Tidy Cloud AWS issue #12 - old year, new year

Hello all!

It is soon Christmas, and soon after that it is New Year!

2021 is a year that has had its challenges, and we are still in a pandemic with infections rates being quite bad in some countries. I really hope you all can stay healthy at these times.

Since this is the last bulletin of 2021, there will be some reflections on the past year and predictions for the new year for myself, this bulletin and Tidy Cloud AWS, along with some news items.

Enjoy and see you next year!

Tidy Cloud AWS 2021 to 2022

Tidy Cloud AWS started off as a book project. The goal was to advise in book form to make life easier for people who were working with AWS solutions and infrastructure, primarily in small- to medium-sized companies.

The book itself is no longer the single goal. Instead, the idea is to get useful material out in different formats, which may be blog posts, training material, books, presentations. Material on the Tidy Cloud AWS website and this bulletin is published to try out some content and get feedback on it more or less continuously. This is better than to spend several hundred hours on a book that might miss the mark.

So I appreciate very much any feedback you provide me, as a reader of the bulletin or any of the articles on the website. Some articles are re-posted to dev.to as well, which I think is a quite nice social media platform for developers.

The website has been revamped more than once, but right now I have settled to use the Publii static site content management system. The themes are nice and it is relatively easy to work with. Actual content I usually write in Scrivener nowadays. I love Scrivener as a writing tool, but there are some challenges with producing suitable output for articles with code examples.

My goal has been to publish content, either in a bulletin or an article on a weekly basis, during 2021. This has not always worked out, but it is getting better.

For 2022, the plan is to continue with publishing more material on the Tidy Cloud AWS website with higher frequency. Also, more posting on dev.to and publish more on Medium as well, probably.

I hope to figure out a suitable delivery mechanism for content as courses. Also, there will be some experiments in that area.

There will be a book also, eventually. But posting material on the website will have higher priority for now, and course and training material.

Wishes and predictions for AWS in 2022

My predictions/wishes for AWS in 2022 are in a few areas where I think there is room for improvement.

  • Sustainability - AWS recently added a pillar to its Well-Architected Framework, the Sustainability pillar. It is nice to see that AWS makes some effort to address concerns around sustainability, which is an area where Azure and Google Cloud seem to be ahead of AWS. It is not really about who is the best here though, but that everyone put in the effort, and fast enough - including all the major cloud providers. I believe, and hope, that AWS will ramp up its efforts here and we will see much more in the sustainability area during 2022. Hopefully also genuine effort and not just marketing.
  • Multi-cloud - As concept to use best-of-breed solutions from multiple cloud providers, I think the concept makes sense. It is not really different from other types of software solutions. AWS has historically not been keen on the multi-cloud strategy. On the contrary, they have very much discouraged that in the past. I do not think AWS will embrace multi-cloud support in 2022. I think Google Cloud, Azure and Oracle Cloud will be more active in this area.
  • Data Transfer costs - All major cloud providers do not charge for ingress costs - traffic from internet to the cloud provider is free. The egress costs, from cloud provider to the internet, they do charge for. And they charge a lot sometimes. They may also charge for traffic between regions, between availability zones, etc. It can be quite a mess. I predict egress charges will drop a little (10-15%) from AWS, but more from other cloud providers. AWS has changed the free egress per month from 1 GB to 100GB. That may seem like an improvement, but not that much - about $9. You get slightly lower prices when you get into Terabyte territory. 10 TB/month egress may cost around $850 in AWS. It depends on the region also, prices are not the same everywhere. Compare this to Oracle Cloud, for example, where the first 10 TB/month is free. If you double that to 20 TB/month in Oracle Cloud (OCI), you likely will have to pay $83 for the egress. And the prices are the same in every OCI region. I can understand that AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, at least historically, have used this pricing model to lock in customers to their platform. As their stories potentially change to support multi-cloud, I think data transfer costs will drop with that as well.
  • Better multi-account support. Nowadays, the overall best practices around non-trivial AWS cloud infrastructure presence involve multiple AWS accounts. A lot of the user experience is still oriented towards single accounts and also one region at a time. AWS has been making improvements on the multi-account/cross-account story, but still has a long way to go. I predict AWS will make many more services have multi-account views, but it will not be a consistent experience in 2022. I wish AWS would make AWS Console multi-account-aware and that you can by default be logged in to multiple accounts (without browser add-ons, like in Firefox). But I think that is just wishful thinking. I do not think it will happen.

What are your thoughts? What do you predict AWS will or will not do, and what do you wish AWS will do in 2022?

You can find the contents of this bulletin and older ones, and more at Tidy Cloud AWS. You will also find other useful articles around AWS automation and infrastructure-as-software.

Until next time,

/Erik