LogiCast AWS News (Video)

Season 4 Episode 2: Patching, Sustainability, and AI Hallucination

In Season 4, Episode 2 Karl & Jon are joined by AWS Ambassador & Community Builder, Niklas Westerstråhle. They discuss new configurable Point in Time Recovery periods for Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Compute Optimizer, automating Systems Manager patching reports, optimizing container workloads for sustainability, AI hallucination and potential fixes and Niklas becomes the first LogiCast guest to sport the coveted AWS gold jacket while recording!
 
07:08 - Announcing configurable point-in-time recovery periods for Amazon DynamoDB
12:21 - AWS Compute Optimizer now expands idle and rightsizing recommendations for Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling groups 
17:23 - Automate Systems Manager patching reports via email and slack notifications in an AWS Organization  
25:00 - Optimize your container workloads for sustainability 
32:04 - Can AWS really fix AI hallucination? We talk to head of Automated Reasoning Byron Cook 
 
Guest was Niklas Westerstråhle
https://www.linkedin.com/in/niklaswesterstrahle/

Season 4 Episode 1 - VPC Origins, Backup Searches, and Jeff Barr's Farewell

In Season 4, Episode 1 Karl & Jon are joined by AWS Community Builder, Gabriel Torres. They discuss AWS Community Builder program benefits and application process, Amazon CloudFront, AWS Backup's new search and item-level recovery features, decreasing storage volumes for RDS databases, troubleshooting AWS Systems Manager patching using Amazon Bedrock, Jeff Barr stepping down as lead AWS evangelist/blogger after 20 years and Karl & Jon are envious of Gabriel's summer weather in Ecuador!
 
06:39 - Amazon CloudFront Introduces Support for VPC Origins and Static IPs 
13:22 - AWS Backup launches support for search and item-level recovery 
18:32 - Shrink storage volumes for your RDS databases and optimize your infrastructure costs
23:53 - Troubleshooting AWS Systems Manager patching made easy with Amazon Bedrock’s automated recommendations 
30:49 - And that’s a wrap!
 
Guest was Gabriel Torres
https://www.linkedin.com/in/gtorreswm/
https://gabrieltorreswm.medium.com/
https://github.com/gabrieltorreswm
 
 
 

Season 3 Episode 42 - re:Invent 2024

In Season 3 Episode 42 we have something a little different for the season finale. Karl & Jon attended the recent AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas from 2-6th December. On Tuesday 3rd December they attended the AWS Community Builder mixer in the AWS Community Hub in Buddy V's restaurant in The Venetian. While you won't hear from Jon in this episode, he did man the camera while Karl interviewed 16 AWS Community members about their experience at re:Invent, including AWS Community Builder program manager Jason Dunn. Check out the episode to find out what our AWS Community Builder peers got up to at re:Invent.
 
01:20 - Jason Dunn
01:52 - Stephen Sennett
03:04 - Raphael Manke
04:13 - Ashish Kumar
04:49 - Matt Martz
05:57 - Andres Moreno
06:53 - Robin Ford
08:00 - Ivan Casco
08:47 - Ryan Cormack
09:44 - Martyn Kilbryde
10:33 - Jenn Bergstrom
11:32 - Thomas Taylor
12:18 - Marin Radjenovic
13:46 - Amelia Hough-Ross
14:37 - Christophe Limpalair
15:49 - Ryan Pothecary

Season 3 Episode 41 - Graviton Dashboards, Transfer Terminals & Database Discounts

In Season 3, Episode 41 Karl & Jon are joined by AWS Community Builder, Abhishek Maurya. They discuss AWS Graviton Savings Dashboard, AWS Transfer Family Web Apps, AWS Data Transfer Terminals, AWS D-SQL and database price cuts, stolen AWS credentials from misconfigured S3 bucket and the guys wondered if AWS Community Builders get taller when they become AWS Heroes...
 
06:19 - Accelerate your AWS Graviton adoption with the AWS Graviton Savings Dashboard 
13:29 - AWS Transfer Family Web Apps: Simplified S3 Data Access through the Browser
17:31 - AWS launches Data Transfer Terminals so users can drop off data to the cloud 
23:30 - AWS cuts database prices almost 50% and adds distributed scaling capabilities 
29:10 - Crooks stole AWS credentials from misconfigured sites then kept them in open S3 bucket 
 
Guest was Abhishek Maurya
https://www.linkedin.com/in/abhitnc/

Season 3 Episode 40 - Lambda's Birthday, CloudFormation Timeline & Bedrock Agents

In Season 3, Episode 40 Karl & Jon are joined by AWS Community Builder, Chetan Hirapara. They discuss Lambda, CloudFormation Deployments, Anthropic, Amazon Q Developer plugins, Amazon Bedrock Agents and Karl suggests that you should choose a cloud provider based on your favourite colour....
 
