Last Week in AWS

Just want to say your writing is the best quirky balance of fun and substance, reminiscent of Corey Quinn [1]. Thanks for doing a so damn much work and for the instantly relatable phrase "Nobody is allowed to make mistakes on the Internet". [1] https://www.lastweekinaws.com

Thanks for reading. Love your work with https://www.lastweekinaws.com/ and https://stop.lying.cloud/

Corey is both on-point and hilarious and his newsletter[0] is worth reading. This particular post really resonated with me because AWS gets so much run for being impossible to compete with, but really it's not hard... you just have to pick an appropriate axis on which to compete. It's not likely you'll ever win on availability or integration with AWS services, but the farther you get (in terms of abstraction) from running a data center, there are places where AWS falls flat. [0] https://www.lastweekinaws.com/

Just wanted to make a shoutout to Corey Quinn, who has a consultancy which literally works on lowering your excessive AWS bills. He also runs the most excellent Last Week in AWS newsletter https://lastweekinaws.com/ and podcast Screaming in the Cloud: https://www.screaminginthecloud.com I've personally known Corey for 10+ years and he's a good dude, so if anyone is looking to lower their AWS bills, talk to Corey.

He gets linked here pretty regularly, but for those who don't follow him, the author runs an email newsletter that's basically him throwing shade at AWS every week. It's fucking hilarious AND useful. https://lastweekinaws.com/

Hi! Thanks for your reply! I have signed up with https://lastweekinaws.com. I am pretty new to devops and am interested to know which tools to learn and which are more baked and stable to take a plunge in. I am not so much into the latest and the greatest. I was looking more into blogs / sites where they share their painpoints / experiences or teach about various tools etc. Awesome job with your site, btw! Thanks for putting it up! And i would like to connect with you and if you are fine, learn from you - as i am new to dev operations! How do i connect with you ?

I run https://lastweekinaws.com. As a part of that, I follow a bunch of RSS feeds (keyword searches for AWS specific terms), most of the weekly newsletters mentioned below, the official AWS blogs (of which there are many), and a wide variety of folks on Twitter. Slack teams are the OG-AWS slack team, and of course HangOps. I will say I'm a bit leery of "keeping up with trends." I have an operational background; I like things to be a bit more baked before I put them into production. If I'm not the first person to hear about the next Kubernetes, that's okay with me.

DevOps is a moving target right now, and a lot of great fundamentals are linked here already. I'd also recommend subscribing to, and reading old issues of: https://sreweekly.com/ http://www.devopsweekly.com/ https://lastweekinaws.com/ https://weekly.monitoring.love/ The last two are fairly young, but have good content so far. I wouldn't call it a well-curated list, but there are tons and tons of great posts are linked (in loosely chronological order, as weekly mail blasts tend to be).

I mean yes, look at Corey Quinn [1] for example. He has built an entire career out of the fact that cloud billing trips people up. (Generally, tech seems to skate by on creating insanely complicated things, knowing that given enough pain, people will start blogging about their solutions, ie effectively outsourcing the cost and effort of doing something about it.) [1] https://www.lastweekinaws.com/

"The door is locked, so instead of suggesting to the end user that they should unlock the door with this key that we know how to give the end user deterministically, we instead tell them to drive across town and back on our toll roads and collect money from it" This has been a common gotcha for over a decade now: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/the-aws-managed-nat-gateway-is-unpl…

Sure but I'm still wrapped around your library no? So if your "Process Kafka events" decorator in Python doesn't quite do what I need to, I'm forced to grab the Kafka library, write my code and then learn to build my own container since I assume you were handling the build part. Finally, figure out which 17 ways to run containers on AWS (https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/the-17-ways-to-run-containers-on-aw… is proper for me and away I go? That's my SRE recommendation of "These serverless are a trap, it's quick to get going but you can quickly get locked into a bad place."

AWS policy on NAT Gateways is so stupid that people came up with a d) option - alterNAT[0] that is basically b) but turns on the real NAT GW if b) fails giving you the best of both worlds: lower cost and better reliability than a NAT instance. https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/an-alternat-future-we-now-have-a-na…

https://www.duckbillgroup.com/ (from the people behind https://www.lastweekinaws.com/ ).

Corey Quinn has a great blog post[0] on why status pages are hard, especially for large organizations with lots of products. [0] https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/status-paging-you/

This is probably worth reading too: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/aws-compensation-explained/

Interesting timing given https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/the-aws-managed-nat-gateway-is-unpl… just came out. Does this also apply to NAT Gateways?

Lastweekinaws just published an article about whether you should get a certificate: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/is-aws-certification-worth-it-weigh… While this is focused on AWS, the same holds true for Azure and GCE. And I'll note that if you're at the point where you're getting the expert-level certs, those do stand out and are trusted by hiring managers across the industry.

