Happy Friday! This is Unlimited Leave. A weekly newsletter giving you quick access to AWS Governance & Automation announcements as well as solutions to help you manage your environments.  That said, this entire premise may be moot very soon. More on that below.

This week's topics

• All quiet on the AWStern front

• Generative AI cluttering the space, doing our job

• Providing the resources you need in the format you want

All quiet on the AWStern front

This last week was super quiet on announcements from AWS around Governance, Compliance, and Automation.

One noteworthy announcement was IPAM was Released in GovCloud which is great. Most workloads in GovCloud leverage AWS Direct Connect and extend private IP Space into the cloud. This is a welcomed release for GovCloud for sure.

A future thorn in my side will be the consolidated controls and findings view for Security Hub coming out in Q1 2023. At this very moment, I am working with the solutions I shared in last week's issues on how to globally disable Security Hub Checks. Both of these "solutions" are AWS Solutions on GitHub. I suspect this is the first move toward native Organizational Level disable and suppression. Right now the process is very painstaking and I'm starting to see that it might be pointless at this time.

Generative AI cluttering the space, doing our job

If you are in Information Technology and haven't caught wind of OpenAI's ChatGPT, then it is time to check it out.

Content writing AI has been around for a while. ChatGPT is a game changer.

Why is this a concern to me?

A big part of this newsletter is providing context with personality. Everything I share here, you could easily get from other sources. I'm a just-in-time content consumer. Newsletters like this one are more of a just-in-case consumption model with the hopes that once in a while something will connect and be exactly what you're looking for and at the right time.

The issue I see with Generative AI like ChatGPT is now we are able to get just-in-time information that is very specifically tailored and can be iterated on in a conversational form. The demand for unique content with 'personality' will quickly be replaced by this level of convenience. 

Case in point. The section in last week's issue about Security Hub integrating with Control Tower was written by ChatGPT. Maybe you noticed it wasn't exactly in the voice of this newsletter, but with a couple of minor tweaks, that whole section was supplied via Copypasta.

Examples use cases

Here are two additional use cases that demonstrate this example. 

First, a quick question about solutions to disable AWS Security Hub checks. Which is one of the problems I am currently facing and addressed in the last issue.

Next is an example of how you can use ChatGPT in the context of AWS to build your starter templates. Here you see a template request for a public-facing website-enabled S3 Bucket.

By no means does any of this concern me with regard to losing or devaluing the job I do. Knowing how these services integrate and the many frustrating nuances will not be solved by AI anytime soon. There is still a need for seasoned architects to understand and solve unique problems.

I do see this as a concern regarding true quality content. It is very simple to ask ChatGPT to give you a 5 paragraph summary of a new service announcement and then publish that to Medium, Dev.to, Hashnode, or any other platform. All this does is clutter the content landscape without providing unique experiences or use cases. 

The resources you need in the format you want

There are plenty of forums, slack workspaces, and blogs to rob your attention and provide you with information about AWS services, features, and announcements. The last thing I want to do is provide more noise.

All of these things are great, but one thing I noticed is that a lot of the support or communication for real issues is short and not very detailed. In the future, I'd like to see a community of Management and Governance Professionals and/or organizations needing M&G guidance, have access to a library of quality resources. So... 

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Disclaimer: The resources and topics shared within this newsletter are for informational use only. Any resources deployed or tools implemented are done so at your own risk. Do your own research and testing prior to the implementation of any resource or service deployed for any workload.