Paid AWS support got a lot less capable on average during these two decades . :/
My recent interactions with them would probably have been better if they were an LLM.
AWS in 2025: Stuff you think you know that's now wrong
121–130 of 284 posts
Re: AWS in 2025: Stuff you think you know that's now wrong
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Once upon a time Glacier was its own service that had nothing to do with S3. If you look closely (hi, billing data!) you can see vestiges of how this used to be, before the S3 team absorbed it as a series of storage classes. Your assumption holds if they still use tape. But this paragraph hints at it not being tape anymore. The eternal battle between tape versus drive backup takes another turn.
I am also assuming that Amazon intends for the Deep Archive tier to be a profitable offering. At $0.00099/gb-month, I don't see how it could be anything other than tape.
My understanding is some AWS products (e.g. RDS) need very fast disks with lots of IOPS. To get the IOPS, though, you have to buy +++X TB sized SSDs, far more storage space than RDS actually needs. This doesn't fully utilize the underlying hardware, you are left with lots of remaining storage space but no IOPS. It's perfect for Glacier.
The disks for Glacier cost $0 because you already have them.
Re: AWS in 2025: Stuff you think you know that's now wrong
#123Can no longer login to my AWS account, because I never set up MFA. Want to set up MFA ... login required to request device. Yes, I know, they warned us far ahead of time. But not being able to request one of their MFA devices without a login is ... sucky.
Looks like something that you could solve easily through their support, no?
Support don't talk to you unless you pay for support
Re: AWS in 2025: Stuff you think you know that's now wrong
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gateway endpoints are free. Network endpoints (which are basically AWS-managed ENIs that can tunnel through VPC boundaries) are not free. S3 can use either, and we recommend establishing VPC Gateway endpoints by default whenever you need S3 access. (Disclaimer: I work for AWS, opinions are my own.)
Fair point, and valid for S3 (the topic at hand) and DynamoDB. Other AWS services, though, don't support gateway endpoints.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECR/latest/userguide/vpc-e...
~~I get the impression there are several others, too, but that one is of especial interest to me~~ Wowzers, they really are much better now:
aws --region us-east-1 ec2 describe-vpc-endpoint-services | jq '.ServiceNames|length'
459
Re: AWS in 2025: Stuff you think you know that's now wrong
#125> Availability Zones used to be randomized between accounts (my us-east-1a was your us-east-1c)
WTH?
Re: AWS in 2025: Stuff you think you know that's now wrong
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gateway endpoints are free. Network endpoints (which are basically AWS-managed ENIs that can tunnel through VPC boundaries) are not free. S3 can use either, and we recommend establishing VPC Gateway endpoints by default whenever you need S3 access. (Disclaimer: I work for AWS, opinions are my own.)
That's fascinating! I hadn't found that in the documentation; everything seems to steer people towards PrivateLink, not gateway endpoints. Would you recommend using VPC Gateway even on a public VPC that has an Internet gateway (note: not a NAT gateway)? Or only on a private VPC or one with a NAT gateway?
Privatelink endpoints can be of type gateway or interface. Only gateway is free and only S3 and dynamodb supports it.
Re: AWS in 2025: Stuff you think you know that's now wrong
#127I have a preempt-able workload for which I could use Spot instances or Savings Plans. Does anyone have experience running Spot in 2025? If you were to start over, would you keep using Spot? - I observe with pricing that Spot is cheaper - I am running on three different architectures, which should limit Spot unavailability - I've been running about 50 Spot EC2 instances for a month without issue. I'm debating turning…
In terms of cost, from cheapest to most expensive: 1. Spot with autoscaling to adjust to demand and a savings plan that covers the ~75th percentile scale 2. On-demand with RIs (RIs will definitely die some day) 3. On-demand with savings-plans (More flexible but more expensive than RIs) 3. Spot 4. On-demand I definitely recommend spot instances. If you're greenfielding a new service and you're not tied to AWS, some ot…
To "me, too" this, it's not like that AWS spot instance just go "poof," they do actually warn you (my recollection is 60s in advance of the TerminateInstance call), and so a resiliency plane on top of the workloads (such as the cited Kubernetes) can make that a decided "non-event". Shout out to the reverse uptime crew, a subset of Chaos Engineering
Re: AWS in 2025: Stuff you think you know that's now wrong
#128It would've been nice if each of those claims in the article also linked to either the relevant announcement or to the documentation. If I'm interested in any of these headline items, I'd like to learn more.
I don't believe AWS offers permalinks, so it would only help until they rolled over the next documentation release :-(
They actually used to have the upstream docs in GitHub, and that was super nice for giving permalinks but also building the docs locally in a non-pdf-single-file setup. Pour one out, I guess
Re: AWS in 2025: Stuff you think you know that's now wrong
#129> Availability Zones used to be randomized between accounts (my us-east-1a was your us-east-1c) WTH?
Yeah this one drove me crazy
Re: AWS in 2025: Stuff you think you know that's now wrong
#130> As of very recently, you can also force EC2 instances to stop or terminate without waiting for a clean shutdown or a ridiculous timeout
Not true for GPU instances, they're stuck 5 minutes in a stopping state because they run some GPU health checks.