Okay. Hello, cloud guru,
Scott Pletcher here with another carefully picked selection of the finest AWS
news. And to be honest, as of press time, it's been kind of a slow week,
but I managed to pull together some stories that I found interesting.
SageMaker autopilot gets some clarity.
Route 53 resolver gives us some velvet rope and a big guy in a suit with a
clipboard and Lambda at edge billing. Granularity gets really,
really teensy. This is AWS this week.
[Inaudible].
For all its promise and opportunity.
Developing quality machine learning models is really, really hard.
If you get it wrong,
the resulting email generated decisions can range anywhere from slightly
embarrassing to downright immoral.
It's one thing to pour data in and generate an ML model.
But it's another thing entirely to really understand why your model is making
the decisions it's making. Practitioners call this explainability,
and it has become a hot topic in machine learning circles.
Even simple ML models can consist of hundreds of thousands of layers,
correlations, and weights,
which are impractical to manually reverse engineer.
Late last year AWS announced SageMaker clarify which aims to help you
understand how data elements are influencing your model and check the
fairness of your results. Recently,
AWS announced that explainability reports by SageMaker clarify,
have now been added to SageMaker autopilot.
Autopilot aims to automate much of the ML model development process,
but that ease of use can be a double-edged sword,
especially for those who aren't aware of the nuances of model quality.
With this addition,
explainability and model transparency are brought into that workflow.
Hopefully shedding some much needed light on the topic.
And that is a good thing. Pop quiz gurus:
If the first IP address in a VPC sub-net is reserved for the VPC router,
what purpose do the second and third reserved IP addresses serve? Well,
if you said the second reserved address is for the DNS, then you'd be correct.
Back in the olden days like 2017,
we didn't have very much control at all over how the VPC DNS server
responded to our resources, forcing us to use stuff like host files.
If we wanted to override name resolutions,
then AWS gave us route 53 resolver,
which gleefully provided more control over DNS queries.
AWS has added a new feature to route 53 resolver called DNS firewall,
which lets us block certain public and private DNS queries from
resolving within our VPC.
You can also implement specific allow lists,
which only permit certain domains to be resolved.
This new DNS firewall feature also integrates with the AWS firewall
manager for deployment across multiple accounts and can be useful when
creating another layer of resource protection and Oh,
that third reserved IP address. Well that's just for future use.
AWS Lambda at edge billing Granularity has been reduced
substantially from 50 milliseconds down to one millisecond.
Lambda at edge lives out in CloudFront land and can do some pretty cool stuff
like rewrite a URL path to a locale specific website based on the
edge location or dynamically change which content is served up based
on the user agent header.
Now these types of tasks are usually simple and quick.
So smaller billing granularity means that I'm now only paying per
millisecond rather than per 50 milliseconds.
While this might seem like a tiny improvement.
It can really add up if you're a high volume site. And finally,
would you like to win some AWS credits?
Of course you do put your cloud knowledge to the test in our first ever live
interactive game show that we're calling the guru games it's happening on
Thursday, April 15th, 6:00 PM. Eastern 3:00 PM, Pacific 10:00 PM.
Universal coordinated time to participate head on over to our brand new
discord community linked down below for further instructions.
And that my friends is some of the AWS news that I've found to print this week.
If you're so inclined, like, and subscribe, stay safe,
take care of one another and keep being awesome cloud gurus.