In Cloud Computing This Week [Apr 24th 2020]

Hello cloud land,  here's this week's round up of everything that's happening in cloud computing this week.  Just like their market share, AWS seem to be leading the field in terms of major announcements this week with new ChatOps and the Appflow announcement.

Despite all the upheaval in the World, we're not seeing too much disruption in terms of demand or drop off. If anything, we're seeing an uptick in trials and signups.  We hope it's the same for you.

Amazon Appflow could make life easier for developers. 

AppFlow has been designed to remove the need for manually-configured data transfers between AWS and services like Salesforce, Slack, Trend Micro and Zendesk.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched Amazon AppFlow, a new tool for managing the flow of data from AWS to software as  service (SaaS) applications.

Amazon AppFlow has been designed to remove the need for developers to manually configure connectors that enable them to transfer data between AWS and third-party services like Salesforce, Slack, Trend Micro and Zendesk.

AppFlow instead integrates directly with SaaS applications and automatically enables secure, bidirectional data flow between them.

This means that, as well as allowing data to flow from SaaS applications to AWS, it can send data from AWS to SaaS applications.

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/cloud-computing-this-new-tool-from-aws-could-make-life-easier-for-developers/

GCP Anthos now supports multi-cloud. 

Anthos can now run and manage applications on AWS.

Google Cloud has announced that its platform to manage multi-cloud workloads Anthos is now generally available for AWS though the company plans to add support for Microsoft Azure by the end of this year.

Anthos aims to deliver on the promise of write once, run anywhere by allowing businesses to run their applications on existing on-prem hardware investments or in the public cloud.

https://www.techradar.com/news/google-cloud-anthos-now-supports-multi-cloud

AWS opens first African Region

AWS has announced that its new AWS Africa Region in Cape Town, South Africa is now open and with this launch, Amazon's cloud computing division now spans 73 Availability Zones within 23 geographic regions around the world.

Organizations and government agencies can now run their applications and server end-users in Africa with even lower latency while leveraging advanced AWS technologies.

Senior vice president of global infrastructure and customer support at AWS, Peter DeSantis explained in a press release that the opening of the new AWS Africa Region is part of the company's continued efforts to support the growth of the continent's local technology community

https://www.techradar.com/news/aws-opens-first-african-region

AWS Chatbot Release.

Can monitor and interact with AWS resources in Slack & Chime 

Amazon Web Services (AWS)' Chatbot product has entered into general availability for all commercial AWS regions.

Chatbot is an interactive agent for chat operations, or ChatOps, that can monitor and interact with AWS resources in Slack channels and Amazon Chime.

It can send alerts, run commands to return diagnostic information, invoke AWS Lambda functions and create AWS support cases.

AWS Chatbot incurs no charges, with only the underlying services being charged instead, such as Amazon Simple Notification Service or AWS Lambda.

https://www.arnnet.com.au/article/678687/aws-gets-chatty-with-general-availability-of-chatbot/

 

Azure Migrate now available in Azure Government 

Microsoft’s service for datacenter migration, Azure Migrate, is now available in Azure Government—unlocking the whole range of functionality for government customers. Previously, Azure Migrate V1 was available to US Azure Government customers, which performed limited scale assessment for VMware workloads. Azure Migrate V2 for Azure Government, now available, includes a one-stop shop for discovery, assessment, and migration of largescale datacenters.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-migrate-now-available-in-azure-government/

Enhanced features in Azure Archive Storage now generally available

Since launching Azure Archive Storage, Microsoft report seeing unprecedented interest and innovative usage from a variety of industries. Archive Storage is built as a scalable service for cost-effectively storing rarely accessed data for long periods of time. Cold data, including application backups, healthcare records, autonomous driving recordings, and other data sets that might have been previously deleted could be stored in Azure Storage’s Archive tier in an offline state, then rehydrated to an online tier when needed.

With customer usage and feedback, Microsoft have made their archive improvements generally available.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/enhanced-features-in-azure-archive-storage-now-generally-available/

GCP Cloud Spanner backup-restore features added 

Google built Cloud Spanner to support the need for a scalable, multi-version database with relational semantics. It’s become an important capability for teams that need a globally distributed, strongly consistent database service. Spanner continues to launch new enterprise capabilities, and Google announced the general availability of managed backup-restore.

Google reports, this can help you achieve high business continuity and add data protection without much management overhead. This feature provides you protection against user or application errors that result in logical data corruption. You can now take consistent, on-demand backup of databases in your regional or multi-regional configurations, and restore those backups onto the same or different instance with the same instance configuration. These restores are optimized to reduce the time to first byte access to the data in a backup. This means you can get access to terabytes of data being restored from a backup within minutes after a failure. 

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/databases/native-cloud-database-spanner-adds-features

AWS Transfer for FTP and FTPS, in addition to existing SFTP 

AWS Transfer for SFTP was launched on November 2018 as a fully managed service that enables the transfer of files directly into and out of Amazon S3 using the Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP).

The week, AWS announced the expansion of the service to add support for FTPS and FTP, which makes it easy to migrate and securely run File Transfer Protocol over SSL (FTPS) and FTP workloads in AWS, in addition to the existing AWS Transfer for SFTP service. Supporting SFTP-, FTPS-, and FTP-based transfers for Amazon S3, Amazon also announced the “AWS Transfer Family,” which is the aggregated name of AWS Transfer for SFTP, FTPS, and FTP.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-transfer-for-ftp-and-ftps-in-addition-to-existing-sftp/