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In Cloud Computing This Week [Feb 19th 2021]

Written by Team Hava | February 19, 2021

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

 

 

Here's a round up of all things AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform for the week ending Friday 19th February 2021.

Here at Hava we're working on adding more resources to those visualised on your diagrams and some exciting additions to the capabilities of our Azure and GCP functionality.  More details soon.

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AWS Updates and Releases

Amazon Elasticsearch Service adds Trace Analytics, a new feature for distributed tracing

Amazon Elasticsearch Service adds Trace Analytics, a new feature for distributed tracing that enables developers and IT operators to find and fix performance problems in distributed applications, leading to faster problem resolution times.  


Amazon Redshift Query Editor now supports clusters with enhanced VPC routing, longer query run times, and all node types

You can now use the Amazon Redshift Query editor with Amazon Redshift clusters enabled with enhanced VPC routing. You can leverage AWS Secrets Manager to store your cluster credentials and use that with the Amazon Redshift Query Editor.


AWS Glue Studio jobs can now update AWS Glue Data Catalog tables

AWS Glue Studio now supports updating the AWS Glue Data Catalog during job runs. This feature makes it easy to keep your tables up to date as AWS Glue writes new data into Amazon S3, making the data immediately queryable from any analytics service compatible with the AWS Glue Data Catalog.

 

Amazon ml.Inf1 instances are now available on Amazon SageMaker in 14 additional AWS regions

Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed service that provides every developer and data scientist with the ability to build, train, and deploy machine learning (ML) models quickly. To deploy ML models for real-time predictions, Amazon SageMaker provides you with a large selection of AWS compute instances, so you can find the right cost to performance ratio depending on your requirements. One such instance type is Amazon Inf1, powered by AWS Inferentia, a custom chip built from the ground up by AWS to accelerate ML inference workloads. Amazon ml.Inf1 instances were available in Amazon SageMaker in the US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon) regions. Starting today, Amazon ml.Inf1 instances are available on Amazon SageMaker in 14 additional AWS regions worldwide.
 
 

AWS Glue Studio now supports reading uncatalogued data from Amazon S3 and inferring its schema

AWS Glue now supports reading data stored in Amazon S3 without first adding it to the AWS Glue Data Catalog. This feature makes it fast to start authoring Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) and ELT jobs in AWS Glue Studio by allowing you to use locations and objects in Amazon S3 directly as data sources. AWS Glue infers the schema of the data in real time , allowing you to easily define transforms on it in the AWS Glue Studio visual job authoring interface.


Update content of inbound and outbound emails using AWS Lambda in Amazon WorkMail

This week, Amazon WorkMail announced that you can now update content of in-transit emails to and from your organization with AWS Lambda functions when using Email Flow Rules. With this, you can easily update the contents of the email as it flows in and out of your organization in order to help meet security, compliance, or productivity needs. For example, you can create a Lambda function which removes all attachments, or adds disclaimers or signatures on the email before it is delivered.

 

AWS Fargate increases default resource count service quotas to 1000

AWS Fargate recently increased default service quotas to 500 and starting today you can launch up to 1000 concurrent Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) tasks and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) pods running on Fargate On-Demand and 1000 concurrent Amazon ECS tasks running on Fargate Spot. These are default quotas (also commonly known as limits) for an account in a given AWS Region, but you can always raise these values even further to meet your application needs by requesting a quota increase. This makes it even more seamless to run your workloads at scale on Fargate, the serverless compute engine for containers that works with Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, and AWS Batch.


Amazon EKS and EKS Distro now supports Kubernetes version 1.19

Kubernetes is rapidly evolving, with frequent feature releases and bug fixes. Highlights of the Kubernetes 1.19 release include Ingress API  and Pod Topology Spread  reaching stable status, EndpointSlices  being enabled by default, and immutable Secrets  and ConfigMaps . Learn more about Kubernetes version 1.19 in the Kubernetes project release notes .

 

Announcing General Availability of Amplify Flutter, with new data and authentication support

Flutter support in AWS Amplify is now generally available (GA). Amplify is a set of tools and services that help frontend web and mobile developers build secure, scalable, full-stack applications. Flutter is an open-source UI software development kit created by Google for developing applications for Android and iOS from a single codebase. Amplify Flutter brings together Amplify and Flutter. It is designed for developers who have invested in the Flutter ecosystem and now want to take advantage of the power of AWS. You can use the Amplify Flutter libraries with Amplify-created backends, as well as existing AWS backends.


AWS Direct Connect Announces Native 100 Gbps Dedicated Connections at Select Locations

AWS Direct Connect now offers native 100 Gbps Dedicated Connections to support your private connectivity needs to the cloud.

