iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 29/09/2026

Reminder that this exists: AWS Interconnect gives you a private connection between clouds. No VPN, no public internet routing. The parts worth knowing: 1. Microsoft Azure is in preview now as well, next to Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud which are GA

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 28/09/2026

AWS has 200+ services. You need maybe 20 of them. Still true to this day. The rest is feature overlap, regional limitations, and solutions looking for problems. Here's what actually covers 99.9% of projects: 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗽𝘂𝘁𝗲 EC2, Lambda, ECS/Fargate (+ EKS if large-scale)

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 27/09/2026

Switched my AWS SSO tooling from Leapp to Granted a while back Anyone else still running Leapp? Leapp was fine when I started with it. Last release though was June 2024. Everything since is CI chores. Not really maintained at this point. Granted is CLI-first, which is just how I work anyway.

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 26/09/2026

There's a new way to skip the IAM asterisks madness: feed a Terraform plan file into Policy Autopilot. It reads the plan instead of just app code now, and generates a baseline policy with actual resource ARNs instead of wildcards.

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 25/09/2026

The reason we're not running DSQL in prod yet is gone. Foreign key constraints shipped on August 27 😬 Completely missed it. You can add them to new and existing tables, and choose what happens when the referenced row is deleted or updated: NO ACTION, RESTRICT, CASCADE, SET NULL, SET DEFAULT.

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 23/09/2026

Reminder: us-east-1 at AWS had 10 outages in 2025. Almost 34 hours of downtime. StatusGator builds their annual report from real status page data instead of vendor marketing. The 2025 AWS numbers: • N. Virginia (us-east-1): 10 outages, 33h49m down • Stockholm (eu-north-1): 2 outages, 11h55m

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 22/09/2026

A t8i.nano costs you $4.56 a month in us-east-1, and for that you get 2 vCPU on Granite Rapids Xeons with up to 70% more compute than the t3.nano you're probably still running 🔥 0.5 GiB of memory, burst network up to 6.25 Gbps, and 2.4x the EBS bandwidth of T3.

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 21/09/2026

You can sign up for AWS with your GitHub account now, skip the credit card, and cap the whole thing at $20 a month. AWS built a second entrance into AWS, because the first one scares people off 😅

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 20/09/2026

AWS finally let NAT Gateway auto-scale across AZs. Everyone's calling it the death of AWS's favorite profit center. It's not 😅

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 19/09/2026

Everyone wants the lights-off software factory. AI writes it, nobody reviews it, tickets just clear themselves. It doesn't work like that. What I keep seeing instead: a team turns AI loose, ships 400 tickets in a sprint, then spends the next few months buried in regressions from all of it.

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 18/09/2026

Elastic Beanstalk is still alive! Cluster Mode landed this week and it runs on EKS! 🔥 You pass --tier Name=Cluster,Type=EKS and Beanstalk creates the cluster for you. First deploy takes about ten minutes, later ones reuse it.

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 17/09/2026

A thread on r/aws mapped out why Datadog bills quietly outgrow AWS bills. None of it is Datadog doing anything wrong. It's just invisible until the invoice.

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 16/09/2026

Lambda Managed Instances: AWS trying to give Lambda what ECS already does well. Same instinct that gave us Proton and App Runner. Same result. Someone spent six weeks testing Lambda Managed Instances for a real Node API and wrote the whole thing up on r/aws. I read the entire thread twice 😅

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 15/09/2026

One question answers "is this AWS service safe to build on": Would AWS/Amazon build on top of it? Got this comment under my ECS post and it's better than what I wrote 👌 • If no, it'll probably get deprecated, or at least left to deteriorate

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 14/09/2026

If you remember this: a trailing slash bypassed authentication on an AWS API Gateway and paid a $12K bounty 😅 GET /v1/accounts returned 401. GET /v1/accounts/ returned 200 with full account data 🫠 What actually happened:

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 13/09/2026

Back in May I posted: change my mind, "generally available" at re:Invent is one of the most misleading phrases in cloud computing. Nobody changed my mind. The data did 😅 I went through 13 GA launches from re:Invent 2025 and checked where each one actually runs today, 9 months later.

