How To Keep Up With AWS Announcements
A practical guide to staying current with less effort
AWS posted 4500 announcements and blogs in 2019, and that number it has been growing exponentially. We all know how important it is to use the right tool for the job. Of course to do that you need to know what’s in your toolbox and what each tool can do. If you are not aware, then surely you will miss out on opportunities and be a less effective builder.
But with the rapid pace of AWS innovation, it’s hard to keep up without making “keeping-up” a near full-time job. AWS has 25,000 engineers tasked with creating and changing your toolbox. On the other hand, you only have you. This many-to-one relationship means that you need some strategies to have a fighting chance to survive the onslaught and leverage the available toolset. Not doing so would be like trying to climb a changing Hogwarts staircase blindfolded.
AWS is not slowing down, so I’ve provided the following simple and practical tips to help you keep up with with much less time and effort that will help you be a more efficient and effective AWS artisan.
Practical guide
AWS uses many channels (dozens of email lists, over 30 RSS feeds, thousands of web pages, etc.) to disseminate their information. This makes keeping up and overwhelming task. Fortunately, there’s hope. CloudPegboard.com is a free service that aggregates all AWS service information and then makes it easy to consume in a very personalized manner so that you get just want you need, how you want it, and when you need it.
CloudPegboard provides access to all information about AWS services (development attributes, documentation links, pricing, region information, compliance information, security attributes, and much more), but for this discussion, we’ll only focus on announcements and blogs.
Step 1: Sign up for a free CloudPegboard.com account
Step 2: Configure your profile to match your needs and style following the guidance below
Step 3: Pick either Daily or Weekly email updates
Update emails are consolidated summaries of changes to AWS services (grouped by service) over the last day or week. Personally I prefer to get daily updates so that I can consume smaller bites of information incrementally. As you review an update email, most items can be consumed quickly by just reading the headline. However, some will be particularly relevant and you’ll click through to read the full announcement or blog. For me, I’d rather spread this out during the week instead of catching up all at once. Your style may vary, so pick whatever works for you.
Step 4: Suppress change types you don’t need
The email updates can contain various types of service changes in addition to announcements and blogs. For example, changes in regulatory compliance, region additions, summaries of wishlist tweets for a given service, changes to service attributes, etc. While all these attributes are useful to some users, many find that they don’t need to see all change types. For example, if you are in a regulated industry, then you’ll want to see compliance changes, but otherwise, that’s noise you can do without. Therefore, use the checkboxes to decide which change types to suppress so that you can improve your signal-to-noise ratio.
Step 5: Don’t watch all services
Update emails are organized by service. Therefore, you can choose to only get updates for the services that are relevant to you. To only follow select services, uncheck the Watch All checkbox and instead define what services you want to watch in the next step. For some roles you’ll need to watch all services. But if your role is such that you can define a subset (even if large), then this is a powerful tactic to reduce noise and clutter so that you can focus on what’s truly important to you.
Note that even if you uncheck Watch All, you will still get notified for new services when they are introduced.
The service datasheets available on the Cloud Pegboard web portal show you a list of all announcements and blogs associated with the given service. Therefore, you can always look at the history to see notices that you might have missed or were not included in your watch list. This is also helpful when you first start using a service that you had not previously been following.
Step 6: Create lists of services
By creating lists of services, you can choose to “watch” one or more of these lists in your email updates. (Lists can also be used to create shortcuts for opening AWS consoles or datasheets for AWS services, but we’ll save that discussion for another day.) Since email updates contain the union of all the services in your watched lists, you can keep them reasonably granular if that suits your context.
To create a list, open the Cloud Pegboard Datasheet Dashboard and use the Lists Actions menu to Create a New List. Then use the search box to find a service and click the Add button. Rinse and repeat to add more services or create more lists.
For each list that you want to include in your email updates, in the List Actions menu, select Watch This List.
That’s it!
This one-time setup takes less than a few minutes and could save you hours every week for as long as you use AWS. Not only will you save time, but by taking charge and personalizing what information you get, you are reducing noise and better ensuring that you don’t miss the information that will help you make better engineering decisions and therefore better solutions. Perhaps equally important I think is that this all reduces the stress of trying to keep up with more information than any one person can reasonably consume.
About Cloud Pegboard
Cloud Pegboard helps AWS practitioners be highly effective and efficient even in the face of the tremendous complexity and rate of change of AWS services. We want to keep AWS fun and feel more like dancing in a sprinkler on a hot summer day and less like being blasted with a firehose. We make the AWS information you need amazingly easy to access, and with personalization features, we help you stay up to date on the AWS services and capabilities that are important to you and your specific projects.
Free sign-up at CloudPegboard.com