06:53 - AWS Lambda turns 10: A rare look at the doc that started it
- Overview of the original PR FAQ document for Lambda
- Lambda was the first functions-as-a-service offering
- Lambda originally only supported Node.js, now supports many more languages and frameworks
- Billing granularity has improved from 250ms increments originally to 1ms now
- Cold start times for Java apps reduced by 90% with SnapStart
 
15:49 - Peek inside your AWS CloudFormation Deployments with timeline view 
- It provides a waterfall view of CloudFormation deployments
- Helps identify bottlenecks and long-running operations
- Can help optimize deployments by splitting stacks, parallelizing, etc.
 
21:11 - Amazon considering further investment in Anthropic 
- Amazon invested $4 billion in AI startup Anthropic in March 2022
- Reportedly wants Anthropic to use AWS Inferentia chips instead of Nvidia
- Anthropic was co-founded by former OpenAI executives
- Alphabet has also invested significantly in Anthropic
 
28:08 - Amazon Q Developer plugins now generally available for the AWS Management Console 
- Plugins allow Q Developer to interface with third-party services like Datadog and Whiz
- Provides easy access to information without leaving the AWS console
- Limited to fairly simple questions currently
 
33:50 - How Amazon Bedrock Agents work 
- Agents are like small orchestration software tools
- Have capabilities like memory, prompting users, invoking APIs
- Built using LLMs like Titan - Continuously run to provide answers to users
 
Guest was Chetan Hirapara
https://www.linkedin.com/in/chetan-hirapara-90344345/
https://www.youtube.com/@upskillwithchetan
 

Season 3 Episode 39 - Lambda Enhancements, Bedrock Prompt Management & Remote Working Natives

In Season 3, Episode 39 Karl & Jon are joined by AWS Community Builder, Muhammad Rashid. They discuss Lambda VS Code IDE, Ephemeral jobs on ECS/Fargate, CloudFront/WAF billing change, Bedrock Prompt Management, AWS earnings results and Karl wonders if he may have coined the phrase 'Remote Working Natives'
 
07:27 - AWS enhances the Lambda application building experience with VS Code IDE and AWS Toolkit 
New features in AWS Lambda - VS Code IDE and AWS Toolkit enhancements for building Lambda applications
12:32 - Ephemeral Jobs Longer than the Lambda Timeout 
Running ephemeral jobs longer than the Lambda timeout - Using ECS and Fargate for ad hoc, long running background tasks
17:31 - Amazon CloudFront no longer charges for requests blocked by AWS WAF 
 CloudFront no longer charges for requests blocked by WAF - Small billing change but reduces costs for customers
23:16 - Amazon Bedrock Prompt Management is now generally available 
Amazon Bedrock Prompt Management now generally available - Manages and chains prompts for more advanced AI workflows
28:39 - Amazon’s cloud unit records highest profit margin in at least a decade
AWS Q3 earnings results - AWS revenue growth remains strong, posts highest profit margin in over a decade
 
Guest was Muhammad Rashid
https://www.youtube.com/@codewithmuh
https://www.linkedin.com/in/muhammad-rashid-daha/
 

Season 3 Episode 38 - Q Developer, Security Group Sharing, and Amazon's RTO

In Season 3, Episode 38 Karl & Jon are joined by AWS Community Builder, Anna Astori. They discuss Q Developer, Amazon VPC, AWS WAF, celebrating 10 years of Amazon ECS, Amazon return to office policy and once again Karl tries to extract trade secrets from our guest!
 
03:05 - AWS launches in-line Q Developer AI coding assistant to take on Microsoft’s Github Copilot
The speakers discuss the launch of AWS's Q Developer, an AI coding assistant to compete with GitHub Copilot. Jon is skeptical about the usefulness compared to IntelliSense. Anna agrees there are pros and cons. The new integration with CodeWhisperer model 3.5 could improve it.
13:13 - Amazon Virtual Private Cloud launches new security group sharing features 
Jon explains the benefits of the new VPC security group sharing feature for connecting resources across VPCs more securely.
17:30 - How to mitigate bot traffic by implementing Challenge actions in your AWS WAF custom rules 
The article explains how to use WAF challenge actions to mitigate bot traffic. Jon provides an overview of how rate limiting and bot control in WAF work.
23:52 - Celebrating 10 Years of Amazon ECS: Powering a Decade of Containerized Innovation 
They discuss EC2 Container Service turning 10 years old. Jon explains the pricing and simplicity benefits of ECS compared to Kubernetes.
29:40 - Amazon workers 'appalled' by AWS CEO’s return to office remarks, urge policy reversal 
Employees wrote an open letter criticizing the mandated return to 5 days a week in office. Anna and Jon discuss the discrimination concerns and why hybrid doesn't work.
 
