AWS Tidbits
For a long time, I've been thinking about getting some AWS certifications to add to my trophy case (don't laugh, I need to feel accomplished about something). To finally get the ball rolling, I recently signed up for and completed a three-day instructor-led course for the "AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate" exam.
Nowadays "certifications" can really mean anything. You can get "certified" in something just by clicking through a series of videos and forms. AWS happens to take it pretty seriously (as do a number of SaaS products in the cloud business) and their certifications are generally respected in the industry (aside from maybe the "Cloud Practitioner" badge, the introductory-level). I frequently see them directly mentioned in the qualifications bullets of job descriptions, so I've convinced myself there's merit to it.
I'm usually not one for online courses, but I was lucky to have an incredibly engaging instructor. He was a veteran developer from Atlanta who had spent most of his career doing network engineering (mostly at Cisco) beginning in the mid 90s. Because of his background and yapper personality, I did end up taking away quite a few interesting facts about AWS and other related tech. I figured I would share them here. Here goes!
Origins
AWS originated as a way to monetize the server surplus the company found itself with after bulking up their compute resources in preparation for the *Amazon dot com* holiday shopping season. After demand tapered off, someone came up with the idea to rent out the idle hardware. ~20 years later, the entire world runs on cloud platforms.
Dolphins
The AWS SDK for Python, boto3, is named after South American river dolphins. "Boto" was the nickname early Portuguese settlers gave a few species of pink dolphin they discovered around the Amazon rainforest and the river's tributaries. The gag is: the boto dolphin (the API) teaches your Python code how to navigate the Amazon river (the AWS services). Stupid little things like this make me happy.
Coincidentally, while procrastinating writing this blog post, I stumbled upon another Amazon name-choice tidbit. Amazon apparently calls their internal polyrepo system "Brazil", which falls neatly into the namesake rainforest theme they got going on:
@iamyourboon is an incoming software engineer at Twitch and an excellent Twitter follow, by the way.
Malware
An expansive library of Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), customized VM templates with preconfigured settings and or preinstalled software, are available to AWS customers looking to spin up EC2 instances for specific use cases. Anyone can create an AMI for their own purposes, businesses can sell AMIs on the marketplace, and creators can publish AMIs for free use by the community.
Rather unsurprisingly, someone managed to smuggle a crypto miner into an AMI -- and not just into some sketchy unverified AMI, but into the official AWS Marketplace which is supposed to be available only to verified vendors. Yikes!
I must say, it's pretty cool that raw compute power alone is something worth hijacking. It makes me wonder what other malware is crawling around out there right now... These electricity thiefs are creative! This great Twitter thread comes to mind:
Spinoffs
An entire mini-industry is thriving largely thanks to AWS's poor UI/UX. For example:
- Antimetal markets itself as "an AI-powered command and control system for AWS" and raised a seed round in 2023 (co-founder and CEO @mprkhrst is another good Twitter follow).
- Vercel is a popular service that abstracts the front-end deployment and hosting complexities of AWS, referred to by some (derogatorily) as simply an AWS wrapper. Vercel also maintains the Next.js framework.
- Terraform, while not developed as a direct response to AWS's shortcomings, is the hallmark infrastructure-as-code tool, a category growing in popularity alongside painful cloud platforms.
Other examples arguably include Ansible, Datadog, Heroku, Pulumi, and Spot.io. It's an interesting mix of open-source software and businesses attempting to capitalize on AWS's (and GCP's, Azure's...) flaws.
Outer space
Maybe I've just been living under a rock, but I was not aware you can rent f**king satellites on AWS. This means I, some 24-year-old in Illinois, can get a bill in the mail for renting equipment currently orbiting our planet. The service is called AWS Ground Station. Reading that article is the first time I've ever seen the term "ground station-as-a-service". I'm beginning to think we're pushing the limits of that expression a bit far.
I knew Amazon was in the space game (I have a friend know a guy who's an SDE doing super cool things at Project Kuiper), but I didn't know outer space was already on the road to commoditization like this. I'm really interested in what use cases and side project opportunities are possible with this tech, I'll have to do some poking around after I'm done writing. I'd consider exploring the possibilities myself, but I fear the AWS bill that may come with it.
Not quite AWS but still fun learnings
Some history: it was Flickr that pioneered the migration from monolithic software applications to the now-ubiquitous microservices architecture. They were one of the first *BigCo's* (rocking a more glamorous reputation back in the mid 2000s) to take a leap in this direction by adopting a less-coupled service-oriented architecture (SOA). At the time, this was a pretty big deal! Not long after, it was Netflix and Amazon that would really run with this granularity and popularize modern microservices. Today's DevOps and SRE roles exist thanks to these vanguards (used a thesaurus for that one).
Speaking of DevOps, one last tidbit: I knew Docker was named after shipping containers (think about it like this -- you package a container, transport it anywhere, and the contents always remain the same regardless of where you unpackage it -- this statement is true for both shipping containers and Docker containers), BUT I wasn't aware of how the name *Kubernetes* came about.
Kubernetes comes from the Greek word, κυβερνήτης, which means helmsman or pilot ("pilot" in the nautical sense, the ancient Greeks were unfortunately not flying aircraft in their heyday). In a nutshell, this pilot (the orchestrator) is steering the ship and its passengers (the containers), dilligently guiding their safe journey -- hence Kubernetes' steering wheel logo and Docker's ship-like whale icon. This is trivial stuff, but again, stupid little things like this make me happy. Details are fun.
I hope you found some of this junk as interesting as I did. It should make for some good trivia if nothing else. Please let me know if there's anything else I should add, and, as always, if I'm wrong about something, I encourage you to harass me on Twitter about it. Take care!
—JT