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AWS Celebrates International Women’s Day, Introduces Carbon Footprint Tool, and Releases Delete Account API
With the endless flood of new products, features and changes from AWS and its surrounding ecosystem, it can be easy to miss an update. Our monthly round-up highlights major AWS news, announcements, product updates, and behind-the-scenes changes we think are most relevant.
Happy (belated) International Woman’s Day!
AWS is celebrating national woman’s day by shining the spotlight on women engineers and giving us some stats on women in the workforce. According to this celebratory AWS Blog post, women are valuable in the workforce (duh) but tend to take technical jobs at a lower rate than men. India may be the one exception. If there is still doubt about the value of women in technology, though there shouldn’t be, AWS provides a list of architecture tools and a selection of blog posts all written by women. My favorite post took a look at implementing feedback loops for system operations, which is critical if you’re interested in continuous improvement (that should be everybody).
This complicated rocket surgery can be a bit offputting for your average Jill, who’s just getting her head in the cloud. For those still hesitant, AWS showcases the human side of women in tech through a series of interviews dubbed their “Breaking the Bias” series. It starts with a chat with some of the lovely ladies that make up the AWS developer relations team, but we also get to meet a big data architect, a product lead, and a mechatronics engineer. AWS must know something about attracting female talent, and they offer suggestions on how to make the workplace more inclusive for women. The AWS architects think women are particularly well suited to the solutions architect position but have a hopeful message to all women interested in starting a career in technology. I didn’t see any mention of MacKenzie Scott (Bezos’ former wife) even though she is third on the list of richest women in the world, in no small part due to AWS.
Is AWS Environmentally Friendly?
Without the ability to measure something, you cannot control it. Up until recently, measuring the environmental impact of your cloud workloads was largely guesswork. With the launch of the carbon footprint tool, AWS gives you the ability to measure your cloud resource’s carbon footprint. Chances are AWS is already measuring it because they’ve pledged to get to net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. The calculations are interesting. They consider the emissions based on the electric grid of the region your services are running in. Between now and 2040, I would think they could make a few bucks by offering a carbon-offset cloud service.
They also let you know how efficiently your workload is over a traditional data center. How they calculate these numbers is less clear. I assume that services like S3 are somehow more efficient than running your own NAS in a data center. Personally, these numbers would be more meaningful if they compared AWS to running my infrastructure out of a dusty closet with an extra AC unit cranked up to 11. Resource link here.
Delete AWS Account API released!
Once upon a time, there was no way to automate the entire lifecycle of AWS accounts. To delete an account, you had to log into the console and reassure AWS of your certainty by typing variations of “yes, I’m sure” multiple times. For anyone who runs an organization that spins up and down AWS accounts, this is not only annoying but makes certain account workflows impractical.
That day is no longer as AWS has silently released the DeleteOrganization
action for the Organizations
API. Now management accounts in an AWS organization can delete member accounts, provided that they do not manage any accounts themselves. The only stupidly frustrating limitation of this API is that you can only delete 10% of your active accounts every 30 days, up to 200. The upside of this new API is that closing accounts through the console is slightly less infuriating.
I understand that the idea of customers deleting their accounts isn’t palatable for AWS marketing and is likely why this important release has been quiet. There is a solution, though, because this AWS API call is also the only single API call you can make that will ensure your data is never hacked.
- DeleteOrganization – AWS Organizations
- aws-cli/CHANGELOG.rst at develop · aws/aws-cli
- AWS Organizations now provides a simple, scalable and more secure way to close your member accounts
Miscellaneous News
- Amazon EC2 adds new AMI property to view timestamp of the latest instance launch using the AMI. If you frequently struggle to figure out if your AMI is being used or not, this is EXCITING!!!
- Amazon Timestream: 2021 in review. Remember that AWS service you were excited about for years and then completely forgot about when Prometheus got big? Neither do I, but AWS would like you to.
- One of those interesting cases where a service just got CloudFormation support that has been supported by Terraform for years.
- Deploying a database cluster of one writer and two read replicas across three availability zones is now a button click. Welcome to the future New Amazon RDS for MySQL & PostgreSQL Multi-AZ Deployment Option: Improved Write Performance & Faster Failover.
- Check out two helpful case studies on EKS. One answering the age-old question “does anyone actually use this in production yet” that you can read here. The other discusses using the new EKS hotness, including the AWS CDK, Bottlerocket AMIs, and FluxCD that you can find here.
- They automated the AWS incident response whitepaper. Well, automated the instance isolation – you still have to inspect the compromised instance yourself. GitHub – awslabs/aws-automated-incident-response-and-forensics
- Startup Foundations: Exploring AWS Options for Serverless APIs. Goldman Sachs investigates serverless options on AWS and opts for Fargate over Lambda because it’s more familiar.
- Fastest Runtime For AWS Lambda Functions. When are Nodejs and Python faster than Java or dotnet? When you’re only running, hello world!