As the title states, out of work system administrator with 20+ years of classic IT experience. I've been thinking more and more about switching to cloud engineering (should have done this long ago, apparently), but would like to hear from others who have made the switch as well as a general outlook on the job outlook.

My background: BS degree in IT, 6 different certs, plenty of experience from MSP to System Admin work, including Windows Server setup and management, AD, Exchange, SharePoint, O365, Networking, and I know it's starting to look like a resume but I just wanted to share a little bit about my experience and how it may transition into similar AWS or Azure roles.

Have any older fellas like me successfully made the transition? If so, how long did it take you guys to get the certs and how long after to land a job?

Thanks in advance!

Where can I find someone who can guide a company on navigating the AWS Partner Network, including how to use and maximize MDF?

We're getting increasingly involved in the AWS ecosystem. We're on the Marketplace, AWS sellers bring us opportunities, and we bring deals there too. But I feel like we have some significant knowledge gaps, and we can do much more.

Thank you in advance for any help or advice you can offer!
Write here or DM me, please.

I am completely trapped in an AWS account security loop and need a human engineer to escalate my case.

Root Cause: I closed my initial default project on a new account before a replacement could be provisioned. My root credentials authenticate perfectly, but because there are 0 active projects, the top-level router crashes. Every console subdomain (including Billing and standard Support) immediately returns: "Something went wrong. This project is currently inaccessible. For more information, visit AWS Settings."

The Loop:
1. I cannot log in to open a traditional support case because the console is completely broken.
2. I tried using the unauthenticated/offline forms, but the automated security bot immediately rejects them, stating I must log in to discuss account-specific information.
3. Tickets submitted via the legacy ://aws.com timeline have sat unassigned and ignored since October 8.

I have already paid any outstanding balances. I need an Account / Sign-In Engineer to manually clear the profile initialization block or inject a blank default project context so my console can load. My public form transaction reference numbers are: 179198721400075 and 179140354800545. u/AWSSupport — Can you please escalate these references to a human engineering team?

tldr: Trawl is an ALB/S3/CF access log analyzer that runs entirely in your browser.

Hey folks,

recently I found myself having to generate a report from some AWS access logs for one of my clients. As this turned out to be a recurring task, I planned to build this into a reusable self-service application but didn't like the idea of having to build yet another backend+frontend stack and take care of hosting it.

I remembered hearing something about a WASM version of DuckDB but I was a bit worried about the performance when millions of lines of log data. Luckily it turned out to be good enough for my use case so I gave it a go.

Building this was a very enjoyable experience and it's crazy what kind of functionality you can achieve nowadays in the browser with no backend at all.

Big kudos to DuckDB which is the main driver of this project.

You can give it a try by loading some sample data or your own access logs. Again, nothing leaves your browser, all processing is happening locally.

Loading 1GB of data takes ~60 seconds on my end. No need to keep the browser tab open though during the initial load and the tab name shows you the progress.

Tried improving performance by enabling the experimental multithreading support but it didn't result in any meaningful gain. Will keep an eye on that though.

Wish you guys a pleasant day and a stable AWS bill 😉

Hey everyone, so stupid mistake on my end. When I set up my account I used an email I check infrequently and missed the emails requesting 2 documents from me (proof of ID + bank statement). I assumed the setup had been completed and AWS had everything I needed so I never considered that I'd need to submit more documents. When I checked last last Saturday I found my account was suspended, and then checked my email and found out why

I put in a support ticket and heard back from the agent that they'd forwarded my case to the specialized Account Verification team, who will follow up with me directly regarding submitting the documents and the status of my account. For anyone who has ever been in a similar position I'm just wondering how long it took to get your account reactivated, and if there's a faster way I can get them the documents they need so my account can be reactivated faster.

I'm learning AWS so it's not the end of the world for work or something but I thought I'd just ask here in case anyone knew or had dealt with this before. Thank you

Hi All,

I've identified a bug in AWS WorkSpaces caused by an incompatibility between the WorkSpaces Personal Smart Card driver and the Windows October 2026 cumulative update.

It manifests as the update downloading and showing as "Pending Restart", however during the commit phase it fails and rolls back with error 0x80070002.