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 12/09/2026

I think S3 is the only AWS service that has never disappointed me. After heavily working with AWS for 8 years. I've been burned by Lambda quotas, NAT Gateway bills, CloudWatch pricing, and whatever App Runner was supposed to be 🪦 S3? Never.

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 11/09/2026

Your org doesn't need a landing zone on day one. It needs AWS Organizations, Identity Center and three accounts. I keep seeing small teams start their AWS journey with a full Control Tower setup because a blog post told them it's best practice. What you actually need at the start:

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 10/09/2026

Multi-AZ can give you a real quick, massive cost problem if the routing between your services isn't set up properly. Everything healthy and every dashboard green. But your pods in one AZ talk to pods in another AZ for no reason at all.

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 09/09/2026

NAT Gateway is the most profitable design decision AWS ever made. What it does: it forwards packets. That's it. For that you pay $0.045 for every GB it processes, plus an hourly charge for each AZ you run one in, whether traffic flows or not. And the defaults push you straight into it.

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 08/09/2026

Completely missed this release: you can now block AWS console sign-ins that don't come from your own networks.

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 07/09/2026

S3 handles 500 million requests per second. Werner Vogels wrote about what shipping a filesystem interface on top of that actually takes, and it's one of the best engineering reads I had this year. The design reasoning is the good part, not the feature.

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 06/09/2026

I assumed my AWS Org security was solid. An audit said otherwise: 8 gaps, some of them embarrassing 🔥 So I hardened everything over a weekend. Pure Terraform, no Control Tower. Three pieces: 1. SCPs

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 05/09/2026

workshops.aws is still the most underused free resource on AWS. Hands-on guides, written by AWS teams, and they actually work. No marketing BS, just labs 🤷‍♂️ The one I keep recommending: Amazon ECS/Fargate

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 04/09/2026

I called AWS WAF a tax on running a public API a few weeks back. One question kept coming up after: okay, so what do you do instead? 😅 What actually came out of that discussion: 1. CloudFront flat-rate plans. WAF-rejected requests don't hit your bill. The only true cap in the whole setup

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 03/09/2026

Three people run 6,000 AWS accounts. I posted about this before, and I keep coming back to one part of it. Not the scale (40 services, ~120,000 instances, about a million Lambda functions). The isolation model. Ok yes, also a little bit the RIDICULOUS SCALE 😅

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 02/09/2026

Every layer AWS built on top of ECS is dead or dying I keep a list 🫡 • ECS CLI, archived November 2025 • Fargate CLI, archived May 2024 • Copilot CLI, end of life June 2026 • AWS Proton, end of life October 2026 • App Runner, maintenance mode since April 2026

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 01/09/2026

As a heavy EKS user, the MostAllocated strategy sounds really cool 💪 EKS now lets you tune control plane parameters beyond the defaults.

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 31/08/2026

You cannot move an S3 bucket to another account. Not even AWS can 🫠 Someone on r/aws has production URLs pointing at an S3 bucket owned by another company, and that company is about to delete it. So: can you move a bucket to another account and keep the name?

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 30/08/2026

London quietly got a fourth availability zone 🔥 Someone on r/aws spotted eu-west-2d in their console, and it apparently surprised their TAM too. Checked my own account: eu-west-2a => euw2-az2 eu-west-2b => euw2-az3 eu-west-2c => euw2-az1 eu-west-2d => euw2-az4

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 29/08/2026

A $3.40/month AWS account got a $600 charge, and the billing history shows nothing 💸 Sounds pretty scary, as I run almost everything on AWS myself.

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 28/08/2026

Good move by the Lambda team: you can finally test new runtimes early 🎉 Node.js 26 and Python 3.15 are on Lambda as public previews, months before they go GA. Until now Lambda only ever launched runtimes as GA, so nobody could give feedback while breaking changes were still on the table.

