Hava Blog and Latest News

In Cloud Computing This Week [Jan 28th 2022]

Written by Team Hava | January 28, 2022

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

 

Here's a cloud round up of all things GCP, Azure and AWS for the week ending Friday 28th January 2022

Here are Hava we released a stack of new features including several improvements to the AWS security group view, launched the much anticipated Azure security view, made a change to how connections are displayed on infrastructure diagrams and released SSO for business accounts. You can read all about the January releases here: 

https://www.hava.io/blog/hava-updates-january-2022 

To stay in the loop, make sure you subscribe using the box on the right of this page.

Of course we'd love to keep in touch at the usual places. Come and say hello on:

Facebook.      Linkedin.     Twitter.

AWS Updates and Releases

Source: aws.amazon.com

 
Amazon QuickSight now supports comparative (e.g., year-over-year) and cumulative (e.g., year-to-date) time period functions. These new functions allow QuickSight authors to quickly implement advanced date/time calculations without having to use complicated row offsets or pre-computed columns, allowing these calculations to be added in regular business reporting, trend analysis and time series analysis. For further details, visit here.

AWS customers in the AWS Asia Pacific (Jakarta) Region can now use Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS).

Amazon EFS is a simple, serverless, set-and-forget, elastic file system that makes it easy to set up, scale, and cost-optimize file storage in the AWS Cloud. It is built to scale on demand to store petabytes of data without disrupting applications, growing and shrinking automatically as you add and remove files, eliminating the need to provision and manage capacity to accommodate growth.


 
Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for PostgreSQL and Amazon RDS on AWS Outposts now supports PostgreSQL major version 14. PostgreSQL 14 includes performance improvements for parallel queries, heavily-concurrent workloads, partitioned tables, logical replication, and vacuuming. PostgreSQL 14 also improves functionality with new capabilities such as long-running queries may be cancelled if the client disconnects, idle sessions can timeout and close, and stored procedures can return data.

 

Amazon RDS Performance Insights now supports collection and tracking of query execution plans for Amazon RDS for Oracle, so you can more easily identify if a change in the query execution plan is the cause of a worse performing or a stuck query.

A query execution plan is a sequence of steps used to access data in a relational database management system (RDBMS). The RDBMS query optimizer chooses the optimal execution plan from many alternative ways to execute a given query, with widely varying performance. Because query optimizers do not always make the most optimal choice, database users and administrators sometimes need to manually examine and tune the plans to improve performance. Correlating this performance data can take hours without specialized expertise.


 
You can now create and update records in SAP ERP (ECC, S/4 HANA) and Business Warehouse (BW, BW/4HANA) with Amazon AppFlow and SAP OData APIs using the Amazon AppFlow SAP OData connector.

 
AWS IoT Greengrass is now available in Canada (Central) region. AWS IoT Greengrass is an Internet of Things (IoT) edge runtime and cloud service that helps customers build, deploy, and manage device software. With AWS IoT Greengrass, customers can have their connected devices run AWS Lambda functions, Docker containers, or both, execute predictions based on machine learning models, keep device data in sync, and communicate with other devices securely – even when not connected to the Internet.

 
AWS Resilience Hub, which provides a central place to define, validate, and track the resilience of your applications on AWS, has just launched in 13 additional AWS Regions: US West (N. California), Africa (Cape Town), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Canada (Central), Europe (London), Europe (Milan), Europe (Paris), Europe (Stockholm), Middle East (Bahrain), and South America (São Paulo).

 
AWS are excited to announce the launch of prediction explanations for Amazon Fraud Detector machine learning (ML) models, available via both the AWS Console and SDK. Prediction explanations report the impact of the predictors (or input variables) on a fraud score, which helps customers achieve greater visibility into how an ML model arrived at a particular fraud score.
Amazon Fraud Detector (AFD) is a fully managed service that makes it easy to identify potentially fraudulent online activities, such as the creation of fake accounts or online payment fraud. Using ML under the hood and based on over 20 years of fraud detection expertise from AFD automatically identifies potentially fraudulent activity in milliseconds—with no ML expertise required.

 

You can now access 5 new metrics for PrivateLink-based VPC Endpoints and Endpoint Services. AWS PrivateLink is a fully-managed private connectivity service that enables customers to access AWS services, third-party services or internal enterprise services hosted on AWS in a secure and scalable manner while keeping network traffic private.


 
Amazon EC2 G4dn instances which provide a cost-effective GPU platform for deploying machine learning models in production and graphics-intensive applications are now available in the Asia Pacific (Osaka) AWS region.

 

Contact Lens for Amazon Connect now includes a new custom vocabulary capability that helps businesses improve the accuracy of speech recognition for product names, brand names, and domain-specific terminology by expanding the vocabulary of Contact Lens’ speech-to-text engine. 

