bartek@aws: ~/news
$ whoami

Bartek Chojnacki

$ AWS Architect · DevOps · Cloud
Saturday, August 1, 2026

Master Cost and Performance Trade-offs with Amazon EMR Advanced Scaling

Amazon EMR on EC2 just got smarter with Advanced Managed Scaling—pick your strategy based on what matters most: squeeze costs with conservative scaling, balance both worlds, or go aggressive for SLA-critical jobs. The post walks you through real scenarios so you can dial in the perfect scaling config for your data pipeline.

source: [aws/big-data-blog]

Friday, July 31, 2026

Critical DoS Vulnerability in smithy-rs JSON Parser

aws-smithy-json has a nasty uncontrolled recursion bug in its unknown-key skip path that lets unauthenticated attackers crash smithy-rs generated servers with a denial of service attack. This affects all servers built with the vulnerable library. You should patch immediately—no user interaction needed to trigger the exploit. Check AWS Security Bulletin for detailed mitigation steps and patched versions.

source: [aws/security-bulletin]

also that day:

Thursday, July 30, 2026

Amazon MSK Express Now Streams Kafka Data Directly to S3

Amazon MSK Express brokers can now deliver Apache Kafka data straight to S3 buckets with zero manual connector management. This fully managed feature automatically scales to 10 GB/s throughput, handles retries and backpressure on its own, and cuts costs by up to 60% compared to self-managed solutions. Perfect for log archival, compliance, and ML training pipelines.

source: [aws/whats-new]

AWS IAM Policy Simulator Gets Smarter and Moves Into the Console

AWS has upgraded IAM Policy Simulator with a major refresh—it's now built right into the IAM console instead of running separately. The tool can now test service control policies (SCPs) and lets you simulate "what if" scenarios by excluding specific policies. You'll get better insights into cross-account permissions and how conditions like regions and tags affect access decisions.

source: [aws/whats-new]

also that day: