Last Week In AWS Podcast

AWS Morning Brief for the week of August 10, 2020.

About Corey QuinnOver the course of my career, I’ve worn many different hats in the tech world: systems administrator, systems engineer, director of technical operations, and director of DevOps, to name a few. Today, I’m a cloud economist at The Duckbill Group, the author of the weekly Last Week in AWS newsletter, and the host of two podcasts: Screaming in the Cloud and, you guessed it, AWS Morning Brief, which you’re about to listen to.LinksCHAOSSEARCH@QuinnyPigTranscriptCorey: Welcome to AWS Morning Brief: Whiteboard Confessional. I’m Cloud Economist Corey Quinn. This weekly show exposes the semi-polite lie that is whiteboard architecture diagrams. You see, a child can draw a whiteboard architecture, but the real world is a mess. We discuss the hilariously bad decisions that make it into shipping products, the unfortunate hacks the real-world forces us to build, and that the best to call your staging environment is “theory”. Because invariably whatever you’ve built works in the theory, but not in production. Let’s get to it.Corey: This episode is brought to you by Trend Micro Cloud One™. A security services platform for organizations building in the Cloud. I know you're thinking that that's a mouthful because it is, but what's easier to say? “I'm glad we have Trend Micro Cloud One™, a security services platform for organizations building in the Cloud,” or, “Hey, bad news. It's going to be a few more weeks. I kind of forgot about that security thing.” I thought so. Trend Micro Cloud One™ is an automated, flexible all-in-one solution that protects your workflows and containers with cloud-native security. Identify and resolve security issues earlier in the pipeline, and access your cloud environments sooner, with full visibility, so you can get back to what you do best, which is generally building great applications. Discover Trend Micro Cloud One™ a security services platform for organizations building in the Cloud. Whew. At trendmicro.com/screaming.Welcome. I am Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is the AWS Morning Brief: Whiteboard Confessional. One of the nice things about how I do business is that I don't actually know when I record these episodes, who is going to be sponsoring it. Today, I'm going to talk about secrets management. The reason I bring this up is that should whatever sponsor has landed the ad slot for this week be talking about a different way of handling secrets management, you should of course disregard everything I'm about to say, and buy their product and or service instead. That said, let's talk about secrets management and how it can be done in some of the most appalling ways imaginable.There are a depressing number of you listening to this, where if I were to steal your laptops, A) you potentially would not have hard drive encryption turned on, so I could just pull things off of your system. That said, most modern operating systems do this by default now, so that's less of a threat. Now, let's pretend that I wind up instead surmounting an almost impossible barrier. That's right, getting a corrupted browser extension onto your system that somehow has access to poke around in your user's home directory. Think for a second about what I might find. Would I find, oh, I don't know, SSH keys that would grant me access to your production environment? Well, that wouldn't be that big of a problem because there's no possible way I would know what hosts they go for unless I look at the known_hosts file sitting right next to your SSH keys. But even that's a little esoteric because that's not something I would ever do at grand scale. Let’s instead consider what happens if I poke around in the usual spots and find long-lived IAM credentials, or whatever your cloud provider of choice’s equivalent is, which I believe is IAM in most cases unless you're using IBM Cloud, in which case, it's probably an old-timey skeleton key that is physically tied to your laptop. Now, the reason this becomes a common pattern is because it's honestly pretty convenient. You're going to need to be able to access production environments or your cloud environment, and have permissions that are generally granted to you, and ease of access is always juxtaposed with convenience. And invariably, convenience tends to win out. Sure, you can mandate the use of multi-factor authentication for those credentials to get into production, but that means you have to type in a code or press a button on a Yubikey, or something else. That fundamentally means you're going to be spending a lot more time pressing buttons or digging out passphrases than you're going to spend getting into production in a hurry. So, we make trade-offs; we cheat; it's human nature. And of course, once you get into your production environment, things are rarely better. It seems that you have a choice. You can either have the same password shared absolutely everywhere within an environment, or you have these incredibly secure key management systems, but in return becomes virtually impossible to rotate credentials. We've seen this before, and we've talked about this before. When we look at what happens when someone leaves a job unexpectedly, and suddenly the credential rotation causes four site outages in the next two days.There's always a trade-off here. And the problem is, is that these elaborate multi-step secret retrieval processes that people can deploy are no stronger than their weakest link. I've talked about it in an early episode, but probably one of the most bizarre I've ever seen was for regulated data, where in order to start the database server, it required a long key that was cut into pieces, and then we needed to have multiple staff contribute and turn their key like we were launching a freakin’ nuclear missile from a submarine. And it worked, sure, but at the same time, it meant to restart a server, you needed at least two people nearby, and that became a little nutty. Let's also ignore for a minute the fact that this was just for encrypting the data at rest. Once the service was running, it was loaded into RAM. There was no real guarantee that this was going to be any more secure than anything else. And let's face it, we're living in an era now where people stealing the server out of our cloud-hosted environment is not the primary or secondary or tertiary threat modeling that anyone has to do. For better or worse, you can give an awful lot of crap to the cloud providers, but they've pretty much solved the ‘someone rams a truck into the side of the building, grabs a rack into the back of said truck and peels off into the night.’ Except IBM Cloud. So, what are some patterns that work for this? Great question. But first:Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by ChaosSearch. Now their name isn’t in all caps, so they’re definitely worth talking to. What is ChaosSearch? A scalable log analysis service that lets you add new workloads in minutes, not days or weeks. Click. Boom. Done. Chaos...

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AWS Morning Brief for the week of August 3rd, 2020.

About Corey QuinnOver the course of my career, I’ve worn many different hats in the tech world: systems administrator, systems engineer, director of technical operations, and director of DevOps, to name a few. Today, I’m a cloud economist at The Duckbill Group, the author of the weekly Last Week in AWS newsletter, and the host of two podcasts: Screaming in the Cloud and, you guessed it, AWS Morning Brief, which you’re about to listen to.LinksCHAOSSEARCH@QuinnyPigTranscriptCorey: Welcome to AWS Morning Brief: Whiteboard Confessional. I’m Cloud Economist Corey Quinn. This weekly show exposes the semi-polite lie that is whiteboard architecture diagrams. You see, a child can draw a whiteboard architecture, but the real world is a mess. We discuss the hilariously bad decisions that make it into shipping products, the unfortunate hacks the real-world forces us to build, and that the best to call your staging environment is “theory”. Because invariably whatever you’ve built works in the theory, but not in production. Let’s get to it.Corey: This episode is brought to you by Trend Micro Cloud One™. A security services platform for organizations building in the Cloud. I know you're thinking that that's a mouthful because it is, but what's easier to say? “I'm glad we have Trend Micro Cloud One™, a security services platform for organizations building in the Cloud,” or, “Hey, bad news. It's going to be a few more weeks. I kind of forgot about that security thing.” I thought so. Trend Micro Cloud One™ is an automated, flexible all-in-one solution that protects your workflows and containers with cloud-native security. Identify and resolve security issues earlier in the pipeline, and access your cloud environments sooner, with full visibility, so you can get back to what you do best, which is generally building great applications. Discover Trend Micro Cloud One™ a security services platform for organizations building in the Cloud. Whew. At trendmicro.com/screaming.Hello, and welcome to this edition of the AWS Morning Brief: Whiteboard Confessional, where we confess our various architectural sins that we and others have committed. Today, we're going to talk about, once upon a time, me taking a job at a web hosting provider. It was the thing to do at the time because AWS hadn't eaten the entire world yet, therefore, everything that we talk about today was still a little far in the future. So, it was a more reasonable approach, especially for those with, you know, budgets that didn't stretch to infinity, or willingness to be an early adopter of someone else's hosting nonsense to go ahead and build out something in a data center. Now, they were obviously themselves not hosting on top of a cloud provider because the economics made less than no sense back then. So, instead, they had multiple data centers built out that provided for customers various hosting needs. Each one of these was relatively self-contained unless customers wound up building something themselves for failover. So, it wasn't really highly available so much as it was a bunch of different single points of failure, and an outage of one would impact some subset of their customers, but not all of them. And that was a fairly reasonable approach provided that you communicate that scenario to your customers because that's an awful surprise to have later in time. Now, I was brought in as someone who had had some experience in the industry, unlike many of my colleagues who