Best of AWS — March 2026

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    Article
    Avatar of thomasthorntonThomas Thornton·8w

    AWS Diagram Agent Skill with Draw.io MCP

    A GitHub Copilot Agent Skill that uses Draw.io MCP to automatically generate AWS architecture diagrams has been extended from its original Azure-only scope. The skill adds AWS-specific provider-aware logic including AWS4 icon support, icon availability checks, fallback mappings, and readability defaults like left-to-right flow and minimal crossing lines. Rather than treating AWS as a cosmetic add-on, the skill integrates AWS naming conventions and rendering assumptions to produce cleaner first drafts. Two example outputs are shown: a three-tier PaaS web app and an ECS Fargate multi-tier architecture. The workflow still expects engineers to refine the generated diagrams, but shifts effort from manual layout to architectural clarity.

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    Article
    Avatar of hnHacker News·7w

    GitHub - hectorvent/floci: Light, fluffy, and always free - AWS Local Emulator

    Floci is a free, open-source local AWS emulator designed as a drop-in replacement for LocalStack Community Edition, which is sunsetting its free tier in March 2026. It requires no auth token, supports unlimited CI/CD usage, and starts in ~24ms with ~13 MiB idle memory. The Docker image is ~90 MB versus LocalStack's ~1 GB. Floci supports 20+ AWS services including API Gateway v2, Cognito, ElastiCache, RDS with IAM auth, DynamoDB Streams, and more — with 408/408 SDK tests passing. Setup is a single `docker compose up` and SDK integration requires only pointing the endpoint to localhost:4566.

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    Article
    Avatar of infoqInfoQ·9w

    Netflix Automates RDS PostgreSQL to Aurora PostgreSQL Migration Across 400 Production Clusters

    Netflix built an internal automation platform to migrate nearly 400 RDS PostgreSQL production clusters to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL with minimal downtime. The system uses a self-service workflow that handles physical read replica creation from storage snapshots, WAL replication validation, CDC slot coordination, controlled quiescence and cutover, and rollback safeguards. Because Netflix routes all database access through an Envoy-based data access layer that abstracts endpoints from application code, migrations happen transparently at the infrastructure level. A real-world case study shows how the team resolved an elevated OldestReplicationSlotLag caused by a stale logical replication slot before completing a successful migration for device certification and partner billing workloads.

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    Video
    Avatar of techwithlucyTech With Lucy·10w

    This AWS Certification WILL NOT Make you a Solutions Architect (How to actually get hired)

    A former Amazon solutions architect argues that the AWS Solutions Architect Professional certification is largely useless for career advancement. Despite its prestige, the exam can be gamed through pattern recognition and AI tools, and employers increasingly view certifications without hands-on experience as a red flag. Instead, the recommended approach is a 20/40/40 split: 20% theory, 40% hands-on projects, and 40% networking, personal branding, and interview prep. The AWS Cloud Practitioner and Solutions Architect Associate certifications are sufficient as a foundation before moving directly to real-world projects.

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    Article
    Avatar of joindevopsDevOps·10w

    Our AWS Bill Spiked 3x Overnight — It Wasn’t Traffic, It Was One Missing Limit

    A DevOps engineer shares a postmortem of an AWS bill tripling overnight due to a runaway Auto Scaling Group. A background SQS worker with no concurrency ceiling triggered a self-amplifying feedback loop: slow jobs raised CPU, which launched more EC2 instances, which pulled more messages, which caused more retries. The fix involved setting a hard max on the ASG in Terraform, capping application-level concurrency with p-limit, adding circuit breakers for downstream failures, and setting up AWS Budget alerts and cost anomaly detection.

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    Video
    Avatar of seytonicSeytonic·7w

    Every Insane Hack in the 2026 Iran War (So Far)

    A rundown of cyber operations during the 2026 Iran conflict, covering US Cyber Command disrupting Iranian early warning systems, Israel hacking Tehran traffic cameras and phone networks to enable the assassination of Iran's Supreme Leader, an Iranian prayer app being hijacked to broadcast pro-Western messages, Iran's 20-day internet blackout, Iranian hackers targeting Jordan's wheat reserve via industrial control systems, Shahed drone strikes on AWS data centers in the UAE and Bahrain knocking out over 100 services, and a devastating wiper attack on Stryker (a US healthcare company) carried out by pro-Iranian group Handler Hack via a compromised Microsoft Intune admin account that wiped 200,000+ devices. Hacktivist groups like 313 Team and Russian No-Name are also active but largely limited to short DDoS campaigns.

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    Video
    Avatar of anthonysistilliAnthony Sistilli·8w

    proof we live in a simulation

    A commentary-style video transcript covering a series of absurd real-world events framed as evidence we live in a simulation: the White House posting AI-generated war videos on Twitter, a viral McDonald's CEO burger review spawning a Burger King CEO clap-back, Taco Bell launching Mountain Dew Baja Blast under-eye patches, AWS blaming an outage on AI-assisted deployments (vibe coding), and McKinsey's AI platform getting hacked within 2 hours. The AWS incident is used to raise broader questions about AI as a corporate scapegoat and whether enterprise vibe coding is ready for production.

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    Article
    Avatar of awsfundamentalsAWS Fundamentals·10w

    The $5 AWS Setup That Replaced My Local OpenClaw

    A step-by-step guide to running OpenClaw, an open-source personal AI agent, on a $5/month AWS Lightsail instance instead of locally. The setup uses SSM Session Manager for zero open ports (no SSH), GitHub as version-controlled memory for the agent's config and skills, Slack as the messaging interface, and Terraform for provisioning. Integrations with Notion, Gmail, and AWS Cost Explorer are covered, along with a workflow using Claude Code to write and deploy new agent skills. The guide also warns about LLM cost management for always-on agents, recommending cheap models like GPT-5 nano or Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite.

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