In Cloud Computing This Week [Aug 6th 2021]

Amazon S3 on Outposts now supports sharing of S3 capacity across multiple accounts within an organization using AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM). Multiple teams within your organization can now create and manage buckets, access points, and endpoints on S3 on Outposts.

Amazon CloudWatch announces cross account alarms, a new feature that enables customers to set alerts and take actions based on changes to metrics in other AWS accounts. Cross account alarms provide alerting based on trends in metrics in different AWS accounts and can be used in combination with existing cross account dashboards to setup operational visibility in a centralized monitoring account. With cross account alarms, you can be alerted when a trending metric in a different AWS account indicates that further investigation is required before the trend starts to cause operational issues or impacts the end user experience.

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Instance Refresh now supports performing updates to the Auto Scaling group (ASG) configuration as well as the ability to skip replacing already updated instances during an Instance Refresh. These new capabilities make it easier to deploy changes to an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) or install additional software in a controlled manner. To help you further deploy updates on Auto Scaling instances, we are also announcing four new Instance Refresh-based event notifications available through Amazon EventBridge.

Since our last update in March 2021, AWS CloudFormation has expanded the CloudFormation Registry  to support 79 new resource types between April and July 2021 (see the complete list at the end of this post). A resource type includes schema (resource properties and handler permissions) and handlers that control API interactions with the underlying AWS or third-party services. Out of these 79, AWS has published 56 and AWS Partner Network (APN) Partners have 23. Customers can now configure, provision, and manage these newly supported resources through CloudFormation in a predictable and reliable way. Among the AWS resources, we are pleased to announce that 8 new AWS services added launch day CloudFormation support. These services include: Amazon Interactive Video Service (IVS), Amazon Nimble Studio, AWS IoT Device Management, Amazon FinSpace, Amazon Fraud Detector, Amazon Location Services, AWS App Runner, and Amazon Lookout for Equipment. CloudFormation now supports 775 AWS resource types across 160 AWS services .

Amazon Personalize now enables you to optimize personalized recommendations for a business metric of your choice, in addition to improving relevance of recommendations for your users. You can define a business metric such as revenue, profit margin, video watch time, or any other numerical attribute of your item catalog to optimize your recommendations. Amazon Personalize automatically learns what is relevant to your users, considers the business metric you’ve defined, and recommends the products or content to your users that benefit your overall business goals. 

This week, AWS are announcing the availability of three new AWS Wavelength Zones on Verizon’s 5G Ultra Wideband network in Chicago, Houston, and Phoenix. Wavelength Zones are now available in 13 major US cities , including the previously announced cities of Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Denver, Las Vegas, Miami, New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington DC.

Amazon Athena now lets you store results in the format that best fits your analytics use case. Using Athena's new UNLOAD statement, you can format results in your choice of Parquet, Avro, ORC, JSON or delimited text. Athena's SQL-based interface and support for open formats are well suited for creating extract, transform, and load (ETL) pipelines that prepare your data for downstream analytics processing.

CloudWatch Synthetics now supports visual monitoring, allowing you to catch visual defects on your web application’s end user experience. CloudWatch Synthetics supports monitoring your REST APIs, URLs, and website content by running scripts 24/7. The new visual monitoring feature makes it possible to catch visual defects that cannot be scripted.

Private Connectivity for AWS NAT Gateway is now available in both AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. The expansion into the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions enables U.S. government agencies and contractors to move more sensitive workloads into the cloud by helping them to address certain regulatory and compliance requirements. With this launch, AWS Private NAT Gateway is now available in all AWS regions.

The AWS Solutions team recently updated Machine to Cloud Connectivity Framework, a solution that provides secure factory equipment connectivity to the AWS Cloud. This solution isa framework to send equipment telemetry data to your AWS account, allowing you to leverageAWS Services to conduct analysis on your equipment data instead of managing underlyinginfrastructure operations. The solution allows for robust data ingestion using OPC Data Access(OPC DA) and OPC Unified Access (OPC UA) protocols.

This week, AWS Copilot announced the release of version 1.9. With this release, AWS Copilot now allows you to configure a friendly DNS name for your request driven web services deployed with AWS App Runner. This feature was already available for load balanced web services deployed with Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS). Customers using AWS App Runner can now provide a friendly DNS name, such as api.example.com, directly in the manifest file and AWS Copilot will provision and manage the necessary infrastructure to associate the domain name with the customer’s service deployed with App Runner.

