Here's a round up of all things GCP, Azure and AWS for the week ending Friday 30th April 2021.
To stay in the loop, make sure you subscribe on the right - There's a new Newsletter series starting soon that will keep you up to date with all our new releases, enhancements and capabilities and will also showcase lesser known but powerful features that you may not be aware of.
Of course we'd love to keep in touch at the usual places. Come and say hello on:
Starting today, you can now use the Node.js 14.x runtime to develop functions in AWS Lambda@Edge. This runtime is in addition to the currently supported Node.js 10.x and Node.js 12.x runtimes.
The AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) CLI now supports AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) applications, as a public preview. The AWS SAM CLI is a developer tool that makes it easier to build, locally test, package, and deploy serverless applications.
Starting today, AWS Network Firewall is available in the following ten additional regions:
Amazon Redshift, a fully-managed cloud data warehouse, now adds support for Recursive Common Table Expression (CTE). Starting today, you can use a Recursive CTE on your Redshift cluster to query hierarchical data such as organizational charts where employees reports to other employees (managers), or multi-level product orders where a product consists of many components, which in turn consist of other components.
AWS were excited to announce the launch of Amazon CloudWatch Monitoring Framework, a reference architecture that makes it easier for customers to set up Amazon CloudWatch dashboards to monitor Apache workloads running on AWS.
We’re excited to announce an intermediate, 150-minute, digital course: Amazon Elastic Block Store Primer. This free course provides an overview of Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), and explores how to balance cost and performance using different volume types. Designed for cloud architects, storage architects, and operations engineers, it includes interactive lessons, a self-paced lab, and a quiz to check your knowledge.
AWS Glue DataBrew announced native console integration with Amazon AppFlow to connect to data from applications like Salesforce, Zendesk, Slack, ServiceNow, and tens of other Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, and AWS services like Amazon S3 and Amazon Redshift. To get started, when you create a new dataset in DataBrew , you can pick from a list of pre-configured flows from AppFlow that load data (scheduled by, by event and on-demand) into Amazon S3 or create a new flow . The transferred data has to be in S3 before you can use them as input for DataBrew. You can then clean and normalize this data in DataBrew, and join, union, aggregate or combine with datasets from other data stores or SaaS applications. You can leverage already available 250+ transformations to prepare data for analytics of machine learning, without writing any code. Learn more about supported AppFlow sources and destinations .
AWS Snow Family now enables you to order, track, and manage long-term pricing Snowball Edge jobs directly from the console or via APIs. Many Snowball Edge customers deploy Snowball Edge devices for one or more years. By paying the device fees upfront, Snowball Edge’s long-term pricing options enable you to use Snowball Edge devices for 1 year or 3 years at up to a 62% discount compared to on-demand per-day fees. This pricing is available for all Snowball Edge device types in all regions where Snowball Edge is available.
Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) now supports Apache Kafka version 2.6.2 for new and existing clusters. Apache Kafka 2.6.2 includes several bug fixes and security fixes. Version 2.6.2 will replace 2.6.1 as the default recommended version for new clusters created in Amazon MSK. For a complete list of fixes, see the Apache Kafka release notes for 2.6.2 .
Amazon Redshift native support for JSON and semi-structured data is now generally available. It is based on the new data type ‘SUPER’ that allows you to ingest and store semi-structured data in your Amazon Redshift data warehouses. Amazon Redshift also includes support for PartiQL for SQL-compatible access to relational, semi-structured and nested data. Using the SUPER data type and PartiQL in Amazon Redshift, you can perform advanced analytics that combine classic structured SQL data (such as string, numeric, and timestamp) with the semi-structured SUPER data (such as JSON) with superior performance, flexibility, and ease-of-use.
This week AWS announced a free digital course: AWS Network Connectivity Options. The course introduces network connectivity concepts, describes network design patterns, and demonstrates how to apply the design patterns to common use cases. This intermediate, 150-minute course includes reading modules, quizzes to check your knowledge, and an optional hands-on lab. The course is designed for network engineers, enterprise architects, infrastructure architects, systems engineers, and application architects.
Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) now supports Apache Kafka version 2.8.0 for new and existing clusters. Apache Kafka 2.8.0 includes several bug fixes and new features that improve performance. Some of the key features include connection rate limiting to avoid problems with misconfigured clients (KIP-612 ) and topic identifiers which provides performance benefits (KIP-516 ). There is also an early access feature to replace zookeeper with a self-managed metadata quorum (KIP-500 ), however this is not recommended for use in production.
Streaming ETL jobs in AWS Glue now support SSL client certificate authentication with Apache Kafka stream producers. You can now provide a custom certificate while defining an AWS Glue connection to an Apache Kafka cluster, which AWS Glue will use when authenticating with it.
Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Amazon Nimble Studio. Nimble Studio is a managed service that empowers creative studios to produce visual effects, animation, and interactive content entirely in the cloud, from storyboard sketch to final deliverable. With Nimble Studio, artists can accelerate digital content creation with virtual workstations, high-speed storage, and scalable rendering across AWS’s global infrastructure footprint.
Media & entertainment customers face industry-wide transformation, with companies reinventing how they create content, optimize media supply chains, and compete for audience attention across streaming, broadcast, and direct-to-consumer platforms. Industry leaders such as Netflix, FORMULA 1, Discovery, and Disney use the AWS Cloud to pioneer new ways to entertain—launching new streaming services, expanding their content catalogs, and setting new standards with audiences for viewing experiences.
AWS Storage Gateway adds a new gateway type, Amazon FSx File Gateway, providing low-latency on-premises access to fully managed file shares in the cloud. Customers that want to take advantage of fully managed cloud file storage, but require low latency for their users and applications, can now easily extend Amazon FSx for Windows File Server into their existing on-premises environment.
AWS Proton now features a cancellation API to help you manage your deployments in real time. You can use the cancel deployment API to stop the deployment of a service and try again if it’s taking too long or has an error.
AWS Nitro Enclaves now supports the creation of isolated compute environments, called enclaves, from parent EC2 instances running Windows operating system. Nitro Enclaves further isolates the CPU and memory of the enclave from users, applications, and libraries on the parent EC2 instance.
AWS Proton now allows customers to import their existing shared resources as customer-managed environments. Customers can now create environments in AWS Proton by providing an infrastructure-as-code template that AWS Proton will provision, or by linking to their existing provisioned resources. This allows customers to start incorporating Proton in their existing infrastructure without having to recreate the shared resources.
The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Java (JDBC) Driver for PostgreSQL is now available in preview. This open-source database driver allows applications connecting to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL to minimize failover time by closely monitoring the database cluster status.
Starting this week, you can configure AWS Systems Manager OpsCenter to automatically aggregate security findings from AWS Security Hub into OpsCenter as operational issues. This enables operations engineers and IT professionals to view, investigate, and resolve security issues along with other operational issues in OpsCenter. Additionally, you can now view aggregated Security Hub findings across multiple accounts and Regions in AWS Systems Manager Explorer to help you check overall security posture. AWS Systems Manager OpsCenter enables operators to track and resolve operational items related to AWS resources in a central place and AWS Systems Manager Explorer is an operations dashboard that provides a view of your operations data across your AWS accounts and Regions. AWS Security Hub gives you a comprehensive view of your security alerts and security posture across your AWS accounts.
Today we are announcing the availability of on-demand Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 with High Availability and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 with High Availability Amazon Machine Images. Customers can combine the scale, performance and elasticity of Amazon EC2 with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) with High availability (HA) to easily build reliable and highly available compute clusters for mission critical workloads. RHEL with HA AMIs are pre-configured with software packages and access to Red Hat’s High availability add-on repositories that customers can use to build and maintain their instances. RHEL with HA can be launched directly from the Amazon EC2 console and marketplace.
Amazon CloudWatch announces the availability of moving graphs, which allows you to animate your CloudWatch Dashboard and more easily see the progression of health and operational performance trends over time.
Amazon Kendra is an intelligent search service powered by machine learning, that enables organizations to provide more relevant information to customers and employees, when they need it. Starting today, Amazon Kendra is giving AWS customers more control when it comes to optimizing search results for end users with the release of dynamic relevance tuning.
AWS Glue is a serverless data integration service that makes it easy to discover, prepare, and combine data for analytics, machine learning, and application development. AWS Glue custom connectors makes it easy for customers to transfer data between SaaS applications, cross-cloud data stores, AWS services, data warehouses, custom data sources, and Amazon S3. Today, we are announcing the the availability of data sink capability that will allow customers to use bidirectional connectors as both source and destination. Data sink capability for AWS Glue custom connectors is also supported on AWS Glue Studio enabling a no-code experience for users building their data pipelines.
We are pleased to announce that AWS Control Tower customers can discover a curated collection of third-party software built for AWS Control Tower from within the AWS Control Tower Console. You can choose from professional services and software solutions including identity management, security for a multi-account environment, centralized networking, operational intelligence, Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), cost management or offerings for customized guardrails, account factory, regulatory compliance solutions, and enterprise-specific solutions (e.g. Internet of Things, data lake, etc).