 

Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) now supports PCI DSS compliance to help you run payment processing workloads more easily

Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra)    , a scalable, highly available, and fully managed Cassandra-compatible database service, now supports Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliance to help you run payment processing workloads more easily.

 

Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) now supports next generation, burstable general-purpose Amazon EC2 T3 instance types

Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) now supports next-generation, burstable general-purpose Amazon EC2 T3 instance types, which provide a baseline level of CPU performance with the ability to burst CPU usage however long is required.

 
 

Google Cloud Releases and Updates

 

Cloud Logging

Cloud Logging agent for Windows version 1-14 is now available. This version changes the default Windows configuration from using gRPC to REST for sending logs to the Cloud Logging API. For more information, refer to the release information on GitHub.

Dialogflow

Dialogflow ES now supports the europe-west1 (Belgium) region 

Compute Engine

Preview: Predictive autoscaling for managed instance groups lets you improve the availability of your workloads by using Machine Learning to predict future demand and create virtual machines ahead of forecasted load.

Google Cloud VMware Engine

Added password management of the CloudOwner@gve.local user for vCenter and the admin user for NSX-T Manager. VMware Engine generates a password for these users when you deploy a private cloud. You can view and reset credentials from the private cloud details page.

Added the ability to peer multiple VPCs with private clouds in a region. This improvement enables you to establish a many-to-many relationship between your VPCs and regions.

Added support for global DNS name resolution for management components of your private cloud using Cloud DNS. You can set up Cloud DNS to resolve domain names of management components of multiple private clouds (in the same or different regions) in your project.

For more information, see Configuring DNS for vCenter access.

AI Platform Training

The default boot disk type for virtual machine instances used for training jobs has changed from pd-standard to pd-ssd. Learn more about disk types for custom training and read about pricing for different disk types.

Note that for training jobs where you don't specify a DiskConfig, pricing does not change. This is because the first 100 GB of disk for each VM do not incur any charge, regardless of disk type.

BigQuery

BigQuery now supports exporting table data in Parquet format. This feature is in Preview. For more information, see Parquet export details.

Cloud Composer

GA: Setting and updating machine types for CloudSQL/Web Server is now generally available.

GA: Support for Domain restricted sharing is now generally available.

Cloud Composer 1.14.3 release was rolled back. If you have an environment that was created with a composer-1.14.3-airflow-* image, you can later upgrade it to a newer version.

Cloud DNS

Managing response policies and rules in Cloud DNS is available in Beta.

Cloud Load Balancing

Zonal NEGs (with GCE_VM_IP network endpoints) can now be used as backends for internal TCP/UDP load balancers. For more information on this type of zonal NEG, see Zonal NEGs overview.

This feature is in Preview.

Dataproc

New sub-minor versions of Dataproc images: 1.3.84-debian10, 1.3.84-ubuntu18, 1.4.55-debian10, 1.4.55-ubuntu18, 1.5.30-centos8, 1.5.30-debian10, 1.5.30-ubuntu18, 2.0.3-debian10, and 2.0.3-ubuntu18

Dataproc Metastore

You must now have storage.objects.get permission on the Cloud Storage object in order to import metadata from the Cloud Storage file.

Identity and Access Management

You can now use IAM conditions to set limits on the roles that a member can grant and revoke. This feature is generally available.

VPC Service Controls

Preview release of Ingress and egress rules for VPC Service Controls.

Dataproc

Dataproc 2.0 image version will become a default Dataproc image version in 4 weeks on March 15, 2021.

Microsoft Azure Releases And Updates

 

Azure Sphere OS version 21.02 is now available for evaluation

This Azure Sphere quality update of the OS includes bug fixes as well as recent CVE mitigations.

Azure Front Door Standard and Premium now in public preview

Azure Front Door Standard and Premium, enables Azure customers to securely deliver and manage their global applications and content, migrate to cloud and modern microservice architectures and improve their users’ experience.

General Availability: Azure Red Hat OpenShift support for OpenShift 4.6

Benefit from new features and enhancements in OpenShift release 4.6.

Azure Purview available in public preview in South Central US and Canada Central

Azure Purview is now available in the South Central US and Canada Central Azure regions. You can now provision Azure Purview accounts in these regions as a public preview offering.  

General availability: Azure Machine Learning updates for native terminal

Users can now perform any CLI operation directly in the Azure ML Studio.

Azure Dav4-series VMs are available in Azure HDInsight

Adopt Dav4-series VMs in HDInsight to get great performance at a competitive price.

