About Corey QuinnOver the course of my career, I’ve worn many different hats in the tech world: systems administrator, systems engineer, director of technical operations, and director of DevOps, to name a few. Today, I’m a cloud economist at The Duckbill Group, the author of the weekly Last Week in AWS newsletter, and the host of two podcasts: Screaming in the Cloud and, you guessed it, AWS Morning Brief, which you’re about to listen to.Links
http://nops.io/snark

http://snark.cloud/n2ws 
@QuinnyPig
TranscriptCorey: Welcome to AWS Morning Brief: Whiteboard Confessional. I’m Cloud Economist Corey Quinn. This weekly show exposes the semi-polite lie that is whiteboard architecture diagrams. You see, a child can draw a whiteboard architecture, but the real world is a mess. We discuss the hilariously bad decisions that make it into shipping products, the unfortunate hacks the real-world forces us to build, and that the best to call your staging environment is “theory”. Because invariably whatever you’ve built works in the theory, but not in production. Let’s get to it.nOps will help you reduce AWS costs 15 to 50 percent if you do what tells you. But some people do. For example, watch their webcast, how Uber reduced AWS costs 15 percent in 30 days; that is six figures in 30 days. Rather than a thing you might do, this is something that they actually did. Take a look at it. It's designed for DevOps teams. nOps helps quickly discover the root causes of cost and correlate that with infrastructure changes. Try it free for 30 days, go to nops.io/snark. That's N-O-P-S dot I-O, slash snark.Welcome once again to the AWS Morning Brief: Whiteboard Confessional. Today I want to talk about, once again, an aspect of writing my Last Week in AWS newsletter. This goes back to before I was sending it out twice a week, instead of just once, and my needs weren't that complex. I would gather a bunch of links throughout the week: I would make fun of them and I had already built this absolutely ridiculous system that would render all of my sarcasm from its ridiculous database where it lived down into something that would work to generate out HTML. And I've talked about that system previously, I'm sure I will again. That's not really the point of the story. Instead, what I want to talk about is what happened after I had that nicely generated HTML. Now, I've gone through several iterations of how I sent out my newsletter. The first version was through a service known as Drip, that's D-R-I-P. And they were great because they were aimed at effectively non-technical folks, by and large, where it’s, “Oh, you want to use a newsletter. Go ahead.” I looked at a few different vendors. MailChimp is the one that a lot of folks go with for things like this. At the time I was doing that selection, they were having a serious spam problem. People were able to somehow bypass their MFA. Basically, their reputation was in the toilet and given my weird position on email spam, namely, I don't like it, I figured this is probably not the best time to build something on top of that platform, so that was out. Drip was interesting, in that they offered a lot of useful things, and they provided something far more than I needed at the time. They would give me ways to say, “Okay, when someone clicks on this link, I can put them in different groups, etcetera, etcetera.” You know, the typical email, crappy tracking thing that squicks people out. Similarly to the idea of, “Hey, I noticed you left something in your cart. Do you want to go back and buy it?” Those emails that everyone finds vaguely disquieting? Yeah, that sort of thing. So, 90 percent of what they were doing, I didn't need, but it worked well enough, and I got out the door and use them for a while. Then they got acquired, and it seemed like they got progressively worse month after month, as far as not responding to user needs, doing a hellacious redesign that was retina searingly bad, being incredibly condescending toward