awsthro00945
Joined 5 years ago
Joined 5 years ago
>At the same time you are able to this internal lookups?
I looked him up on LinkedIn. Nothing internal about it.
Rich was in the sales org. His primary job was sales. Reinvent is a sales conference. Speaking at reinvent is a sales pitch. He was a salesperson. I'm not sure why you're so offended by that. Being a salesperson isn't bad, it's just an explanation for why engineers wouldn't have heard of him.
I just looked him up (I had not heard of him before seeing his name mentioned on r/aws a few days ago) and he was an L7 TPM/Practice Manager in AWS's sales organization. That's not really a notably high position, and in the grand scheme of Amazon pay scales, isn't that high up. An L7 TPM gets paid about the same as, or sometimes less than, an L6 software dev (L6 is "senior", which is ~5-10 years of experience).
Also, him being in the sales org means he had practically nothing to do with the engineering of the service. AWS Sales is a revolving door of people. I mean no offense towards Rick (again, I didn't know him or even know of him before I read his name in a comment a few days ago), but I would not read anything at all into the fact that an L7 Sales TPM left for another company.
Almost every single team at Amazon that I can think of off the top of my head uses DynamoDB (or DDB + S3) as its sole data store. I know that there are teams out there using relational DBs as well (especially in analytics), but in my day-to-day working with a constantly changing variety of teams that run customer-facing apps, I haven't seen RDS/Redis/etc being used in months.
If an attacker can do it, you must assume they will do it. Because they will. That should be the starting point for any threat model.
IP address spoofing is a thing. Blocking CIDR ranges might protect you from low-effort, drive-by botnets that constantly scan the entire internet (which all should be completely mitigated by using certificate based auth anyway), but blocking based on IP address is absolutely not an effective control against a determined hacker.
You must consider your threat model. For your personal instance that you host hobby things on, you probably won't be targeted via IP spoofing. For any type of company, you should not be relying on CIDR blocking as part of your security layers. CIDR blocking is only effective at reducing the clutter of your logs, which is a convenience, not a security control. The real security control is using proper auth methods, which are so easy to do at this point that it's ridiculous for even a hobbyist to not do them.
Individuals can individually choose to pretend covid isn't a thing, but society as a whole cannot simply choose to suddenly restore our medical infrastructure, fix supply chains, grow the labor market, etc. Covid's effect on those things won't magically go away just because someone says "you know what, I'm tired of waiting on covid! I'm going to be normal now!"
Adjustments to these will happen over time and humanity may "continue", but when that happens is not a choice we make.
How? Rick wasn't part of the DynamoDB service team. He wasn't an engineer, nor a manager on the team, nor even a product manager. He was a salesperson that specialized in DDB. He most likely had very little interactions, if any, with the engineering team. I don't see how him leaving speaks at all to anything about the inner workings of the engineering teams.
Rick seems cool, and after skimming some of his chats he seems really knowledgeable about the customer-facing side of DDB, and I mean absolutely no disrespect to him. But I think you're making way too many assumptions about his "rank" and "influence" within the company.