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- 🍳🧇 Don't You (Forget About Me) 🥞🥯
🍳🧇 Don't You (Forget About Me) 🥞🥯
We're changing our cadence to increase value.
Ross Wickman
January 06, 2023
Happy New Year! This is Unlimited Leave, the now Sporadic newsletter about AWS Management, Governance, and Automation.
By sporadic I really mean unpredictable. The literal definition. I can't promise you when new issues will hit your inbox, but I can make a safe bet that it will happen at least once a month. Likely still be at 1100 CT on Friday of whatever week that moves me.
Since re:Invent and the downturn of AWS announcements relevant to this newsletter, I find myself walking around my house aimlessly; avoiding my children's toys strewn about like Jim Kerr in the Simple Minds music video "Don't You (Forget About Me)" trying to figure out what you write about.
This week's topics
New Newsletter Delivery Cadence
Lone Governance / Automation Update
Recommended Newsletters
Query your OS using SQL
New Newsletter Delivery Cadence
Content creation is hard. I never wanted this newsletter to be all about written content, but that is what it primarily has been. Just rehashing AWS announcements and syndicating links to Git projects that might help you in your endeavors.
I mentioned previously that ChatGPT can pretty much do what I'm doing here. And it will only get better. In the last few weeks, the community has started to prove this.
Here are some examples:
When I asked early on - what you as readers wanted to get out of this newsletter, - the majority of you indicated you simply did not want more announcements and updates. You want actionable tutorials, walk-throughs, and examples.
Later, when I asked how you wanted to consume those resources, the desired delivery mode was through this newsletter. This has resulted in a conflict of priorities for me in that, I dedicate my time to FINDING content to supply here instead of the deep work to GENERATE value for this newsletter.
To solve for this I've decided to use the newsletter primarily for the delivery of these resources when completed. I will continue to supply a monthly rollup of major AWS governance announcements for the month if they exist and other valuable resources.
Don't forget about me
What all this means is my amazing open rate from all of you fantastic subscribers is likely going to drop.
Since providing quality content and value is more important to me than the open rate, I've decided to dedicate 80% of the time originally allocated for this publishing the newsletter to building more of what you already told me you wanted.
My ask to you is please don't forget about me when I finally do hit your inbox.
While thinking about this and all the work that goes into newsletters, I could not get the movie The Breakfast Club out of my mind.
Not until gathering some fun links for this issue did I pay any attention to or realize how much those 5 young whippersnappers were able to accomplish in a 9-hour day.
Oh to have that kind of freedom again.
Could you imagine doing cloud architecture from one of these machines:
Watching this music video trailer I can't help but map these kids to developers or operations and Vice Principal Richard Vernon to the stern InfoSec Team.
Coming up
I am working on some solutions to consolidate all resources, tutorials, videos, walkthroughs, and source code. I believe it to be important that everything be in one place for you and future subscribers instead of pilfering through email after email.
I am not sure how quickly that library will grow but regardless, I will always share and syndicate everything here in this email. Just not on a weekly basis unless the climate or content requires it.
In the meantime, please don't remove our delivery address from your email filtering.
We're still here.
Lone Governance / Automation Update
This week, the AWS Cloud Ops & Migrations Blog put out a post titled How AWS Control Tower users can proactively verify compliance in AWS CloudFormation stacks. This walkthrough leverages the recently announced AWS CloudFormation Hooks coupled with the AWS Control Tower Proactive Controls to create a solution that stops the deployment of resources not meeting predetermined compliance requirements.
This is great because lots of (pipeline) solutions allow you to check, but do not always enforce proper configuration in your Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC). This solution walks you through the configuration of some preventative controls and the subsequent deployment of compliant resource(s).
This is a very helpful tutorial to actually start using those two recent service features practically to support Governance, Management, and Automation. Everything we care about here at Unlimited Leave.
Recommended Newsletters
Growing email newsletters and acquiring subscribers is very hard. It's tedious and in most cases very disheartening. Had it not been for Corey Quinn sharing Unlimited Leave in issue #291 of Last Week In AWS, I might not still be doing this.That is why I want to start the year off by paying it forward. There are two other Cloud/AWS newsletters hosted right here in the BeeHiiv Platform and you can see them on my recommendations page or subscribe to them right here:
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No kickbacks.No benefit to me or them. Just more cloud-related content to help you become better at what you do every day.
Enjoy!
Query your OS using SQL
Have you ever wanted to globally gather specific and/or unique system information from your systems? Checkout OSQuery.
When I look at this I see
a custom SSM Run Document to gather specific information from instances using Tags.
a custom SSM Run Document to gather specific information from instances using Tags
an write to a log file on OS
a collection of logs using CloudWatch or some other central consolidation point
and any number of operations on the information in AWS (e.g. Alarms, Events, you name it)
If only I had the bandwidth. If you do be sure to check it out.
*Not a sponsor