Guest was Anna Astori
https://www.linkedin.com/in/anna-astori/
https://annaeastori.medium.com/
https://x.com/AmaMidzu

Season 3 Episode 37 - Jam, Sessions & The Nuclear Option

In Season 3, Episode 37 Karl & Jon are joined by AWS Community Builder, Ryan Pothecary. They discuss CloudQuest and AWS Jam, AWS Session Manager, Amazon CloudWatch Evidently and AppConfig, Amazon going nuclear, Amazon's returning to office policy and Karl hopes Amazon can finally realise the Back to the Future Mr Fusion reactor... 
 
06:22 - Enhance your real-world skills with AWS Cloud Quest and AWS Jam 
- CloudQuest provides gamified learning for AWS certifications like Cloud Practitioner
- Jams are in-person problem solving events, Logicata is hosting a Jam soon
- Pricing for CloudQuest seems expensive compared to alternatives like Udemy courses
 
13:49 - Secure SSH Access to EC2 Instances with AWS Session Manager 
- Session Manager provides secure remote access without exposing SSH ports
- It logs all activity for auditing and compliance
- Allows access through console, CLI, port forwarding
 
22:29 - Support for Amazon CloudWatch Evidently ending soon 
- Evidently allowed testing variations of apps/websites to improve performance
- Being replaced by Amazon AppConfig which provides similar functionality
- Shows AWS consolidating services and giving notice before deprecation
 
27:01 - Amazon goes nuclear, to invest more than $500 million to develop small modular reactors 
- To provide power for energy-hungry data centers and AI/ML workloads
- Investing in grid power, not owning reactors directly
- Small modular reactors easier to build and operate than large ones
 
33:24 - Amazon AWS CEO: Quit if you don't want to return to office 
- Strong statement against remote work from Amazon leadership
- Cites need for in-person collaboration and innovation
- Unlikely to work as well outside the US due to logistics
- Remote teams can still innovate without being co-located
- Impact on attracting talent remains to be seen
 
Guest was Ryan Pothecary
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanpothecary/
https://dev.to/ryanpothecary
 
 

Season 3 Episode 36 - CodePipeline, Valkey and AI Exec Departure

In Season 3, Episode 36 Karl & Jon discuss Optimize CPUs, AWS CodePipeline, Amazon ElastiCache for Valkey, AWS Console-to-Code, departure of Matt Wood and the guys go off on a tangent about kids destroying things...
 
02:31 - Amazon EC2 now supports Optimize CPUs post instance launch 
07:58 - AWS CodePipeline introduces new general purpose compute action 
12:13 - Announcing Amazon ElastiCache for Valkey 
18:05 - Convert AWS console actions to reusable code with AWS Console-to-Code, now generally available
24:20 - Amazon Web Services VP of AI, Matt Wood, is leaving the company 

Season 3 Episode 35 - Graviton 4, ChatOps & Bananas

In Season 3, Episode 35 Karl & Jon discuss Storage Browser for S3, Graviton 4-powered Amazon EC2 instances, Chatbops, Amazon GuardDuty, Elasticsearch and the guys go off on a tangent about bananas...
 
02:10 - Amazon Introduces Storage Browser for S3 
The hosts discuss the launch of a new Storage Browser for Amazon S3 and how it provides an easier way for non-technical users to upload and download objects from S3 without needing access to the AWS console.
06:54 - Now available: Graviton4-powered memory-optimized Amazon EC2 X8g instances 
The hosts talk about the announcement of new Graviton 4-powered Amazon EC2 instances.
13:35 - Ten features for efficiently managing your AWS applications from Microsoft Teams and Slack using AWS Chatbot 
The hosts talk about using the AWS Chatbot to manage AWS services through Microsoft Teams and Slack. They talk about the benefits of chatops and doing tasks through chat rather than a browser or console.
24:28 - Get to know Amazon GuardDuty Runtime Monitoring for Amazon EC2 
The hosts talk about some newer capabilities in Amazon GuardDuty like runtime monitoring for EC2 instances. They talk about the security benefits of having integrated tools.
28:54 - AWS Open-Source Brouhaha About Elasticsearch Takes Another Turn 
The hosts discuss the ongoing dispute between AWS and Elastic over Elasticsearch being open source.