In Cloud Computing This Week [Apr 15th 2022]

AWS DataSync now supports transferring files to and from Amazon FSx for OpenZFS, a fully managed service that offers highly reliable, scalable, performant, and feature-rich file storage built on the open-source OpenZFS file system. Using DataSync, you can easily and securely migrate your on-premises file or object storage to FSx for OpenZFS or perform ongoing transfers of your data between FSx for OpenZFS and your on-premises storage or AWS Storage services. You can also use DataSync to move data between FSx for OpenZFS file systems.

AWS DataSync is an online data movement service that provides you with a simple way to automate and accelerate copying data over the internet or AWS Direct Connect. DataSync securely and seamlessly connects to your Amazon FSx for OpenZFS file system, and copies files and folders together with their associated metadata. DataSync automates data transfers, including scheduling, monitoring, encryption, and data integrity validation. Support for Amazon FSx for OpenZFS complements existing DataSync capabilities to copy data between Network File System (NFS) shares, Server Message Block (SMB) shares, Hadoop Distributed File Systems (HDFS), self-managed object storage, AWS Snowcone, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets, Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) file systems, Amazon FSx for Windows File Server file systems, and Amazon FSx for Lustre file systems.

This new capability can be used in all regions where AWS DataSync and Amazon FSx for OpenZFS are available. Learn more by reading the DataSync User Guide and DataSync website.

AWS Fargate, the serverless compute engine for Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), now enables customers to scale applications faster, improving performance and reducing wait time. We have made several improvements over the last year that enable you to scale applications up to 16X faster, making it easier to build and run applications at a larger scale on Fargate.

When using the Amazon ECS service scheduler for running web and other long-running applications, you will be able to launch up to 500 tasks in under a minute per service, 16X faster than last year. Previously you would have waited for nearly 15 minutes to scale an application to 500 tasks at steady state. When running one-time or periodic batch jobs using ECS RunTask API, Fargate now allows customer accounts to burst up to 100 On-Demand or Spot tasks, with a sustained task launch rate of 20 tasks per second, 20X faster than last year. For example, if you run a batch job with 1,200 On-Demand tasks, you can now launch your job in under a minute, while previously it would have taken about 20 minutes. Similarly, EKS Fargate customers will now observe up to 20X faster scaling when using the Platform Versions referenced in the release notes.

Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP now supports Single Availability Zone (AZ) deployments. Single-AZ file systems are designed for use cases that do not require the data resiliency model of a Multi-AZ file system, such as running development and test workloads, or storing secondary copies of data that is already stored on premises or in other AWS Regions. Single-AZ file systems provide a lower-cost storage option than Multi-AZ file systems for these use cases, while offering all the same data management capabilities and features.

Production workloads typically require high availability and durability across multiple AZs. FSx for ONTAP Multi-AZ file systems offer a simple solution for these workloads by providing storage with built-in replication across AZs.

However, with some workloads you may already have another copy of your data stored elsewhere (e.g., disaster recovery from on premises to AWS or across AWS Regions), and you don’t need your Amazon FSx file system to also offer Multi-AZ resiliency. Non-production workloads such as development and testing also don’t always require high availability across AZs. Single-AZ file systems offer a cost-optimized solution for these use cases by only replicating data within an AZ. Like Multi-AZ file systems, Single-AZ file systems also offer automatic backups that are stored across multiple AZs for high durability.

You can create Single-AZ file systems in all Regions where Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP is available. To learn more about this deployment option, please visit the FSx for NetApp ONTAP documentation, the FSx for NetApp ONTAP product page, and the AWS News Blog.

The Amazon Chime SDK lets developers add intelligent real-time audio, video, and screen share to their web and mobile applications. The Amazon Chime SDK for JavaScript 3.0 and React Components 3.0 provides developers of web and Electron applications with a simplified developer experience for faster implementation and consistency across popular browsers and Chromium runtimes.

Each user’s audio and video devices are now fully decoupled from their connection to the WebRTC media session. A user can select their preferred devices in a preview window prior to joining the session, and the devices do not have to be programmatically reselected when joining the session. Once connected to the session, the user can switch devices instantly and without interrupting their WebRTC connection.

The 3.0 client libraries now use the standardized WebRTC metrics for all browsers. Safari 12, and Plan B in Session Description Protocol (SDP) negotiations are no longer supported. Client event logging to destinations including Amazon CloudWatch is now available in both client libraries. The AWS SDK dependency has been updated from 2.x to 3.x, to help avoid using multiple versions in a single application and minimize application footprint.