Once this happens, check:

C:\Windows\WinSxS\pending.xml

You should see references to:

C:\Windows\System32\WinSCard.dll

The WSP agent implementation does some unusual hard-linking of this file to its own version, which Windows servicing doesn't like. During the update process, poqexec.exe fails when attempting to modify the file, causing the update to roll back.

This has been confirmed with Amazon Support, who are working on a permanent fix, although there is currently no ETA for resolution, expected in next agent version.

Workaround:

1. Ensure the WorkSpaces agent version is 2.2.0.2482 or later (August 2026 release minimum).
2. If running an earlier version, reboot the workspace to pick up the newer agent version.
3. Create the following registry value:

Key: HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-18\Software\GSettings\com\nicesoftware\dcv\smartcard

Value Name: Process-Denylist

Type: REG_SZ

Value Data: ['poqexec.exe']

1. Reboot the machine to apply the exception.
2. Patch and reboot as normal.

This prevents poqexec.exe from interacting with the smart card component during servicing and allows the cumulative update to install successfully.

Hope that helps whilst we wait for a fix!

Saw this post on how to check if your CloudTrail bucket was compromised in the two recent LiteLLM malware attacks.

I'm working on a self-hosted CRM that companies would deploy in their own AWS or Azure account, or on-prem, instead of using a SaaS product. Before I go much further, I want to understand the side I worry about most: what it's actually like for the people who keep this kind of software running.

My assumption so far is that the software itself is the easy part, and the ongoing work is what makes or breaks it: upgrades, patches, backups, someone getting paged at 2am. I'm designing around that. It ships as containers on a managed Postgres, upgrades apply themselves with no manual steps, and there are as few extra services to run as possible. But I don't know whether that matches what really matters to you, or whether I'm solving the wrong problem.

So I'd really like to hear from people who've run business apps like this. When your company chose to self-host something instead of paying for SaaS, what drove it: cost, compliance, data residency, or just wanting control? Once it was running, how much effort did it take in practice, and did that surprise anyone? I'm also curious about the other side: the apps that were a pleasure to run, what made them that way, and the ones that made you swear you'd never self-host again.

And if you've ever evaluated something like this and said "no, we'll just pay for SaaS," I'd love to know what tipped it. Those stories are probably the most useful to me.

Not selling anything here, and there's nothing to sign up for. I'm trying to build this the right way before it's too late to change course. Thanks for any stories, good or bad.

EDIT: I overstated, and shouldn't have said ERP

Is there any way to make it prepaid?

How do u make AWS bills predictable?

Hi, I opened a new AWS account (India, AWS India billing) for my startup about a week ago. Everything else works: S3, SES and IAM, and our AWS Activate credits were even approved and applied.

But CloudFront won’t let me create a distribution. I get:

“Your account must be verified before you can add new CloudFront resources. To verify your account, please contact AWS Support and include this error message.”

CloudShell also says “Your account verification is in progress. This may take up to two days for new accounts.”

What I’ve done so far:

• Verified my phone number
• Completed contact, payment and tax details
• Opened a support case with the error message, and followed up

It’s been about a week now. Has anyone else run into this with a new account, especially in India? How long did it take, and was there anything that sped it up? Should I open a separate case just for CloudFront?

Case ID: 179265014000179
Also I cant raise another case. When clicked on the Create Case it redirect to the same support home screen.

Thanks!

Hello everyone not sure if this is the right server for reviving a rtsp aws but can anyone tell me if this rtsp link is still active or not?

Found this from the wayback machine and it appears to be a episode of a kids show named Heulwen a Lleu (a welsh television programme)

Here is the link btw:

rtsp//:ec2-46-137-111-46.eu-west--1.compute.amazonaws.com:1935/httpl/_definst_/mp4:amazons3/bsmvid2/UK/standard/600/heulwen_a-lleu_abracadabra_cymraeg_re145r_001e2e2af4.mp4

I dont want to deal with signing up on amazon aws so thats why im asking for anyone to help!

Hello everyone. I want to publish my Medium blog to Medium publication that related with AWS but I confused. Here anyone can recommended me to publish?

AWS archived rain in July with a README notice and no migration guide. Nobody picked it up, so I did.

