AWS released a couple of interesting improvements to Fargate and EKS, shared storage solutions in the AWS Sydney region became useful, but at the same time Australia shoots itself in the foot again with a new law.

AWS Fargate and EKS Improvements

As AWS keeps rolling out improvements to their container services, I’ll group several of them under a single header.

About a month ago, ECS introduced container dependency management. Which basically boils down to having the ability to determine start up sequences for containers. So, if you have two containers in your task and one needs to be started after the other you can now do so. As usual, Fargate lagged behind on supporting this, but finally got it at the same time as it gained support for the secrets manager.

Moving on to EKS, this had a couple of useful new features added in the last week. First, we now finally have the ability to view control plane logs in CloudWatch. This makes it possible to audit changes at that level, which is obviously a good thing. However, like the private endpoints, this is not yet available in CloudFormation. Which is obviously not a good thing.

The other EKS release is CSI drivers for EFS and FSx for Lustre¹. A Container Storage Interface is how Kubernetes can give a pod (and the containers in it) access to the underlying storage system. CSI was considered stable² with Kubernetes 1.13 in January so it’s good to see drivers for AWS' shared storage solutions appear so you can now use those. With the exception of FSx for Windows, but then Windows support only went GA 2 weeks ago.

Shared Storage in Sydney Region

Now, I wouldn’t be as happy about this if it wasn’t that AWS finally released several things into the Sydney region. Both FSx for Windows and FSx for Lustre are now available here. Especially FSx for Windows will be useful as EFS doesn’t work with Windows systems so there is now a native solution for Windows workloads.

Probably even more interesting is the release of AWS Backup in Sydney. I mentioned this spoke of this when it was released elsewhere, because while the one stop solution for all your backup needs isn’t that interesting³, it includes the only way to backup your EFS disks natively and that is very useful indeed.

Australia’s New Stupid Law

Speaking of Australia, it doesn’t seem long ago that I got to rant about a stupid new law here, but here we are again with the Sharing of Abhorrent Violent Material bill. As the new implies, this law is aimed at preventing the uploading of videos such as the recent terrible events in Christchurch. The goal is laudable, but as so often the execution isn’t just flawed it’s downright bad.

There are a number of flaws in this legislation, among them that people might go to jail if they don’t respond quickly enough to a notice about this content being available. To be clear, in interviews lawmakers mention the executives of those companies as the ones to go to jail, but the actual bill doesn’t limit itself to that. I’m sure being on call with a threat of going to jail if you don’t respond quickly enough will be a lovely experience⁴. Ok, this isn’t quite right, according to the letter of the law if you receive a notification it is actually too late already.

It’s also not limited to any type of company, so an ISP is just as liable as a YouTube or Facebook. Seriously, I really enjoy living in Australia, but I wouldn’t be surprised if in the next couple of years any internet site will just blacklist all traffic from here because it’s the only way not to break the law. Or worse, the rest of the world follows and implements the same stupid laws.