 

Azure NetApp Files | Volume hard quota change

The Azure NetApp Files behavior of volume and capacity pool provisioning will change to a manual and controllable mechanism beginning March 15th, 2021. This means that application users will have more control over provisioned capacity pool space and associated cost.

Public preview: Application Insights work item integration for Azure DevOps & GitHub

Azure Monitor Application Insights has released a new way to create work items based on application insights telemetry.

Generally available: Application Insights synthetic monitoring SLA report template

Azure Monitor Application Insights has released a new report template to enable easy reporting of your web tests across Application Insights resources that includes several key features like total application downtime, maintenance data exclusion, and end to end outage identification.

Application Insights availability troubleshooting report for URL tests

Azure Monitor Application Insights has released a troubleshooting report for URL ping web tests to help quickly identify the root cause behind a test failure.

Public preview: Application Insights auto-instrumentation for .NET5 App Services

 Azure Monitor application insights now offers auto-instrumentation for .NET5 based Windows App Services.
 

Cross Region Restore of Azure VMs now generally available 

This week  Azure announced the general availability of Cross Region Restore (CRR) for Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) support using Microsoft Azure Backup.

New disk bursting metrics

New disk bursting metrics that help you gain insight into your disks IO and bandwidth limits for your provisioned and bursting performance and inform you of how much of your bursting credit have been used. These allow you to see your disk's limits for performance as well as see how you have been using your bursting capabilities in the past.

Additional IOPS feature for MySQL - Flexible Server in preview 

MySQL – Flexible Server supports the provisioning of additional IOPS (preview) so you can provision more IOPS above the complimentary IOPS limit and can increase or decrease the number of IOPS based on workload requirements.

API Management Diagnostics now available in public preview

API Management Diagnostics provides an intelligent and interactive experience to help customers troubleshoot their API , with no configuration required. 

More ways to use composite indexes in Azure Cosmos DB now generally available

You can now use composite indexes in Azure Cosmos DB to optimize even more types of queries, including queries with aggregates and system functions.

LOG REPLAY SERVICE FOR AZURE SQL MANAGED INSTANCE IN PUBLIC PREVIEW

Log replay service enables continuous replication of SQL Server data to SQL Managed Instance in the cloud, the easier orchestration of workload functions, and pre-migration performance testing through a fully customizable experience.

Machine Learning on Azure SQL Managed Instance now available

Use machine learning capabilities on a Managed Instance of Azure SQL Database for ease of moving your data, packages, and models to a cloud ready environment fully configured for machine learning.

Azure IoT Edge 1.1.0 release is now generally available 

 

Azure IoT Edge 1.1.0 is our first long term servicing (LTS) release.

.NET Core support for Analysis Services client libraries is generally available

Today, we are announcing general availability (GA) of Analysis Services client libraries for .NET Core, along with several enhancements.

US Gov Virginia Availability Zones now generally available

Availability Zones are now generally available from the US Gov Virginia datacenter region, offering US government customers more options for their most demanding mission-critical applications.

Automatic Azure VM extension upgrade capabilities now in public preview

Automatic extension upgrade provides safe and automatic upgrades for extensions on Azure virtual machines and virtual machine scale sets, keeping your environments more secure and up to date.

Azure Firewall Premium now in public preview 

 

Azure Firewall Premium provides next generation firewall capabilities that are required for highly sensitive and regulated environments.

Azure role-based access control (RBAC) for Azure Key Vault data plane authorization is now generally available

 

Achieve unified management and access control across Azure resources, Azure Key Vault and keys, certificates, and secrets.

Standard Load Balancer and IP addresses metadata now available through Azure Instance Metadata Service (IMDS)

 

Azure Instance Metadata Service (IMDS) is a mature REST API which offers metadata information regarding Networking, Storage, SKU and etc. We are now adding Load Balancer related information to the list of metadata IMDS covers.

 

UPComing Events:   

 

New digital curriculum: Managing Amazon S3

 

AWS were excited to announce a free new digital curriculum: Managing Amazon Simple Storage Service. This advanced 150-minute curriculum covers techniques to simplify the management of Amazon S3 storage. Designed for cloud architects, storage architects, developers, and operations engineers, it includes interactive lessons, video demonstrations, a self-paced lab, and quizzes. The self-paced lab costs up to 15 USD per lab (this cost is not included with free digital training on aws.training).

 

Azure Virtual Events

Microsoft have a full schedule of Virtual Events

A  full list including session times and details are here : https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/community/events/

AWS Events:

AWS events are pretty fluid at the moment, with most in-person events being cancelled or postponed. There are a number that have been taken online and full details can be found here: https://aws.amazon.com/events/

Thanks for reading again this week, we hope you found something useful. 

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