If you haven't used it: rain deploys CloudFormation the way you'd want the AWS CLI to. You get a readable change set, a confirm prompt, live progress and the real error when something fails, even in a nested stack. It also adds a few template tags. My favorite is `!Rain::Embed`, which keeps code in its own file and puts it into the template at deploy time.

cfnrain v1.25.1 is the original rain code under a new name. Templates, directives, config files and artifact buckets work as before. Next up is dependency updates, then the first changes that might break compatibility, where they buy a real usability win.

If you use rain, tell me what you can't live without, or join the direction discussion. If nobody does, I'll make the calls myself.

- Repo and releases: https://github.com/awesome-foundation/cfnrain

- Direction discussion: https://github.com/awesome-foundation/cfnrain/discussions/20

- The longer story: https://chaosguru.substack.com/p/aws-killed-rain-im-keeping-it-going?r=3f5ebc

Curious what people actually do in teams without a dedicated FinOps person. Cron

and Lambda scripts? AWS Instance Scheduler? Tags and good intentions? Someone

remembering on Friday?

The parts I keep hearing are painful: developers needing a stopped box at 9pm,

scripts that break when someone renames a tag, and RDS starting itself again after 7

days.

What's worked for you, and what did you give up on?

Hi, I'm a student learning AWS. I'm looking for project ideas. It should take about a week for a team of 5 and only use services available for free tier.

So far, we've studied things like VPC, subnets, security groups, nat gateways, ec2, ALB, auto scaling, cloud formation, cloudfront etc. We've not really done much for monitoring or IAM. We also studied using docker, no k8s yet, no terraform yet.

I'm hoping we get to use some, if not everything we've learned. We're not developers, but some of us know how to use git and some python. Really, we're just looking to make a simple project that we can decide to continue on later if we want. Also, I would love for there to be some way to measure the efficiency/impact. We are down to learn 1 or 2 new things, but we only have a week.

Aside from project ideas, I would also love advice on how a team should be assigned different roles since all of us are focusing on the same thing. I was thinking one project lead for documenting and decisions, 2 on infrastructure and IaC, and 2 on platform containerization. The only thing I'm unsure of is how everyone will constantly have sth to do rather than waiting for one team to finish.

It would be awesome to be able relate it to an irl scenario or task that a company might have undergone. Even better if recent.

I know I'm asking a lot, but I would really appreciate it if I got some good advice. Please don't be too harsh if this isn't the right place to ask.

I recently built a AWS serverless side project and felt that coding agents struggled to gather the broader wholistic context regarding code and devops. I studied about some alternative to SAM like SST but they all believe in the same concept - code and infra should be separate - Infra as Code (IaC).

Then I stumbled across encore.dev which rethought all of this fundamentally using Infra from Code (IfC) and realised this is exactly what I was looking for.

But one major issue, it supports exclusively container services like EKS meanwhile I use solely serverless for my weekend projects. Hence, decided to build a Infra from Code (IfC) for pure AWS serverless services.

Decided to dogfood it by making my own side project use it. This approach allowed make eventually verify whether IfC compiler works.

So have a look it and tell me what you think about it. Don't keep your expectations too high, this is just a cute side project. :-)

framework: https://github.com/harsh-vardhhan/syncploy
serverless app: https://github.com/harsh-vardhhan/EHR-backend
documentation: https://www.syncploy.com/

Hi ,

Historically, our organization had a dedicated DBA team for managing on-premise databases. However, with the migration to cloud databases like AWS Aurora (MySQL & Postgres) and Snowflake, management adopted the mindset that "the cloud manages everything now." Consequently, database responsibilities fell entirely onto our feature developers.

While AWS/Snowflake handles the physical infrastructure and basic backups, we are getting heavily burnt by data-layer issues. Our generalist developers don't have deep database expertise, and we are experiencing frequent performance bottlenecks, sub-optimal indexing,clustering,partitioning choices and spiking cloud bills etc.

So thinking of having a specialized Database expert Team . Is this the right move? For those in modern cloud environments, do you still see a need for a dedicated data team, or should developers truly own the database end-to-end? If its yes, then want to understand , what all should this specialized team actually be responsible for in your opinion?

