AWS News Updates

New charges for Public IP Usage

Effective February 1, 2024 there will be a charge of $0.005 per IP per hour for all public IPv4 addresses, whether attached to a service or not. This translates to approximately $3.60 per month or $43 per year of extra charges to your account, PER IP ADDRESS.

AWS claims that this new change is due to IPv4 address being an "increasingly scarce resource" and is intended to encourage you to be "a bit more frugal" with your use of IPv4. The suggested approach is to migrate over to IPv6 which are not currently being billed (yet?). This does seem to align with Amazon's frugality leadership principle.

Not surprising, this new announcement has caused some uproar among the cloud community. Folks are ticked since some services aren't even available over IPv6. Others see it purely as a cash grab.

What are your thoughts on this change?

New DynamoDB feature makes it easier to work with ConditionalCheckFailed exceptions

I wrote about this feature recently and even created a video about it. AWS just made a major change to PutItem, UpdateItem, and DeleteItem APIs. Previously, when attaching a ConditionalExpression to these APIs, requests that failed to satisfy the condition threw an exception and didn't provide much more context.

With this new change, you can now supply the ReturnValuesOnConditionCheckFailure parameter in your API request. Doing so makes Dynamo return a copy of the item that existed in the database when this exception was encountered.

This is a powerful new feature that makes debugging and logging much much easier. To learn more about the video, watch the quick two and a half minute video above!

Prime Day powered by AWS put up some wild numbers

As per usual, AWS just released some interesting numbers regarding usage of AWS services during the Prime Day event. These statistics apply to internal Amazon services used to power the backend of Amazon/AWS.

Some interesting stats that stood out:

• DynamoDB served trillions of API calls and peaked at 126 million requests per second.
• SQS processed 86 million messages per second at peak which was a 22% increase from last year.
• 5835 Aurora database instances were active processing 318 billion transactions.

For more statistics and some interesting numbers, check out Jeff Barr's blog post.

July Video Recaps

Keep Your Network Traffic In AWS with VPC Endpoints

VPC endpoints are a powerful feature that allow you to keep all of your traffic bound for an AWS service WITHIN AWS itself. Previously, requests in private subnets trying to communicate with AWS services would need to egress out to the public internet (via a nat gateway), talk to the AWS service, and then return all the way back into your VPC. This causes all sorts of security headaches.

This video explains the feature and includes a conceptual overview and a demo walkthrough using Amazon Step Functions as an example.

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Aspiring Developers Need to Read This Book

I don't recommend books very often. Mostly because more often than not I get 1/3rd through a book and put it down thinking "why did I waste my time reading this".

This book, however, is much different. Staff Engineer by Will Larson is a phenomenal book for any aspiring developer. Will talks about the Principle/Staff Software Engineer track including the change of responsibilities and expectations when taking on this role. As a Sr. SDE myself, so much of this rang true. I highly recommend checking out the book and giving this video a watch for my take.

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Step Function Callbacks with AWS Lambda

I've been using Step Functions quite a bit lately for a work project. This has given me ample opportunity to find the great and not so great quirks of using the service. Among the not so great: dealing with callbacks.

Callbacks allow you to create a "human in the loop" type of arrangement where the execution of your workflow will pause until some external actor performs an action, and thereby calls back into your Step Function to resume it.

I played with this feature for hours before finally understanding how it works in detail. I wanted to make a video to spare you the pain I went through. Even if you're not using Step Functions right now, it's good to know about this feature in case you ever cross paths with it.

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And that's all folks! I'll see you in a few weeks.

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