AWS Services for Thanksgiving Dinner

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Pete: Hello, and welcome to AWS Morning Brief. I am Pete Cheslock, and I am here yet again with Jesse DeRose. Jesse, welcome back. 

Jesse: Thanks for having me, Pete. 

Pete: But it's not just the two of us. We have a very special guest: we are also joined with one of the newest hires to The Duckbill Group, Amy Negrette. Amy, hello.

Amy: Hello. And one might say the most special of guests; that person would be me.

Pete: The most special of guests. 

Jesse: [laugh].

Pete: Well, we are pleased to have you. So, in honor of Thanksgiving—American Thanksgiving, for anyone outside of the United States, or who doesn't celebrate. But this is the American Thanksgiving holiday week. We wanted to take a little different approach to this week's episode. And Amy, you were the one who kind of came up with this idea, and so that's why we forced you to join us because—

Jesse: One of us. One of us.

Pete: [laugh]. Because you had such a good idea, and we wanted to make sure that we just pulled this together and really did a Thanksgiving theme to this podcast. So, I don't know about either of you, but my family has some very clear requirements about what dishes do and do not constitute Thanksgiving. And you can always expect the turkey and the stuffing. It's just not Thanksgiving without those core components. 

Jesse: But then your cousin's boyfriend shows up with the candied vegetables that nobody asked to be candied. And, you know, you put a little bit on your plate because you want to be nice. You don't want to start World War III in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner. And you say, “Oh, yeah, this is good.” But then you're definitely giving those food scraps to the dog under the table and you don't go back for seconds.

Pete: I mean, a metric ton of sugar is probably the only way to make turnips taste good.

Jesse: Yeah.

Pete: So, with that in mind, we wanted to talk about what AWS services are those core services that you expect the customers kind of using to leverage the cloud, what services would kind of represent a Thanksgiving meal? Which ones constitute the turkey, or the stuffing, or the green bean casserole which, while preparing this, there seem to be some conflicting thoughts about the quality of a green bean casserole.

Jesse: There are some hot takes. Some hot, hot, hot takes in this discussion, putting this list together.

Pete: So, I'll kick us off with an easy, softball one because why not? But it's EC2, right? This is the turkey. It's the main course. And it's also what you'll be eating three to five times a day for every day for the next week or two because you're going to have a lot extra. It's just going to be around for a long time. 

Jesse: Yeah, I feel like EC2 is one that you're going to get in some capacity, anywhere. Whether it is straight-up EC2 instances, whether it is Fargate, ECS, you're going to be using this compute resource in some capacity if you're using AWS. I don't think I know of any AWS customer that is not using some level of compute with EC2. Except for the few people who have managed to move entirely serverless to Lambda, which I am thoroughly impressed if you've been able to do that. 

Pete: So, that is actually a great one which is Amy you do a lot with the serverless community. What do you think Lambda would be as a Thanksgiving side dish?

Amy: It is the canned cranberry sauce because everyone who I hear talk about it they seem to hate it, but I love it. I love not having to work for anything. It tastes the same and the sauce itself tastes like jelly and Lambda packages everything in a way where I don't have to deal with it, and to me that makes everything else super easy.

Pete: I think it's the slow oozing out of the can it does that really kind of makes me not want to like it, and those just too perfect ridges from the form of it. But I don't know what it is about it; when you just slice through that and put it on your plate, so delicious. And don't at me with your fancy homemade cranberry sauce, whatever. None of that can hold a candle. 

So, I actually think Lambda is the special smoked turkey. Because it's a new trend. Lambda being in the new trend, serverless is a new trend. And of course, everyone who is doing a smoked turkey or has a smoker just can't stop talking about it, much like serverless. They just can't stop talking about it.

Jesse: Yeah. I mean, I think that ever since you bought your smoker, you have not stopped telling us all about the meats that you're smoking on a recurring basis.

Pete: I mean, I got a 16-pound turkey for $14, and I got turkey for days. 

Jesse: What I love is that not only do you have a smoker and you talk about it, but you have a monitoring system that you set up so that you can monitor the temperature of the smoker at any given time. 

Pete: I'm a bit of a Luddite at home. I don't like IoT powered anything because I think they're all generally terrible, but for some reason, yeah, my smoker has a little whatever, cellular—powered, connects to my wifi, but I can get to it from the app on my cell phone, can check the temperature of the turkey, out of the store running errands. “Oh, got to get home soon, my turkey’s almost done.”

Jesse: Okay, I’ve got another easy one for us. S3 is your mashed potatoes. It's good, it's on everyone's plate, there appears to always be an infinite amount of it. Everybody's going to want some. And most importantly, if you leave a bucket of it open overnight, you're going to regret it. 

Pete: Yeah, that's going to turn to glue pretty fast, not Amazon Glue, which actually if we are going to talk about Amazon Glue and Lake Formation, and that weird amalgamation of Amazon services, we actually have one for that. This is something called the piecaken, which I had never heard about until I saw an Instagram ad because that's a thing. But a piecaken is a pecan pie—pecan or pecan? Let's not, do that.

Jesse: Oh, God, don't start.

Pete: Okay. Pumpkin pie, spice cake, and an apple pie filling. It's like three pies stacked into a cake. And that's what I think of when I think about the whole Lake Formation/Glue setup when you're trying to query or analyze your data lake. 

Jesse: Yeah, my arteries just clogged ...