AWS Cloud9 introduces 3 new features, including support for CloudWatch Logs , S3  and EC2 instance profiles . Cloud9 users can now list their log groups and view log streams instantly without leaving their IDE. In addition, the S3 integration has improved performance in VPCs and now supports a new “Upload current file” feature. Finally, Cloud9 users using multi-factor authentication (MFA) and private VPCs can automatically authenticate via EC2 instance metadata and environment variable credentials sources.

Amazon SageMaker Pipelines, the first purpose-built continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) service for machine learning (ML), now supports a LambdaStep that allows customers to directly invoke an AWS Lambda function as a step in the ML model building pipeline. Customers can use the new LambdaStep to run any tasks or jobs on AWS Lambda such as splitting datasets or sending custom notifications, as long as the processing can be completed within 10 minutes. Customers can either write the Lambda function in their preferred language including Python and provide it as a file or provide us a .zip package that contains the code, compiled programs and any depenencies . SageMaker Pipelines will automatically create a new Lambda function and run it as part of the LambdaStep execution. Alternatively, if customers have a Lambda function that has already been created, they can choose to invoke it in the LambdaStep execution.

This week, AWS are excited to announce Amazon Transcribe Call Analytics, a new machine learning (ML) powered conversation insights API that enables businesses to improve their customer experience and agent productivity. Using Transcribe Call Analytics API, you can analyze call recordings to get turn-by-turn call transcripts and actionable insights. Businesses can better understand customer-agent interactions, identify trending issues, and track performance metrics. The API combines powerful speech-to-text and natural language processing (NLP) models that are trained specifically to understand customer service and sales calls. Transcribe Call Analytics allows developers and independent software vendors (ISVs) to add call analytics in their applications, without the need for any ML expertise. 

The AWS Solutions team recently updated AWS Streaming Data Solution for Amazon MSK, an AWS Solutions Implementation that provides an automated configuration of the AWS services necessary to easily capture, store, process, and deliver streaming data.

You can now set up SQL-Based ETL with Apache Spark on Amazon EKS. This solutions implementation provides declarative data processing support, codeless extract-transform-load (ETL) capabilities, and workflow orchestration automation to help data scientists and analysts access their data and create meaningful insights without the need for manual IT processes.

AWS License Manager announces support for Delegated Administrator, a feature that allows license administrators to manage and distribute licenses across all of their AWS accounts from a delegated account other than the central payer account. Using delegated administrator, you can discover licenses running across all accounts and track license usage centrally. Delegated Administrator provides you flexibility to separate license management from the billing activities. 

AWS Data Exchange subscribers can now track and manage their organizations’ entitlements to AWS Data Exchange products using AWS License Manager. With this enhancement, subscribers can manage and distribute licenses using individual Account IDs or Organization IDs, which entitles other accounts within their AWS organization to access data procured via AWS Data Exchange. For organizations with elaborate AWS account structures, this eases the burden of managing data entitlements across accounts.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) now supports the Multus  Container Networking Interface (CNI) plugin, enabling pods running in EKS clusters to attach multiple network interfaces in support of advanced networking configurations.

AWS IoT SiteWise is a managed service that makes it easy to collect, store, organize and monitor data from industrial equipment at scale to help you make better, data-driven decisions. 

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), extends Automatic Table Optimization to modify column compression encodings. This new capability maintains the optimal compression encodings in Amazon Redshift database tables on an ongoing basis to achieve high performance and reduce the storage utilization. By using automation to manage column compression, customers can ensure that column compression encodings are always optimized in order to get the best possible performance.

AWS Control Tower is now available in 2 additional AWS Regions: South America (Sao Paulo), and Europe (Paris) that expands AWS Control Tower availability to 15 AWS Regions. We are announcing AWS Control Tower Region Deselection that enhances your ability to efficiently manage the geographical footprint of your AWS Control Tower resources. You can now deselect Regions you would no longer like AWS Control Tower to govern; providing you with the capabilities to address compliance and regulatory concerns while balancing the costs associated with expanding into additional regions.

Today, we are excited to announce that Amazon SageMaker now supports Amazon EC2 M5d, R5, P3dn, and G4dn instances for SageMaker Notebook Instance. Customers are able to launch SageMaker Notebook Instance with these instance types in the regions where they are available.

Amplify Geo enables developers to quickly add location-aware features to their frontend web and mobile applications. Extending existing Amplify capabilities, Amplify Geo includes a set of abstracted client libraries built on top of Amazon Location Service, pre-integrated map UI components (based on the popular MapLibre open-source library) and it updates the Amplify Command Line Interface (CLI) tool with support for provisioning all required cloud location services.