There's an episode of Screaming in the Cloud[0] that touches on this. They particularly call out Amazon for their comparatively low carbon-neutral benchmarks, but everyone seems to be a culprit in this. Seeing Amazon's record on green energy usage is particularly frustrating given that they just secured the naming rights to a new Seattle stadium and chose the moniker "Climate Pledge Arena". Not a great look, Jeff. 0: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/the-cloud… 1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2020/07/06/amazons-climate…

Guess who‘s favorite evil corp cloud is a magnitude cheaper than AWS on transfer pricing? Oracle, which is why Zoom just signed a deal. https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/why-zoom-chose-oracle-cloud-over-aw…

Someone does it for you https://www.lastweekinaws.com/ I am completely unaffiliated with this site, I just enjoy it

> Is or was he ever affiliated with AWS? Does not appear to be affiliated, but launched "Last week in AWS" more than 2 years ago so may know a thing or two. https://www.linkedin.com/in/coquinn/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/last-week-aws-corey-quinn/ https://www.lastweekinaws.com/

Happy to post it, but you can thank Corey Quinn from https://lastweekinaws.com/ for pointing me to it.

If I had to significantly reduce my AWS cost, I'd turn to Corey Quinn of "Last Week in AWS" (https://lastweekinaws.com) who fixes AWS bills for a living https://www.linkedin.com/in/coquinn

Last Week in AWS (https://lastweekinaws.com/), along similar lines, is pretty decent too.

Some down votes on this one, maybe from the Amazon crew, that it's a fact that by far they have the best Cloud and also: - Amazon is consistently the top user of the H-1B visa program: "Which companies secured the most H-1B visas in 2024?" - https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/us-news/which-companies-secu… - They pay below market rate so they can't have the same hiring power: "AWS Compensation Explained" - https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/aws-compensation-explained/ "The AWS goal is to pay you roughly 50% to 65% of what “the market” will pay you, based upon a variety of sources plus some work with Excel." - And everybody has seen their disaster execution on AI for the last four years. "Amazon CEO Andy Jassy unleashed a meticulous 8-minute defense of AWS’ standing in the AI arms race amid investor stock freakout" - https://fortune.com/2025/07/31/amazon-aws-ai-andy-jassy-earnings-defen…

> I really would love if folks talking about volatile AWS prices would actually give examples. There was never any mention of "volatile" pricing. Egregious? Yes. Volatile? No. There's a significant difference of meaning with those words. Here's a perfect example [0] by Corey Quinn. > So inform us of the uncertainty with AWS. I didn't mention "uncertainty with AWS". I mentioned that there is no more certainty with AWS than with any other major cloud provider with respect to your statement about public companies who "eventually succumb like every company before them to the realities of reporting growth". And then for some reason you pivoted to your own, personal, AWS bill from there. I'm not exactly following the logic. > Cloudflare has secret pricing - that's the really annoying thing. At this point I'm not sure if your comment is even serious. First of all, please elaborate on "secret pricing". Sounds like serious charges we should all be aware of. Maybe it's with the article from 2019 on The Register about domain pricing? That's not exactly in the context of this thread, but please enlighten the masses. > Seriously, put a porn site up online with cloudflare and see how far "free" gets you. I'd charge you with the same ask on AWS. You seem to imply the "free" tier, on AWS, will provide proper capabilities to host an adult content site. I have strong doubts about this. The logic of this argument is ill conceived at best. Or is your logic just that…

Since you work at Google, you should be well aware of the deprecations. You don't need evidence of their existence, you just don't see it as a problem. Which you are free to do, since it's not a problem for you, it's just a problem for GCP clients, many of whose complaints you seem to be dismissing as not being "data". GCP doesn't seem to provide a full list of deprecations, but the list for just one service[1] is pretty terrifying when you consider that your app might depend on two or three dozen services, and a deprecation in just one of them forces you to rewrite perfectly good code. A cursory search reveals a number of reports of being repeatedly bitten by deprecations[2][3][4], so no one should be mislead by the dismissals here. [2] has a good cautionary tale of a forced "upgrade" leading to potentially much greater cost. [1] https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/deprecations [2] https://nilsnh.no/2019/11/09/managing-the-google-cloud-platform-on-dep… [3] https://www.slideshare.net/async_io/lessons-learned-from-building-a-re… [4] https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/aws-morning-brief/whiteboard-con…

A funny story (well, funny because it didn't happen to me) was chronicled on a recent episode of Corey Quinn's "Whiteboard Confessions" -- https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/aws-morning-brief/whiteboard-con… -- where Slackbot's auto URL unfurling feature "clicked" an SNS alert unsubscribe link when a tech posted the a report including that link into a slack channel. If nobody lost their job over this triggering a SEV-1 alert I'm sure they had a laugh about it later. Another issue with auto-unfurling links or generating previews of URLs is the potential for stalking. If I'm hunting my ex and I know their cell phone number AND that they have an iPhone I can simply send a link to a website and let iOS generate the preview... which then pings the URL of the website which I set up and I can now run geo-IP resolution and narrow down where my ex is (and maybe I follow up with a well-crafted PDF exploit when I'm ready to narrow down even more on an area). While systemvoltage was a bit brusque in how the complaint was worded above, these "friendly and helpful" features of Slack, SMS, and other apps can have devastating unforeseen consequences. I question the value of having to opt out of these features instead of making them opt-in instead.

Just the links from…

Using Azure in 2026 should be a firing offense. How many cross-tenant incidents are enough for you? In 20 years of existence of AWS ( since 2006 and S3 ) show me ONE with AWS ... and I will publicly eat my hat here... "Azure’s Security Vulnerabilities Are Out of Control" - https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/azures_vulnerabilities_are_quack/