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Tobias Schmidt

@tpschmidt.com
729 followers 64 following 3.1K posts

Helping aspiring engineers master the cloud 👨‍💻 Freelance Software Engineer ✍️ Book #1: awsfundamentals.com 📕 Book #2: cloudwatchbook.com Learn AWS for Free: awsfundamentals.com/newsletter

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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 29/09/2026
aws.amazon.com/about-aws/w... The original GA announcement: aws.amazon.com/about-aws/w...
aws.amazon.com
AWS announces general availability of AWS Interconnect - multicloud - AWS
Discover more about what's new at AWS with AWS announces general availability of AWS Interconnect - multicloud
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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 29/09/2026
If your org ended up multi-cloud through vendor diversification, this is the cleaner option than the VPN setup ⚡️ Azure is in preview since late August, so all four major clouds are covered now:
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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 29/09/2026
2. Integrates with Transit Gateway and Cloud WAN for multi-VPC and multi-region setups 3. Single-fee pricing based on bandwidth and geographic scope 4. One free 500Mbps local interconnect per region
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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
Pick a subset for a homogeneous stack; even better! P.S. More AWS insights on our weekly newsletter :) awsfundamentals.com
awsfundamentals.com
AWS Fundamentals — AWS for the real world
Real AWS judgment for engineers who ship. The decisions, cost traps, and war stories certifications skip.
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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 28/09/2026
You'll use all four eventually 𝗦𝗲𝗰𝘂𝗿𝗶𝘁𝘆 IAM, Secrets Manager, KMS No shortcuts here 𝗢𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 CloudWatch, CloudFormation (and CDK) Observability and infrastructure as code 𝗠𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗮𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗴 SQS, SNS, EventBridge Queue, pub/sub, event bus
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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 28/09/2026
Pick based on your workload, not trends 𝗦𝘁𝗼𝗿𝗮𝗴𝗲 S3, EBS, EFS S3 for objects, EBS for instances, EFS when you actually need a file system 𝗗𝗮𝘁𝗮𝗯𝗮𝘀𝗲 RDS, DynamoDB, ElastiCache Relational, key-value, caching 𝗡𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 VPC, CloudFront, Route 53, API Gateway
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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
github.com/common-fate...
github.com
GitHub - fwdcloudsec/granted: The easiest way to access AWS.
The easiest way to access AWS. Contribute to fwdcloudsec/granted development by creating an account on GitHub.
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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 27/09/2026
Config sits in ~/.aws/config. One block per profile. credential_process points at granted, that's the whole trick. Image below is roughly what mine looks like across a few accounts. Worth a look if you're still babysitting a desktop app just to switch AWS accounts
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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 27/09/2026
No app to open - everything in the CLI. Great for Claude Code :) assume <profile> in the terminal and you're authenticated for that account.
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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
And either way, it doesn't fix the real reason policies end up full of asterisks: laziness. P.S.: We cover IAM scoping mistakes like this in our newsletter: awsfundamentals.com
awsfundamentals.com
AWS Fundamentals — AWS for the real world
Real AWS judgment for engineers who ship. The decisions, cost traps, and war stories certifications skip.
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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 26/09/2026
Beginners struggle with IAM constantly. Wildcard soup everywhere, because scoping things down properly takes time nobody wants to spend. This could genuinely help there. But if you're already using Claude or any decent AI assistant properly, I'm not sure how necessary this even is anymore.
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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
aws.amazon.com/about-aws/w... P.S. AWS releases like this, without the noise, go out in our newsletter: awsfundamentals.com
awsfundamentals.com
AWS Fundamentals — AWS for the real world
Real AWS judgment for engineers who ship. The decisions, cost traps, and war stories certifications skip.
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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 25/09/2026
And it's in every region where Aurora DSQL runs. Until now referential integrity was on you. No foreign keys means every relationship lives in application code. We want to use DSQL for AWS Fundamentals. Link to the announcement 🔗
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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
Wrote up the full year, plus the three 2026 incidents that kept the pattern going 🔗 awsfundamentals.com/blog/aws-ou... P.S.: More reliability traps and architecture breakdowns like this in our newsletter: awsfundamentals.com
awsfundamentals.com
AWS Fundamentals — AWS for the real world
Real AWS judgment for engineers who ship. The decisions, cost traps, and war stories certifications skip.
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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 23/09/2026
Multi-AZ is the floor here, not the answer. It covers exactly one failure class: a single AZ going down Not an argument to panic-migrate everything out of us-east-1. Just make that trade-off on purpose instead of by default.
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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 23/09/2026
The part I didn't have on my radar: "regionless" incidents, the ones that hit a global service or a control plane instead of one region. 12 of them, 32 hours. Almost as bad as us-east-1 itself. And a multi-region setup does nothing for you if the thing that breaks is IAM or Route 53.
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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 23/09/2026
• Singapore (ap-southeast-1): 1 outage, 55 minutes • Almost every other region: exactly one outage all year So it's not that AWS regions fail constantly. It's that this one specific region does 👀
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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
aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/n... P.S. Our EC2 infographics break down instance families and when each one makes sense: awsfundamentals.com
awsfundamentals.com
AWS Fundamentals — AWS for the real world
Real AWS judgment for engineers who ship. The decisions, cost traps, and war stories certifications skip.
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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 22/09/2026
• micro at 1 GiB, and it's in the Free Tier • small at 2, medium at 4 Everything else is familiar. Same credit system as T3, and Unlimited mode is the default here, which is worth a look before the credit bill surprises you. Announcement 🔗
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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 22/09/2026
