Season 4 Episode 8 - Cloud Formation, Fargate Frugality, and Vanishing Security Advice

In Season 4, Episode 8 Karl & Jon are joined by AWS User Group Lead for "Leeds User Group, Edmund Craske. They discuss Amazon SES Virtual Deliverability Manager tiered pricing, AWS CloudFormation 2024 year in review, free automated tool to hunt for exposed AWS secrets in public repos, AWS Fargate on a budget, best practices to respond to security risks across AWS organizations and Jon shows off his AWS swag blanket that keeps him warm while he waits for his CloudFormation stacks to deploy.

 

08:05 - Amazon SES now offers tiered pricing for Virtual Deliverability Manager

Amazon SES now offers tiered pricing for its Virtual Deliverability Manager (VDM) feature. The new pricing structure makes it cheaper for high-volume email senders, with rates decreasing as the number of emails sent increases. While this change benefits large-scale users, the hosts suggest that for small to medium businesses, other email services might be more suitable due to SES's complexity and stringent requirements.

15:14 - AWS CloudFormation: 2024 Year in Review 

AWS CloudFormation saw numerous improvements in 2024, including faster deployments (up to 40% quicker), improved error handling, and streamlined troubleshooting. The discussion compared CloudFormation to Terraform, with the hosts noting that while CloudFormation has made progress, Terraform still has advantages in certain areas. They highlighted CloudFormation's strengths in handling rate limits and its deployment graph visualization.

23:47 - Check out this free automated tool that hunts for exposed AWS secrets in public repos 

A new open-source tool has been released to scan public repositories for exposed AWS secrets. The hosts discussed the tool's educational purpose and compared it to existing solutions like GitHub's built-in secret scanning. They emphasized the importance of avoiding long-lived credentials and implementing proper security measures to prevent accidental exposure of secrets.

29:48 - AWS Fargate on a Budget

Exploreing cost-saving strategies for running AWS Fargate. The hosts praised the article for its practical approach to reducing Fargate costs by up to 70% for short-lived tasks. They discussed the use of Fargate Spot instances and best practices for handling task interruptions and deregistration delays.

34:10 - Best practices to respond to security risks across your AWS Organizations 

This article, which mysteriously disappeared from the AWS blog, covered security best practices for AWS organizations. The hosts speculated on reasons for its removal but noted that the content seemed valuable and not controversial. They discussed the importance of automating security responses, the AWS Solutions Library for security guidance, and the potential benefits of AWS's security incident response services for organizations with high security requirements.