had come from the hosting provider’s support floor and promoted into systems engineering roles. So, I was there to be the voice of industry best practices, which is a terrifying concept when you realize that I was nowhere near as empathetic or aware back then as I am now, but you get what you pay for. And my role was to apply all of those different best practices that I had observed, and osmosed, and had bluffed, into what this company was doing, and see how it fit in a way that was responsible, engaging, and possibly entertaining. So, relatively early on in my tenure, I was taking a tour of one of our local data centers and asked what I thought could be improved. Now, as a sidebar, I want to point out that you can always start looking at things and pointing out how terrible they are, but let's not kid ourselves; we very much don't want to do that because there are constraints that shape everything that we do and we aren't always aware of them. So, making people feel bad for their choices is never a great approach if you want to stick around very long. So, instead, I started from the very beginning, and played, “Hi. I'm going to ask the dumb questions, and see where the answers lead me to.” So, I started off with, “Great, scenario time. The power has just gone out. So, everything's dark, now how do we restart the entire environment?” And the response was, “Oh, that would never happen.” And to be clear, that's the equivalent of standing on top of a mountain during a thunderstorm, cursing God while waving a metal rake into the sky. After you say something like that there is no disaster that is likelier. But all right, let's defuse that. “Humor me. Where's the runbook?” And the answer is, “Oh, it lives in Confluence,” which is Atlassian’s wiki offering. For those who aren't aware, Wikis in general, and Confluence in particular, is where documentation and processes go to die. “These are living documents,” is a lie that everyone says because that's not how it actually works. “Cool. Okay, so let's pretend that a single server instead of your whole data center explodes and melts. When everything's been powered off, you turn it back on. That one doesn't survive the inrush current, and that one server explodes. That server happens to be the Confluence server. Now what? How do we bootstrap the entire environment?” The answer was, “Okay, we started printing out that runbook and keeping it inside each data center,” which was a way better option. Now, the trick was to make sure that you revisited this every so often, when something changed, and make sure that you weren't looking at how things were circa five years ago, but that's a separate problem. And this is fundamentally a microcosm of what I've started to think of as the bootstrapping problem. I'll talk to you a little bit more about what those look like in the context of my data center atrocities. But first:This episode is sponsored in part by our good friends over a ChaosSearch, which is a fully managed log analytics platform that leverages your S3 buckets as a data store with no further data movement required. If you're looking to either process multiple terabytes in a petabyte-scale of data a day or a few hundred gigabytes, this is still economical and worth looking into. You don't have to manage Elasticsearch yourself. If your ELK stack is falling over, take a look at using ChaosSearch for log analytics. Now, if you do a direct cost comparison, you're going to say, “Yeah, 70 to 80 percent on the infrastructure costs,” which does not include the actual expense of p...

AWS Morning Brief for the week of July 27, 2020.

About Corey QuinnOver the course of my career, I’ve worn many different hats in the tech world: systems administrator, systems engineer, director of technical operations, and director of DevOps, to name a few. Today, I’m a cloud economist at The Duckbill Group, the author of the weekly Last Week in AWS newsletter, and the host of two podcasts: Screaming in the Cloud and, you guessed it, AWS Morning Brief, which you’re about to listen to.LinksCHAOSSEARCH@QuinnyPigTranscriptCorey: Welcome to AWS Morning Brief: Whiteboard Confessional. I’m Cloud Economist Corey Quinn. This weekly show exposes the semi-polite lie that is whiteboard architecture diagrams. You see, a child can draw a whiteboard architecture, but the real world is a mess. We discuss the hilariously bad decisions that make it into shipping products, the unfortunate hacks the real-world forces us to build, and that the best to call your staging environment is “theory”. Because invariably whatever you’ve built works in the theory, but not in production. Let’s get to it.This episode is brought to you by Trend Micro Cloud One™. A security services platform for organizations building in the Cloud. I know you're thinking that that's a mouthful because it is, but what's easier to say? “I'm glad we have Trend Micro Cloud One™, a security services platform for organizations building in the Cloud,” or, “Hey, bad news. It's going to be a few more weeks. I kind of forgot about that security thing.” I thought so. Trend Micro Cloud One™ is an automated, flexible all-in-one solution that protects your workflows and containers with cloud-native security. Identify and resolve security issues earlier in the pipeline, and access your cloud environments sooner, with full visibility, so you can get back to what you do best, which is generally building great applications. Discover Trend Micro Cloud One™ a security services platform for organizations building in the Cloud. Whew. At trendmicro.com/screaming.Welcome to the AWS Morning Brief: Whiteboard Confessional. I am Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, which means that I fix the horrifying AWS bill both by making it more understandable, as well as lower. On today's episode of the AWS Morning Brief: Whiteboard Confessional, I looked around the whiteboards in the backgrounds of the Zoom calls that I'm having with basically everyone these days because going to the office during a pandemic is and remains a deadly risk, and it's amazing how much you can learn about people's companies by what they leave on the whiteboards. Whether you happen to be visiting their office or left inattentively in the background because they forget that they didn't turn on the Zoom background. One of the most disturbing things that we'll see on any whiteboard in any company that you work at, ever, is an org chart. And what makes it disturbing, first off, is that when you see an org chart, that means that generally, someone is considering reorganizing, which is a polite framing of shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. It ties into one of the great corporate delusions that somehow you're going to start immediately making good decisions, and all of the previous poor decision making you've made is going to fall away like dew in the new morning. And the reason that that's the case is that everyone tends to be an optimist when looking forward because otherwise, we'd wake up crying and never go to work.Have you ever noticed that you can take a look at an org chart or an architecture diagram and remove all of the labels, and you've accidentally built the exact same thing just with different services rather than teams? Well, I'm certainly not the first person to make this observation. What I'm talking about is known as Conway's Law. Conway's Law is named after computer programmer Melvin Conway, who in 1967 introduced a phenomenal idea, for the time, that we still haven’t escaped from, specifically, any organization that designs a system defined broadly will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure. Effectively what that means is you ship your culture as well as your org chart, and if we take a look at how different seminal software products of the ages have come out. It's pretty clear that there is at least some passing resemblance to reality. You take a look at Amazon; they're effectively an entire microservices company. They have so many different small two pizza teams building things, and sure enough, you take a look at AWS, for example, they have 200 some-odd services that are ideally production-grade, but again, it's a mixed bag. Because again, not every team is identical, and not every team has the same resources. So, as a result, though, you take a look at that, that is the good part of their culture. Well, what's bad? Well, anything that involves all of those teams to coordinate at once on something. Think of the billing system. Think of the AWS web console. You start to see where these things break down. These are the seams between services that AWS tends to miss out on. If you take a look at Google, for example, the entire model there, to my understanding, is you want to get promoted and you want to get a raise, and that all comes down to certain metrics that don't necessarily align with what people want to be working on. So, you see people instead focusing on things that are they're incentivized to do to go up in the org, and not maintain things that they built last year, which is why I suspect, at least, that we see this neverending wave of Google product deprecations. And the list goes on, and I'm certainly not a corporate taxonomist; I'm a cloud economist, so I'm not going to go into too much depth on what that looks like in different places, but it does become telling. Let's get into that a bit more. But first:This episode is sponsored in part by ChaosSearch. Now their name isn’t in all caps, so they’re definitely worth talking to. What is ChaosSearch? A scalable log analysis service that lets you add new workloads in minutes, not days or weeks. Click. Boom. Done. ChaosSearch is for you if you’re trying to get a handle on processing multiple terabytes, or more, of log and event data per day, at a disruptive price. One more thing, for those of you that have been down this path of disappointment before, ChaosSearch is a fully managed solution that isn’t playing marketing games when they say “fully managed.” The data lives within your S3 buckets, and that’s really all you have to care about. No managing of servers, but also no data movement. Check them out at chaossearch.io and tell them Corey sent you. Watch for the wince when you say my name. That’s chaossearch.io.Now, one thing that I sort of pride myself on being—because I have to be—is data center archaeologist. Frankly, these days it’s cloud archaeology. But when I go into a new client environment, I ask them to show me the...

AWS Morning Brief for the week of July 20, 2020.