One thing to know before you swap everything: per hour t8i.nano is more expensive than t3.nano. $0.00624 against $0.0052. The 30% better price performance is performance-adjusted, so your invoice only drops if you actually use what you're getting. Sizes stop at medium: • nano at 0.5 GiB
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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
P.S. Starting out on AWS? Our infographics cover the core services without the console maze: awsfundamentals.com
awsfundamentals.com
AWS Fundamentals — AWS for the real world
Real AWS judgment for engineers who ship. The decisions, cost traps, and war stories certifications skip.
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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 21/09/2026
Their own wording says it best: "every configuration option is effort standing in the way of shipping your dream product fast" Announcement 🔗 aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/a...
aws.amazon.com
AWS reimagines the getting started experience | Amazon Web Services
AWS has reimagined the getting started experience with smart and sensible defaults to help developers get started fast so that they can focus on building. New customers can sign up and get started right away with $100 in Free Tier credits, managed project environments, and simplified team and resource permissions. If their workload evolves, customers can activate advanced features to access the full breadth and depth of AWS in one step, with no migration required.
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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 21/09/2026
The part that matters for a beginner is the spend limit, starting at $20 per month. You get warned as you approach it, and the project pauses instead of quietly running up a bill. And every surprise-bill story on r/aws starts with an account that had no ceiling on it.
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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 21/09/2026
Sign-up hands you a project with defaults already in place. One prompt into your coding agent wires it to that environment, and there aren't any IAM users to create. $100 in credits to start, plus another $100 if you work through their activity list.
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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.amazon.com/about-aws/w... P.S. We check the pricing behind hyped AWS releases like this in our newsletter: awsfundamentals.com
awsfundamentals.com
AWS Fundamentals — AWS for the real world
Real AWS judgment for engineers who ship. The decisions, cost traps, and war stories certifications skip.
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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 20/09/2026
The hourly rate was never the expensive part. Data processing is The thing that usually kills you in the cloud is how expensive data processing is, and this release doesn't touch that number at all. Fewer misconfigs. Same bill Announcement:
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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 20/09/2026
Genuinely nice. So I checked the pricing before buying the "profit center is dead" take. It's not dead • Still $0.045/hour per active AZ: same total as 3 zonal NAT gateways • Data processing still $0.045/GB, completely untouched • Only real saving: a few bucks on unused EIPs
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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 20/09/2026
Shipped end of 2025, totally missed it until now. One logical gateway, auto-expands and contracts as your workloads spread across AZs. No manual NAT GW per AZ. No public subnet required. No route table babysitting when you add a new AZ.
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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
aws.amazon.com/blogs/migra... P.S.: We write about the real cost of shipping fast with AI in our newsletter: awsfundamentals.com
awsfundamentals.com
AWS Fundamentals — AWS for the real world
Real AWS judgment for engineers who ship. The decisions, cost traps, and war stories certifications skip.
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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 19/09/2026
Google's own DORA research backs it: 25% more AI adoption correlated with 1.5% less delivery throughput and 7.2% less stability. Their fix has a name and comes with a paid engagement attached. Mine is less exciting: slower sprints, more review capacity before you scale anything up. Post 🔗
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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 19/09/2026
AWS has a blog post making basically the same point, dressed up in more consulting language. Individual coding gets faster, but planning, build, test and deploy stay disconnected, so cycle time barely moves.
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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
aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/a... P.S. We cover AWS releases like this in our free newsletter, without the noise: awsfundamentals.com
awsfundamentals.com
AWS Fundamentals — AWS for the real world
Real AWS judgment for engineers who ship. The decisions, cost traps, and war stories certifications skip.
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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 18/09/2026
under $500/month, stay on Standard. The control plane fee and the Auto Mode premium won't pay for themselves at that size. Standard mode isn't going anywhere. Both live in the same Beanstalk application, and you move environment by environment.
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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 18/09/2026
Only primitives as six container services AWS put above ECS are archived or closed to new customers now. EKS is a primitive though. And this looks really nice, so I'll definitely try it out. Also, Beanstalk itself is around for a long time. btw AWS is upfront about the catch:
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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 18/09/2026
Spot capacity is the part I care about most That's what makes it run quite efficiently, instead of being EKS with extra steps! Still, as you might know, I have a rule about the fancy abstractions:
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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 18/09/2026
• No Dockerfile required, Cloud Native Buildpacks handle the container - nice! • Multiple apps share one cluster, so per-app cost drops as the portfolio grows • EKS Auto Mode underneath => Spot is on the table 🥰 • Rolling, immutable and traffic-splitting deploys, all with rollback
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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
www.reddit.com/r/aws/comme... P.S.: We cover cost traps like this in our newsletter: awsfundamentals.com
awsfundamentals.com
AWS Fundamentals — AWS for the real world
Real AWS judgment for engineers who ship. The decisions, cost traps, and war stories certifications skip.
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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 17/09/2026
Your AWS bill moves with usage. Your observability bill moves with telemetry configuration. Almost nobody watches telemetry config the way they watch infra. Worth a look at your tag cardinality and log levels before the next invoice surprises you 🤷‍♂️ Thread 🔗
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Tobias Schmidt @tpschmidt.com · 17/09/2026
• APM span indexing has the same trap • Host-tier pricing jumps in steps, not a curve. An ASG scaling event during a spike can cross a tier line for a cost jump way out of proportion to what actually changed in EC2
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