Month: October 2023

Another step forward recently with the announcement that AWS Lambda now supports IPv6 for connections made from your lambda-executed code.

Its great to see another minor improvement like this. External resources that your service depends upon – APIs, etc – should now see connections over IPv6.

If you host an API, then you should be making it dual-stack in order to facilitate your clients making IPv6 connections, and avoiding things like small charged and complexity for using up scarce IPv4 addresses.

However, this is also useful if you’re trying to access private resources with in an AWS VPC.

VPC Subnets can be IPv4 only, dual-stack, or IPv6 only. Taking the IPv6 only approach permits you to provision vast numbers of EC2 instances, RDS, etc. Now your Lambda code can access those services directly without needing a proxy bottleneck) to do so.

At some stage, we’ll be looking at VPCs that are IPv6 only, with only API Gateways and/or Elastic Load Balancers being dual stack for external inbound requests.

Presumably Lambda will be dual stack for some time, but perhaps there is a future possibility that IPv6-only Lambda could be a thing – ditching the IPv4 requirement completely for use cases that support. Even then, having a VPC lambda connecting to an IPv6 only subnet, but with DNS64 and NAT64 enabled, would perhaps still permit backwards connectivity to IPv4 only services. It’s a few hops to jump through, but could be useful when there is very rare IPv4-only services being accessed from your code.

For anyone learning AWS, then online learning platform that is Skillbuilder.aws is a well known resource. It took over from training.aws as the training platform several years ago, though the latter lives on in a very minor way – as a bridge between SkillBuilder and the AWS Certification portal.

Many individuals hold AWS certifications – personal I currently hold 9 of them. The majority of people have those certifications in an AWS Training & Certification account that is accessed via logging in via a personal login – something not linked to your employer. This is because certifications remain attached to the individual, not the employer.

Historically, this meant using Logon For Amazon, to use the same credentials you could potentially use on the Amazon.com retail platform. Yes, the same credentials that some people buy underpants with also links to your AWS Certifications.

In the AWS Partner space, individuals often end up needing to acquire AWS Accreditations; however they are not exposed on SkillBuilder.aws to individuals not linked to a recognised AWS Partner organisation. Instead, individuals much register in the AWS Partner portal, using a recognised email address domain that links to a given AWS partner entity.

From the partner portal, a user can then access SkillBuilder, using the AWS Partner Portal as a login provider, triggering the creation of a (second) SkillBuilder login – but this time linked as a Partner account.

This is clearly confusing, having multiple logins.

SkillBuilder has evolved, and now also offers paid subscriptions for enterprises. For that set of organisations, federated logins (SSO) are available.

Now, the situation is changing again for individuals. AWS has introduced their separate identity store, called the AWS Builder ID.

Luckily, this new AWS Builder ID does not create a separate identity within SkillBuilder, but adds an additional login for the account linked to your existing Login with Amazon identity.

Onboarding to this is easy. The process validates that you have the email address, and then you can simply use the AWS Builder ID login option where you used to use Login with Amazon.

I’d suggest if you are learning AWS, start using your AWS Builder ID to access SkillBuilder.