About Corey QuinnOver the course of my career, I’ve worn many different hats in the tech world: systems administrator, systems engineer, director of technical operations, and director of DevOps, to name a few. Today, I’m a cloud economist at The Duckbill Group, the author of the weekly Last Week in AWS newsletter, and the host of two podcasts: Screaming in the Cloud and, you guessed it, AWS Morning Brief, which you’re about to listen to.LinksCHAOSSEARCH@QuinnyPigTranscriptCorey: Welcome to AWS Morning Brief: Whiteboard Confessional. I’m Cloud Economist Corey Quinn. This weekly show exposes the semi-polite lie that is whiteboard architecture diagrams. You see, a child can draw a whiteboard architecture, but the real world is a mess. We discuss the hilariously bad decisions that make it into shipping products, the unfortunate hacks the real-world forces us to build, and that the best to call your staging environment is “theory”. Because invariably whatever you’ve built works in the theory, but not in production. Let’s get to it.Sponsorships can be a lot of fun sometimes. ParkMyCloud asked, “Can we have one of our execs do a video webinar with you?” My response was, “Here’s a better idea. How about I talk to one of your customers instead, so you can pay to make fun of you.” And turns out, I’m super-convincing. So, that’s what’s happening. Join me and ParkMyCloud’s customer, Workfront, on July 23rd for a no-holds-barred discussion about how they’re optimizing AWS costs, and whatever other fights I manage to pick before ParkMyCloud realizes what’s going on and kills the feed. Visit parkmycloud.com/snark to register. That’s parkmycloud.com/snark.Welcome. I am Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is the AWS Morning Brief: Whiteboard Confessional; things that we see on whiteboards that we wish we could unsee. Today I want to talk about the worst whiteboard confessions of all time, and those invariably all tend to circle around what we ask candidates to do on a whiteboard during job interviews. There are a whole bunch of objections, problems, and other varieties of crappy opinions around whiteboarding as part of engineering job interviews, but they're all a part of the larger problem, which is that interviewing for engineering jobs fundamentally sucks. There are enough Medium articles on how trendy startups have cracked the interview to fill an S3 bucket. So, I'm going to take the contrarian position that all of these startups and all of these people who claim to have solved the problem, suck at it. And these terrible questions fall into a few common failure modes, most of which I've seen when they were levied at me back in my engineering days, and I was exercising my core competency of getting rapidly ejected from other companies. So, I spent a lot of time doing job interviews, and I kept seeing some of the same things appear. And they're all, of course, are different. But let’s start with some of the patterns. The most obnoxious one by far is the open-ended question of how would you solve a given problem? And as you start answering the question, they're paying more attention than you would expect. Maybe someone's on their laptop, quote-unquote ‘taking notes’ an awful lot. And I can't ever prove it, but it feels an awful lot—based upon the question—like, this is the kind of problem where you could suddenly walk out of the interview room, walk into the conference room next door and find a bunch of engineers currently in a war room trying to solve the question you were just asked. And what I hate about this pattern is it's a way of weaseling free work from interview candidates. If you want people to work on real-world problems, pay them. One of the best interviews I ever had is by a company that no longer exists called Three Rings Design. They wanted me to stand up some three-tiered web app, and turn on monitoring, and standard basic DevOps-style stuff; they gave an AWS account credential set to me. But what made them stand out is that they said, “Well, this is a toy problem. We're not going to use this in production, surprise. It's a generic question. But we don't believe in asking people to do work for free, so when you submit your results, we'll pay you a few hundred bucks.” And this was a standard policy they had for everyone who made it to that part of the interview. It was phenomenal, and I loved that approach. It solved that problem completely. But it's the only time I've ever seen it in my entire career. A variant of this horrible technique is to introduce the same type of problem, but it's with the proviso that this is a production problem that we had a few months ago. It's gone now, but how would you solve it? Now on its face, this sounds like a remarkably decent interview question. It's real-world. They've already solved it. So, whatever answer you give is not likely to be something revolutionary that's going to change how they approach things. So, what's wrong with it? Well, the problem is, is that in most cases, the right answer is going to look suspiciously like whatever they did to solve the problem when it manifested. I answered a question like this once with, “Well, what would strace tell me?” And the response was, “What does strace do?” I explained that it attached to processes and looked at the system calls that that process was making, and their response was, “Oh, yeah, that would have caught the problem. Huh. Okay, pretend strace doesn't exist.” Now it's not just the question of how you would solve the problem, but how you would solve the problem while being limited to their particular, often myopic, view of how systems work and how infrastructure needs to play out. This manifests itself the same way, by the way, in the world of various programming languages, and doing traditional developer engineer’s. It's awful because it winds up forcing you to see things through a perspective that you may not share. Part of the value of having you go and work somewhere is to bring your unique perspective. And, surprise, there's all these books on how to pass the technical interview. There are many fewer books on how to freaking give one that doesn't suck. And I wish that some people would write that book and that everyone else would read it. You can tell an awful lot about a company by how they go about hiring their people.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by ChaosSearch. Now their name isn’t in all caps, so they’re definitely worth talking to. What is ChaosSearch? A scalable log analysis service that lets you add new workloads in minutes, not days or weeks. Click. Boom. Done. ChaosSearch is for you if you’re trying to get a handle on processing multiple terabytes, or more, of log and event data per day, at a disruptive price. One more thing, for those of you that have been down this path of disappointment before, ChaosSearch is a fully managed solution that isn’t playing marketing games when they say “fully managed.” The data lives within your S3 buckets, and th...

AWS Morning Brief for the week of July 13, 2020.