Starting this week, you can now automatically attach Amazon EFS file systems to new Amazon EC2 instances created from the Configure storage section of the new and improved instance launch experience, making it simpler and easier to use serverless and elastic file storage with your EC2 instances. This integration helps you simplify the process of configuring EC2 instances to mount EFS file systems at launch time with recommended mount options. In addition, from the Configure storage section of the launch experience, you can also create new EFS file systems using the recommended settings without having to leave the Amazon EC2 console.  

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 EFS can elastically scale to be consumed from tens of thousands of connections from any AWS compute including Amazon EC2 instances, serverless functions, and containers. Now, you can automatically mount your EFS file systems on newly created Amazon EC2 instances using the new and improved EC2 launch experience.  

You can now automatically attach Amazon FSx file systems to new Amazon EC2 instances you create in the new EC2 launch experience, making it simple to use feature-rich and highly-performant FSx shared file storage with your EC2 instances.

The Amazon FSx family of services makes it easy to launch, run, and scale shared storage powered by popular commercial and open-source file systems. Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP provides fully managed shared storage in the AWS Cloud with the popular data access and management capabilities of ONTAP. Amazon FSx for OpenZFS provides fully managed cost-effective shared storage powered by the popular OpenZFS file system. Now, you can automatically attach your FSx for ONTAP and FSx for OpenZFS file systems on newly created EC2 instances using the new launch experience on the EC2 Console.

To get started, simply select your FSx for ONTAP and FSx for OpenZFS file systems in the Storage section of the new EC2 launch experience. This capability is supported in all regions where these FSx services are available. See the Amazon EC2 documentation for more information.

You can now use AWS PrivateLink to privately access Amazon Connect Wisdom instances from your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) without using public IPs, and without requiring the traffic to traverse across the internet.

AWS PrivateLink provides private connectivity among VPCs, AWS services, and your on-premises networks, without exposing your traffic to the public internet. You can now manage your Amazon Connect Wisdom agent assistants without requiring an Internet Gateway in your VPC, instead using AWS PrivateLink with private IP connectivity and security groups to help meet your compliance requirements.

Amazon Connect Wisdom delivers to contact center call agents the information they need to help solve customer issues as they’re actively speaking with customers. Contact centers often use knowledge management systems and document repositories that are separate from their agents' desktop application, which forces agents to spend valuable time searching for answers while speaking with customers, leading to poor customer experiences. With Amazon Connect Wisdom, agents are delivered content recommendations personalized for the call and can search across connected repositories from within their agent desktop to find answers.

To use AWS PrivateLink, create an interface VPC endpoint for Amazon Connect Wisdom in your VPC using the Amazon VPC console, SDK, or CLI. You can also access the VPC endpoint from on-premises environments or from other VPCs using AWS VPN, AWS Direct Connect, or VPC Peering.

Amazon Connect Wisdom is available in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Europe (Frankfurt), and Europe (London) AWS regions. 

Amazon WorkSpaces is introducing two new graphics bundles based on the EC2 G4dn family: Graphics.g4dn and GraphicsPro.g4dn. These bundles allow you to run graphics- and compute-intensive workloads on desktops in the cloud as cost-effective solutions for graphics applications that are optimized for NVIDIA GPUs using NVIDIA libraries such as CUDA, CuDNN, OptiX, and Video Codec SDK. They come with the NVIDIA T4 Tensor Core GPU that features multi-precision Turing Tensor Cores and RT Cores, AWS custom second generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable (Cascade Lake) processors, and the local NVMe storage designed for applications that require fast access to locally stored data.

Graphics.g4dn bundle provides 4vCPUs, 16 GB of RAM, 16 GB of video memory, 125 GB of temporary NVMe SSD local instance store, and a minimum 100 GB of persistent storage for the user volume and root volumes. It is ideal for customers seeking low-cost GPU-enabled virtual desktops to operate mainstream graphics-intensive applications, such as engineering, design, and architectural applications.

GraphicsPro.g4dn bundle offers 16vCPUs, 64 GB of RAM, 16 GB of video memory, 225 GB of temporary NVMe SSD local instance store, and a minimum 100 GB of persistent storage for the user volume and root volumes. The offering enables high-end workstation workflows on WorkSpaces and is ideal for media production, seismic visualization, GIS data processing, data intelligence, small-scale ML model training, and ML inference.

You can deploy Graphics.g4dn or GraphicsPro.g4dn bundles with Windows 10 Desktop experience powered by Windows Server 2019, or you can bring your own Windows licenses. You can launch the new graphics bundles by selecting their names in the Amazon WorkSpaces management console, or through the Amazon WorkSpaces APIs. You can use the new graphics bundles with Amazon WorkSpaces client applications with PCoIP streaming protocols. The new graphics bundles will be available in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland, London), Asia Pacific (Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo), and South America (São Paulo).