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 27/08/2026

I don't even know when I last used CloudShell 😅 Suspect it's time to try it out again. It has a built-in visual file editor now. You type edit in your shell session and a GUI editor opens in the browser. No setup. Syntax highlighting, find and replace, multi-line selection, undo and redo.

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 26/08/2026

EC2 got a third status check, and this one looks at your application 😎 Instance and system checks tell you the box is reachable. The new application status check tells you whether the thing running on it still works.

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 25/08/2026

AWS is redesigning the sign-in page and I'm not sure if I like this 😬 You type your email, hit Continue, and only then comes the rest. AWS picks the right flow from your address. I'd like to have it all in one step, the way it has always been.

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 24/08/2026

Permission sets are annoying. This is MAYBE the better middle ground 💭 IAM launched account access manager! You assign the IAM roles that already exist in your account to users and groups from IAM Identity Center. Until now you picked one of two ways:

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 22/08/2026

Just stumbled upon the new Managed Dashboards in Billing and Cost Management 👌 Five of them, already filled with your own account data. No setup. • Cost Overview and Trends: 12 months of spend across services, accounts and regions, with a forecast

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 21/08/2026

AWS IAM role manager went GA last week. You set up a service in the console, it creates the role for you from an AWS-managed template. Finally something that stops people from clicking "create new role" blindly.

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 20/08/2026

It's 2026, we have AI everywhere, and networking on AWS still feels like heavy engineering. Small mistakes can kill you! A pattern I keep seeing with dynamic node schedulers on EC2:

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 19/08/2026

Elasticsearch is a database that happens to do search. And AWS charges you like it We have been running Typesense in production for about a year, in a pretty large client project. Time to tell you why

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 15/08/2026

Someone on r/aws paid their AWS invoice on August 5. Billing console says "Paid", confirmation mail arrived. Five days later AWS suspended the account anyway. Production is down. Databases, application, customer data, all of it behind a suspended account.

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 14/08/2026

Lambda functions can now push 3,000 Mbps of network bandwidth ⚡️ They were capped at 625 Mbps before, no matter how much memory you threw at them. It scales with the memory now: • 2 GB => 625 Mbps • 10 GB => 3,000 Mbps • everything in between scales along

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 13/08/2026

We rebuilt awsfundamentals.com. Same content, it just doesn't look like three different websites anymore 💛 One dark theme everywhere now. Blog, free resources, book pages, all on the same background instead of a slightly different one per section. What you get out of it:

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 12/08/2026

Someone on r/aws hit a CSR validation error in AWS Private CA Connector and thought the payload looked way too short. So they decoded it. It's ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ AWS shipped the shrug emoji as an actual certificate signing request payload 😅

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 11/08/2026

Amazon finished paying OpenAI. All $50B of it 🔥 Showed up in an SEC filing on July 31. Buys them roughly 5% of OpenAI ahead of the IPO. But the equity isn't the interesting part for us. • AWS becomes the exclusive third-party cloud provider for OpenAI's Frontier program

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 10/08/2026

AWS shipped a Claude apps gateway a month ago and I filed it as "third way to call Claude on AWS". Wrong. It doesn't serve a single token. You still pick one of the two inference paths:

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 09/08/2026

Someone on r/aws asked why devs can't write least privilege policies. 121 comments, and almost nobody agreed with the question 🔥 😬 OP was doing a security audit, found s3:* and AdministratorAccess on nearly every role, and put it down to laziness.

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 08/08/2026

Managed NAT gateways are a scam imho. You pay hourly for the thing to exist, then per GB to move traffic you're already paying egress for 😅

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 07/08/2026

DynamoDB can now do vector search in single-digit milliseconds. S3 Vectors needs up to a second. Same problem, very different price tag.

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 05/08/2026

I ran 10+ AWS accounts for years before I realized Named Profiles were the piece that makes the whole setup click! Most of us still handle AWS credentials like it's 2018 via aws configure - at least that's what I see on a regular basis!

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