Want to understand experts thought on the same.

How long does it take for AWS support to answer on the ticket? I've been waiting for 2 weeks already, no traction at all. They blocked my account and I can't add a payment method to pay for educational sub, and they're not answering or unblocking my acc. How am I supposed to work with them?

In case AWS answers here - case ID 179202198100662

AWS Transit Gateway now supports 1:1 NAT (SNAT/DNAT) for connecting overlapping networks. This is fully managed. Customer doesn't have to figure out how to SNAT and DNAT the source and target networks.

The article says it uses "Regional Private NAT Gateway" but as of now, customers can not create Regional Private NAT Gateways. Private NAT Gateways have to be zonal. They can only create Regional Public NAT Gateways. Maybe that feature is also coming soon? Nevertheless, this is a nice new feature.

"AWS Transit Gateway and AWS Cloud WAN now provide managed one-to-one network address translation (NAT) directly on their attachments, through integration with Regional Private NAT Gateway. This enables customers to connect private networks that share the same IP address ranges without renumbering either network, deploying a NAT appliance, or writing return-traffic rules"

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2026/10/aws-transit-gateway-cloud-wan-1-1-nat/

I need some help guys

I installed Odoo Community edition in an Ubuntu 24.04 OS in AWS EC2, the installation is successful and "SUDO SYSTEMCTL STATUS ODOO" returns Active but i can't access Odoo remotely using the IP address of my machine.

Odoo is Active but http://13.63.53.194:8069/ does not work in my browser (i am running Odoo in AWS EC2)

I have Odoo working just fine in an Ubuntu VM and can access it from windows just by using the IP address of the VM and the Port of Odoo, but it seems not to work with AWS.

In case you didn't know as part of the AI race there's going to be a data center belt in my town. I don't know exactly what's happened. All I know is that on October 19th it was the final court hearing regarding it for final approval.

Now as much as some of yall hate Amazon web services I don't know if there will be anyway we can stop them. The primary reason is that lots of things like Reddit and Netflix and even PlayStation network is hosted by AWS. So yeah in case some of you guys didn't know Amazon web services is basically 1/3 of the internet.

Northern Indiana Public Service Company (NIPSCO) states that repairs will not have their utility rates raised when the data center is in operation.

Hobart says that this will generate lots of revenue for public works and the school system.

The city council has not yet revealed if they signed any non-disclosure agreements with Amazon yet.

We don't know yet if it will be closed loop.

A group of Hobart residents are suing the city council, alongside the plan commission to block the project.

Source: https://hobart.nwidatafacts.com/

AWS put out a lot of cost updates this week. Here is a quick list of the changes that actually help you cut costs:

• Bedrock cuts down your AI prompts: Bedrock now shrinks your text prompts automatically while keeping the same answer quality. Shorter prompts mean you pay for fewer input tokens and get faster replies. Source
• Lambda stops infinite loops on EventBridge: Lambda now catches runaway loops on custom EventBridge buses and stops them. If a bad setup triggers an endless loop, this stops it before you get a huge surprise bill. Source
• ECS Gateway lets 25 services share one load balancer: This new tool sets up and runs Application Load Balancers for you. Up to 25 ECS services can share a single load balancer, so you stop paying for extra idle load balancers. Source
• DynamoDB lets you unhook region copies without losing data: You can now disconnect a region from a global table without deleting the table or its data. You stop paying for cross-region copying while keeping the local data safe. Source
• Redshift keeps system logs longer without custom code: Redshift now saves system table data past the old 7-day limit using S3 Tables. You no longer need to build and pay for custom data pipelines just to keep old logs. Source
• CloudWatch log sharing reaches more regions: You can now put logs from many accounts and regions into one place in GovCloud and 13 more regions. This makes it much easier to track everything in one spot. Source
• CloudWatch Omni expands to 8 new regions: This tool lets you view monitoring data across AWS accounts and other clouds in one screen. Finding bugs faster means less wasted time for your team. Source
• Better clock sync for 135 more EC2 instance types: More EC2 servers now get super accurate time sync across all regions. This helps apps that need exact timing run smoothly and makes log tracking cleaner. Source

Source: FinOps Weekly Newsletter