This week, AWS announced that AWS Single Sign-On (AWS SSO) is now HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) eligible. AWS SSO is where customers create, or connect, workforce identities and manage their access centrally across AWS accounts. HIPAA eligibility means that customers subject to HIPAA - including health insurance companies, healthcare providers, healthcare clearinghouses, government programs that pay for healthcare, military and veterans' health programs, as well as their associates - can now use AWS SSO for authentication and authorization of users who configure or manage AWS workloads that store, process or transmit Protected Health Information (PHI) and users who sign into applications integrated with AWS SSO that utilize PHI.

If you have a HIPAA Business Associate Addendum (BAA) in place with AWS, you can now start using AWS SSO for HIPAA eligible workloads or use cases. With just a few clicks in the AWS SSO management console you can create users in AWS SSO, or connect your existing identity source, and configure permissions that grant your users access across AWS accounts and hundreds of pre-integrated cloud applications. For information and best practices about configuring AWS HIPAA Eligible Services, see the Architecting for HIPAA Security and Compliance on Amazon Web Services Whitepaper. 

This week AWS announced support for tagging of Amazon Personalize resources to help simplify organization and cost management of resources. Amazon Personalize enables developers to improve customer engagement through personalized product and content recommendations – no ML expertise required.

Tags are labels in the form of key-value pairs that may be attached to individual Amazon Personalize resources to search and filter resources, or allocate costs. For example, if you have multiple campaigns that are linked to different use cases on your website, you can set key as “Website” and value as “Home Page” or “Details page” to understand individual spend for each of the two campaigns.

This functionality also allows customers with multi-tenant deployments to track spend among their end customers. Tagging functionality is available for several Amazon Personalize resources such as dataset groups, solutions, campaigns, recommenders, import jobs, batch inference, batch segment jobs and other resources. 

For a complete list of the supported resources and to learn more on how to tag your Amazon Personalize resources, see the Amazon Personalize Developer Guide. Tagging support for Amazon Personalize resources is available in all Amazon Personalize regions.

Starting this week, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) customers can now create their own Prefix List in the AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) region. A prefix list is a collection of CIDR blocks that can be used to configure VPC security groups and route tables and share it with other AWS accounts using Resource Access Manager (RAM). Customers can easily audit and apply prefix lists across all their accounts to have a consistent security posture and routing behavior.

VPC security groups and route tables are used to control access and routing policies. Customers often have a common set of CIDR blocks for security group and route table configurations. Prefix lists allow customers to group multiple CIDR blocks into a single object, and use it as a reference in their security groups or route tables. This makes it easier for customers to roll out changes and maintain consistency in security groups and route tables across multiple VPCs and accounts.

With this region expansion, prefix list is now available in all AWS Regions except Asia Pacific (Jakarta), AWS GovCloud (US-East), AWS GovCloud (US-West), Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet, and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD. There is no additional charge to use prefix lists. 

The AWS Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) Scholarship program, in collaboration with Intel and Udacity, opens applications for underserved and underrepresented students in tech globally to gain hands on learning, tailored mentoring, and up to two of 2,500 Udacity Nanodegree scholarships awarded annually.

The AWS AI & ML Scholarship program brings ML concepts to life by leveraging AWS DeepRacer Student to get hands-on in learning how to train ML models that drive a virtual race car. AWS DeepRacer Student teaches foundational ML concepts by providing educational content centered on ML fundamentals. Students who successfully complete learning module quizzes and meet a designated lap time performance will be prequalified and receive a unique code to complete their scholarship application through Udacity.

Starting this week, applicants can log into AWS DeepRacer Student, opt into the scholarship program and begin tracking scholarship prerequisites on the home screen. Up to 2,000 students will be awarded a scholarship for the Udacity AI Programming with Python Nanodegree, a four-month course in a collaborative virtual class environment. Throughout the course, students will receive weekly support from Udacity mentors in small group sessions and monthly mentoring events with AWS and Intel experts on topics ranging from career development, networking, and more. The top 500 performing students in the first Nanodegree will be eligible to earn a second scholarship for an advanced Udacity Nanodegree specifically curated for the AI & ML scholarship recipients. Students in the advanced Nanodegree will also receive one to one mentoring from AWS and Intel experts to further prepare them in their career journey.

Students over the age of 16 and currently enrolled in high school or higher institutions around the globe are encouraged to apply today at awsaimlscholarship.com.