Businesses can provide a list consisting of domain-specific words and phrases, words that aren’t being recognized correctly, and proper nouns. They can also add custom pronunciations using International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) characters for each out-of-lexicon term. Alternatively, businesses can use the standard orthography of a language to mimic the way that a word or phrase sounds. They can also designate exactly how a terminology should be displayed when it is transcribed (e.g. “Street” as “St.” versus “ST”). 


 
Amazon MQ is now authorized as FedRAMP Moderate in the US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon) Regions.

 
Amazon Textract is a machine learning service that automatically extracts text, handwriting, and data from scanned documents and goes beyond simple optical character recognition (OCR) to identify, understand, and extract data from forms and tables.

 
Amazon EC2 R5b instances are now available in AWS Asia Pacific (Seoul) Region. R5b instances are powered by the AWS Nitro System and offer up to 60 Gbps of EBS bandwidth and 260,000 I/O operations per second (IOPS), enabling customers to lift and shift memory intensive applications to AWS

 
Starting this week, memory optimized Amazon EC2 X2iezn instances are available. Amazon EC2 X2iezn instances are powered by 2nd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors with an all core turbo frequency of up to 4.5 GHz, the fastest in the cloud.
X2iezn instances deliver the highest all-core turbo CPU performance from Intel Xeon Scalable processors in the cloud, and deliver up to 55% better compute price performance than X1e instances. 

 

You can now connect your Apache Kafka applications to Amazon MSK in the Asia Pacific (Osaka) AWS Region.

Amazon MSK is a fully managed service for Apache Kafka and Kafka Connect that makes it easy for you to build and run applications that use Apache Kafka as a data store. Amazon MSK is fully compatible with Apache Kafka, which enables you to quickly migrate your existing Apache Kafka workloads to Amazon MSK with confidence or build new ones from scratch.


 
Amazon Lightsail now provides you with the ability to optimize the delivery of your containerized applications to your global audience by using Lightsail CDN with your Lightsail Container Services. Lightsail containers can be configured as the origin of a Lightsail CDN distribution with just a few clicks from the Lightsail console.

 
Amazon EFS Replication provides you with an easy way to keep an up-to-date copy of your file system in a second AWS Region or within the same Region. Amazon EFS Replication enables you to replicate file data in a few clicks and without requiring you to manually provision additional infrastructure or a custom process to monitor and synchronize data changes. Amazon EFS Replication is designed to meet a recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) of minutes, enabling you to meet your business continuity and compliance requirements.

 
Starting his week, Amazon EC2 R6i instances are available in additional AWS Regions Canada (Central) and South America (São Paulo). Designed for memory-intensive workloads, R6i instances are built on the AWS Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and lightweight hypervisor, which delivers practically all of the compute and memory resources of the host hardware to your instances.
R6i instances are powered by 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code named Ice Lake) with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.5 GHz, offer up to 15% better compute price performance over R5 instances

 

Customers can now purchase the AWS Panorama Appliance from Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de, Amazon.it, and Amazon.es.

AWS Panorama is a machine learning (ML) appliance and software development kit (SDK) that brings computer vision (CV) to on-premises internet protocol (IP) cameras. With AWS Panorama, companies can use compute power at the edge (without streaming video to the cloud) to improve their operations, by automating visual inspection tasks like evaluating manufacturing quality, finding bottlenecks in industrial processes, and assessing worker safety within their facilities.


 
The Amazon Chime SDK lets developers add real-time audio, video, and screen share to their web applications. Developers can now replace webcam video background with an image to reduce visual distractions and help increase visual privacy.

 

Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP now enables you to increase your SSD storage capacity with the click of a button, making it even quicker and easier to meet your evolving storage needs over time. 

FSx for ONTAP file systems have two storage tiers: primary storage and capacity pool storage. Primary storage is provisioned, high-performance SSD storage for the active or latency-sensitive portion of your data set. Capacity pool storage is a fully elastic storage tier that can scale to petabytes in size and is cost-optimized for the infrequently-accessed portion of your data. Starting today, you can grow your SSD storage capacity for the active portion of your data.


 

You can now connect your Apache Kafka applications to Amazon MSK in the Africa (Cape Town) AWS Region.

Amazon MSK is a fully managed service for Apache Kafka and Kafka Connect that makes it easy for you to build and run applications that use Apache Kafka as a data store. Amazon MSK is fully compatible with Apache Kafka, which enables you to quickly migrate your existing Apache Kafka workloads to Amazon MSK with confidence or build new ones from scratch.


 
Following the announcement of updates to the PostgreSQL database, we have added support in Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for PostgreSQL minor versions 13.5, 12.9, 11.14, 10.19, and 9.6.24. We have also added support in Amazon RDS on Outposts for PostgreSQL minor versions 13.5 and 12.9.
This release closes security vulnerabilities in PostgreSQL and contains bug fixes and improvements done by the PostgreSQL community. This also includes the final release of PostgreSQL 9.6.

