about when it was released. If you’re interested, you should read it.
Obviously this was released quite a while ago by now and I actually started writing it the day after it was released. But then life happened and I, ehm, forgot… ↩︎
In this month’s episode Arjen, JM, and Guy discuss the news from January 2022. Well, everything announced after re:Invent really, but that’s mostly from January. There are good announcements all over; from a new Console Home to unpronounceable instance types, but there is also some news around the podcast that’s either good or bad depending on how you interpret it.
Pull your podcast player out of instant retrieval, because we’re discussing re:Invent 2021 as well as the weeks before it. Lots of announcements; big, small, weird, awesome, and anything in between. We had fun with this episode and hope you do too.
A lot of things happened in October, and we talked about them all in early November. In this episode Arjen, Guy, and JM discuss a whole bunch of cool things that were released and may be a bit harsh on everything Microsoft.
After a very long delay, our September episode finally drops. Recorded in early October Arjen, JM, and Guy discuss how September finally has a fair number of interesting announcements again and of course point out everything that wasn’t great as well.
In an interesting discussion at work today, someone mentioned a tool that would allow you to only log in once for AWS accounts in an AWS Organization. Which surprised me, as that is built into the way the CLI works with AWS SSO. It turns out that many people were unaware of this. As I tend to complain about SSO, I figured I might as well point out one of the parts I really enjoy about it.
When it comes to computers in any form there is one task that it’s hard to find anyone who enjoys it, and that is patching. While updating a system in order to get new capabilities can be fun because of what it will enable you to do, patching means spending time to maintain the status quo. Which is both boring and frustrating. Luckily cloud infrastructure allows us to more easily automate this, so let’s have a look at how that works when running on AWS.
Over on the CMD blog, I wrote about how to make it easy to patch your EC2 instances in an automated manner. If you’re interested, you should read it.
CMD Solutions is the AWS focused brand within Mantel Group, which DigIO (my employer) is also a part of. Because of my status as AWS APN Ambassador, I represent CMD as well. Which also means that for some of my blogposts1, those focused on some small part of AWS for example, CMD is the better outlet. This is a good example of that.
At least those that I write as a representive of my company. Obviously, the best place for anything I write is right here ;). ↩︎