AWS Transit Gateway is now available in the Asia Pacific (Osaka) AWS Region along with support for AWS Direct Connect. AWS Transit Gateway enables customers to connect thousands of Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (Amazon VPCs) and their on-premises networks using a single gateway.
Patches 1.9.2, 2.7.2, 3.4.2, 4.0.2 are now available for customers using Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition. For detailed release notes visit the version documentation . You can apply the new patch version in the AWS Management Console, via the AWS CLI, or via the RDS API. For detailed instructions, please see the technical documentation .
This week, AWS Secrets Manager launched the AWS Secrets and Configuration Provider (ASCP), a plugin for the industry-standard Kubernetes’ Secrets Store CSI driver. ASCP enables applications running in Kubernetes pods to retrieve secrets from AWS Secrets Manager easily, without the need for custom code. Once installed, ASCP ensures your applications always receive the most recent version of your secrets as these are rotated. As a result, you automatically benefit from the rotation and lifecycle management features that Secrets Manager provides, without added coding effort. ASCP also enables convenient and secure access to your configurations in AWS SSM Parameter Store. AWS Secrets and Configuration Provider is available for download now. Read the blog to learn more.
Amazon Translate is a fully managed, neural machine translation service that delivers real-time, high-quality, affordable and customizable language translation. Today, we are announcing that Amazon Translate has increased the size limit of parallel data (PD) from 1 GB to 5 GB. PD is used in Active Custom Translation (ACT), a feature that gives you more control over your machine translation output. You create PD by simply providing your translation examples in TMX, TSV, or CSV format. Then Amazon Translate uses your PD along with your batch translation job to customize the translation output at runtime. With the increase in PD size, you can use more data to customize your ACT output.
min_instances and min_idle_instances will now only apply to versions of a service that have been configured to receive traffic. This change is to reduce unexpected billing due to instances running old versions that are not intended to receive traffic.Cloud Run for Anthos on Google Cloud version 0.21.0-gke.0 is now available for the following GKE minor versions:
The latest release of Azure Sphere brings enhancements and features to the OS, SDKs, and Visual Studio extensions.
Easily build large-scale real-time messaging applications with WebSockets without the need to manage backend infrastructure.
Leverage Azure Policy to enable Azure Site Recovery for your VMs at scale and ensure organizational standards
Protect your applications from outages by replicating your virtual machines across continents.
Azure Site Recovery now provides a portal experience to failover VMs or physical servers inside a proximity placement group in the target Azure region.
Application Insight is now in public preview for customers to start collecting telemetry and analyzing their services for health in the following list of regions South India West Central US.
Azure Log Analytics is now in public preview for customers to start collecting telemetry and analyzing their services for health and usage in South India.
Azure Ultra Disk, which offers high performance along with sub-millisecond latency for your data-intensive and transaction-heavy workloads, is now available in North Central US.
Flexible Server forced failover capability is now available in all zone redundant regions.
You can now create work items in Azure DevOps or GitHub based on Application Insights telemetry.
Log search based alerts can now be automatically resolved, and query can be evaluated every minute for faster time to fire.
Public preview enhancements and updates released for Azure SQL in April 2021.
Azure Database for MySQL - Flexible Server zone redundant high availability is now available in two new regions: UK South and Japan East.
France Central and Brazil South regions are now available deployment options for the public preview of Azure Database for MySQL – Flexible Server.
MySQL 8.0.21 is now in general availability with Azure Database for MySQL - Flexible Server deployment option in all major Azure regions.
The latest preview release of intelligent performance on Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Flexible Server on Postgres 11 and 12 is now available.
You can now add Azure Hybrid Benefit to their Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) VMSS instances as well as RI’s, helping to significantly reduce the costs of running your workloads in the cloud.
Azure Cache for Redis integration with Azure Event Grid allows service manage routing of Redis events like patching, scaling, and import/export (RDB) to your event handler.
With the addition of Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Hyperscale (Citus) preview to France Central and Switzerland North regions, you can now distribute your Postgres database to horizontally scale queries across multiple machines using sharding.
New Dv5, Dsv5, Ddv5, Ddsv5, and Ev5, Edv5 series Azure Virtual Machines deliver increased scalability and an upgraded CPU architecture, including better price to performance compared to the prior generation. The new VMs - now in public preview - run on the 3rd Generation Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8370C (Ice Lake) processor in a hyper-threaded configuration. This custom processor can reach an all-core Turbo clock speed of up to 3.5GHz and features Intel® Turbo Boost Technology 2.0, Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions 512 (Intel® AVX-512) and Intel® Deep Learning Boost.
Read more about Hava Azure Network Topology Diagrams here.
Read more about Hava AWS Network Topology Diagrams here.
Read more about Hava GCP Network Topology Diagrams here