 
Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) now supports Amazon ECS Exec and Amazon Linux 2 for workloads running on-premises with Amazon ECS Anywhere. ECS Exec makes it easier for customers to troubleshoot errors, collect diagnostic information, interact with processes in containers during development, and get “break-glass” access to containers to debug critical issues encountered in production. With Amazon Linux 2, customers can now easily use the same AWS-secured operating system on-premises and in the cloud for development and testing.

 
AWS Elemental MediaConvert now supports creation of the AV1 (AOMedia Video 1) format in 4K frame sizes and with 10-bit color depth. These enhancements expand the AV1 encoding capabilities of AWS Elemental MediaConvert to enable creation of High Dynamic Range (HDR) 4K content for display on modern, color rich 4K playback devices.

 

Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is a scalable, highly durable, and fully managed database service for operating mission-critical MongoDB workloads.

You can now try Amazon DocumentDB for free with a 1-month free trial. New customers are eligible for 750 hours of a t3.medium instance, 30M IOs, 5GB of storage, and 5GB of backup storage for 30 days. You can also build clusters with multiple t3.medium instances. Please see the Amazon DocumentDB Free Trial Page for more details.


 

Amazon DocumentDB is a scalable, highly durable, and fully managed database service for operating mission-critical MongoDB workloads.

Amazon DocumentDB continues to increase compatibility with MongoDB and today added support for the following MongoDB APIs and indexing improvements in DocumentDB 3.6 and 4.0:

  • $mergeObjects: Aggregation pipeline operator that combines multiple documents into a single document
  • $reduce: Aggregation operator that applies an expression to each element in an array and combines them into a single value



 
Google Cloud Releases and Updates
Source: cloud.google.com

 

Anthos Clusters on VMware

Anthos clusters on VMware 1.9.3-gke.4 is now available. To upgrade, see Upgrading Anthos clusters on VMware. Anthos clusters on VMware 1.9.3-gke.4 runs on Kubernetes v1.21.5-gke.1200.

The supported versions offering the latest patches and updates for security vulnerabilities, exposures, and issues impacting Anthos clusters on VMware are 1.10, 1.9, and 1.8.

 

Dialogflow

Dialogflow CX has a new agent design best practices guide.

 
 
  •  
 

Memorystore for Redis

Released the RDB Snapshots (Preview) feature for Memorystore for Redis. For more details, see RDB Snapshots.

 .

VPC 

Accessing supported regional service endpoints using Private Service Connect with consumer HTTP(S) controls is available in General Availability.

Accessing managed services using Private Service Connect with consumer HTTP(S) controls is available in Preview.

 




Microsoft Azure Releases And Updates
Source: azure.microsoft.com
 

General availability: New Azure Maps features historical weather, air quality, and tropical storms

Develop weather and climatology enabled solutions using the historical weather, air quality and tropical storms features from Azure Maps Weather Services.

General availability: Azure Key Vault increased service limits for all its customers

 

Azure Key Vault service throughput limits have been increased for each vault, driving higher performance for your applications.

Public preview: Azure Percept DK January (2201) software update is available

 

The Azure Percept January update includes fixes related to security.

 

Public preview: Multitasking in the cost analysis preview

 

Azure Cost Management has a new tabbed experience to streamline analysis as you drill into costs.

 

Public Preview: Azure NetApp Files new features

 

Azure NetApp Files new features recently added in public preview. The new capabilities enhance your experience in using NetApp Files.


Generally available: Azure Database for MySQL – Flexible Server in two new regions

 

Provision your Azure Database for MySQL - Flexible Server today in the China East 2 and China North 2 regions.

 

Generally available: Azure NetApp Files features

Azure NetApp Files features - dual protocol, ADDS LDAP over TLS and SMB3 protocol encryption have reached general availability.

Public preview: Support for private links available on the new agent

 

Start using the new agent and data collection rules in environments with special network requirements and maintain network isolation by leveraging private links.

Generally available: Azure Backup releases new updates for hybrid backups

 

The new enhancements released for the security of hybrid backups enable you to integrate with MUA, protect against accidental deletion and avoid data loss in soft delete state.

Generally available: Kibana dashboards and visualizations on top of Azure Data Explorer

 

Elasticsearch and Kibana users can now easily migrate to Azure Data Explorer (ADX) while keeping Kibana as their visualization tool, alongside the other Azure Data Explorer experiences.A new version…

Generally available: Azure Site Recovery support for ZRS Managed Disks

With ASR, you can protect your VMs that uses ZRS managed disks by replicating them to a secondary region of your choice.


 

Have you tried Hava automated diagrams for AWS, Azure and GCP.  Get back your precious time and sanity and rid yourself of manual drag and drop diagram builders forever.
 
Hava automatically generates accurate fully interactive cloud infrastructure and security diagrams when connected to your AWS, Azure or GCP accounts. Once diagrams are created, they are kept up to date, hands free. 

When changes are detected, new diagrams are auto-generated and the superseded documentation is moved to a version history. Older diagrams are also interactive, so can be opened and individual resources inspected interactively, just like the live diagrams.
 
Check it out for free here:
View full post