AWS Storage Gateway now supports Quest NetVault Backup 13 on Tape Gateway, enabling you to backup and archive data from Quest NetVault Backup to AWS without changing your backup workflows. With this announcement, Tape Gateway supports Quest NetVault Backup 13 running on Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 or Microsoft Windows Server 2016.

Amazon Redshift now supports an authentication profile that enables administrators to centrally store client-side properties required to connect Redshift data warehouse using JDBC/ODBC/Python drivers. You can create an authentication profile by specifying a JSON file with the name and value for the required client and extended properties. End-users such as analysts, developers, and data engineers can use these profiles with client tools such as SQL Editors, BI Tools, and ETL tools.

Amazon Kendra has been Information Security Registered Assessors Program (IRAP) assessed at the PROTECTED level. Now, you can meet the Australian Government Information Security Manual (ISM)  control objectives while using Kendra.

AWS Config now supports AWS Backup resource types (AWS::Backup::BackupPlan, AWS::Backup::BackupSelection, AWS::Backup::BackupVault and AWS::Backup::RecoveryPoint) in all AWS Regions. AWS Config provides a detailed view of the configuration of AWS resources in your AWS account. This includes how the resources are related to one another and how they were configured. This enables you to see how the configurations and relationships have changed over time. For example, you can now use AWS Config to monitor changes to your backup plan that defines when and how you want to back up your AWS resources, monitor the resource assignment to the backup plan, track changes to the backup vault configuration or monitor changes to the recovery points for different resource types.

General availability: Azure Managed HSM Private Link

You can now use Private Link for Azure Managed HSM to protect sensitive traffic between different Azure and on-premises services.

General availability: New Australia Central region added to Azure HDInsight

HDInsight is now generally available for Australia Central customers.

Azure SQL—public preview updates for early August 2021 

Public preview enhancements and updates released for Azure SQL Managed Instance in early August 2021.

General availability: Lower capacity reservation tier for Azure Monitor dedicated clusters

Leverage advanced features in Azure Monitor like customer-managed key, Lockbox, infrastructure encryption for lower capacity reservation commitment.

General availability: Azure Monitor IT Service Management Connector is now certified with ServiceNow Quebec version

The Azure IT Service Management Connector is certified on the Quebec version of ServiceNow, enabling alerts integration with ITSM products.

Azure Defender for SQL now in general availability on the Azure SQL Virtual Machine blade

Configure Azure Defender to view and manage your security concerns for SQL Server on Azure virtual machines.

Software inventory and agentless dependency analysis generally available with Azure Migrate

You can inventory installed applications, roles and features and perform dependency analysis on discovered Windows & Linux servers without installing any agents. 

AZURE DATABASE FOR POSTGRESQL – HYPERSCALE (CITUS) SUPPORT FOR POSTGRESQL VERSIONS 13.3 AND 12.7 IN PUBLIC PREVIEW

Hyperscale (Citus) now supports the latest PostgreSQL minor versions 13.3 and 12.7 for Azure Database for PostgreSQL, a managed service running the open-source Postgres database on Azure.

Public preview of Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Flexible Server now offers reserved instance pricing

Prepay and commit to one- or three- years’ worth of steady hourly service consumption on Hyperscale (Citus) for Azure Database for PostgreSQL, a managed service running the open-source Postgres database.

Public preview of Azure Database – Flexible Server now available in new regions

The public preview Azure Database for MySQL - Flexible Server (Preview) is now supported in two additional regions—West US and Germany West Central.

Public preview of Azure Database for MySQL – Flexible Server now offers reserved instance pricing

Prepay and commit to Azure Database for MySQL – Flexible Server for one- or three-years’ worth of steady hourly service consumption at a lower per-hour price point.

Private DNS integration zone integration for Azure Database for MySQL - Flexible Server in public preview

Azure Database for MySQL - Flexible Server now supports private DNS zone integration in preview.

Azure SQL—general availability updates for early August 2021 

General availability enhancements and updates released for Azure SQL Managed Instance in early August 2021.

AZURE DATABASE FOR MYSQL – FLEXIBLE SERVER: SAME-ZONE HIGH AVAILABILITY IN PUBLIC PREVIEW

Azure Database for MySQL – Flexible Server enables the creation of a high availability server in the same zone as the primary server.

General availability: Azure Backup now supports Archive Tier for backups of SQL Server in Azure VMs

Azure Backup now provides the capability to move long term retention(LTR) recovery points to low-cost archive tier for SQL Server for Azure VM.