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In Cloud Computing This Week [Feb 26th 2021]

Written by Team Hava | February 26, 2021

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

 

Here's a round up of all things GCP, Azure and AWS for the week ending Friday 26th February 2021.

Here at Hava we're still working on adding more resources to those visualised on your diagrams and some exciting additions to our Azure and GCP functionality and some cool redesign to make your diagrams even more beautiful, if that's even possible.

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AWS Updates and Releases

 

AWS Network Firewall Deployment Automations for AWS Transit Gateway is Generally Available

AWS were excited to announce the launch of AWS Network Firewall Deployment Automations for AWS Transit Gateway, a reference implementation to help customers deploy and configure the AWS resources needed to inspect and filter VPC-to-VPC (East-West) traffic.

 

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports rollups, reducing storage costs for extended retention

Amazon Elasticsearch Service introduces index rollups that lets you summarize high granularity data and preserve feature-rich aggregations over large data sets for analytics while reducing the storage costs.


Automate quality inspection with Amazon Lookout for Vision — now generally available

Today, Amazon Lookout for Vision is generally available to all AWS customers. Amazon Lookout for Vision is a machine learning (ML) service that spots defects and anomalies in visual representations of manufactured products using computer vision (CV), allowing you to automate quality inspection.


Amazon RDS now supports PostgreSQL 13

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL now supports major version 13. PostgreSQL 13  includes improved functionality and performance from new features and performance from new features and enhancements such as de-duplication of B-tree index entries, improved performance for queries that use partitioned tables, incremental sorting to accelerate data sorts, parallel processing of indexes with the VACUUM command, more ways to monitor activity within a PostgreSQL database, new security capabilities, and more. This release also adds support for bool_plperl, which simplifies writing Perl procedures.

 

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling now shows scaling history for deleted groups

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling now allows you to view deleted Auto Scaling groups in the scaling history. Previously if you deleted an Auto Scaling group, you need to either maintain the record of scaling activities for deleted Auto Scaling groups or ask support team to get the record for the same. Now, you can specify one additional parameter in a describe call to get a description of the scaling history for deleted Auto Scaling groups. This makes it easier to keep a record of scaling activities after an application has been shut down.


New troubleshooting feature now generally available for AWS IoT Events

This week AWS launched a new feature for static analysis of your event “detector models” (representations of your IoT devices as state machines on the AWS cloud) in AWS IoT Events. The feature automatically performs 7 different analyses (see list in developer guide ) of your models for potential syntax errors (e.g. bad expressions or payloads), structural issues (e.g. missing states or input triggers) and runtime errors (e.g. data type mismatch, missing data, potential to hit service limits, etc.). This debugging tool is particularly useful for complex detector models which have a large number of state changes, each with unique conditional logic triggered by multiple input data streams. The analysis summarizes diagnostic information of each of the 7 analyses by severity level ('info', 'warning', 'error') and identifies its location within the model (state, transition, action, etc.) to help you fix issues in your model even before publishing it.

 

Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports Always On Availability Groups for Standard Edition

Amazon RDS for SQL Server now offers Always On Availability Groups (AGs) for the Multi-AZ configuration in all AWS Regions on Standard Edition. This new high-availability option meets the requirements of enterprise-grade production workloads on SQL Server.  


Access Amazon EFS file systems from EC2 Mac instances running macOS Big Sur

Starting this week, you can access Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) file systems from your Amazon EC2 Mac instances running macOS Big Sur. You can now mount your Amazon EFS file systems on your instances by using the Amazon EFS client , an open source toolset, installed using the Homebrew package manager. You can also mount your Amazon EFS file systems on your instances using the macOS native NFS client version 4.0. To learn more about mounting Amazon EFS file systems on EC2 Mac instances, see the Amazon EFS documentation .


Amazon EC2 Mac Instances now support macOS Big Sur

Starting today, customers can run macOS Big Sur (11.2.1) as Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) on EC2 Mac instances. macOS Big Sur is the current major macOS release from Apple, and introduces multiple new capabilities and performance improvements over prior macOS versions. macOS Big Sur will support running Xcode versions 12.5 and later, which will include additional SDKs for iOS 14.5, iPadOS 14.5, tvOS 14.5, watchOS 7.4, and macOS Big Sur 11.3. Customers can now also access Amazon EFS file systems from EC2 Mac instances running macOS Big Sur.

 

Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL Patches 1.8.1 / 2.6.2 / 3.3.2 now available

Patches 1.8.1 / 2.6.2 / 3.3.2 are now available for customers using Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL. For detailed release notes visit our version documentation . You can apply the new patch version in the AWS Management Console, via the AWS CLI, or via the RDS API.

Read more about the patches here »


Amazon CloudWatch Contributor Insights for Amazon DynamoDB now supports AWS CloudFormation

Amazon CloudWatch Contributor Insights for Amazon DynamoDB now supports AWS CloudFormation, enabling you to manage Contributor Insights settings for DynamoDB with CloudFormation templates.  


AWS CodeBuild supports Arm-based workloads using AWS Graviton2

AWS CodeBuild’s support for Arm-based workloads now run on AWS Graviton2 without any additional configuration.


AWS Control Tower now provides region selection

This week, AWS announced AWS Control Tower Region Selection, a new capability that provides you the ability to efficiently manage the geographical footprint of your AWS Control Tower resources. You can now select the additional Regions you would 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.
 
 
 
 

Google Cloud Releases and Updates

 

AI Platform (Unified)
AI Platform (Unified) now supports Access Transparency in beta. Google Cloud organizations with certain support packages can use this feature. Learn more about using Access Transparency with AI Platform (Unified).
 
In addition to Docker images hosted on Container Registry, you can now use Docker images hosted on Artifact Registry and Docker Hub for custom container training on AI Platform.

 

The Docker images for pre-built training containers and pre-built prediction containers are now available on Artifact Registry.

BigQuery

BigQuery materialized views are now generally available (GA).  Materialized views are precomputed views that periodically cache the results of a query, enhancing performance and efficiency, and reducing costs, particularly for aggregated queries. For more information, see Introduction to materialized views.

The BigQuery Data Transfer Service's minimum interval time between recurring transfers from Cloud Storage has been reduced from one hour to 15 minutes.

Cloud SQL for MySQL

Cloud SQL now offers faster maintenance, with average connectivity loss lasting 90 seconds or less on average.

Compute Engine

Preview: You can now use the gcloud command-line tool to import images from AWS into Google Cloud. For more information, see Importing images from AWS.

Firestore

A Firestore connector for Workflows is now available in public preview.

IAM

You can now use Policy Simulator to simulate policy changes before you apply them. This feature is available in Preview..

Secret Manager

Event notifications is now available in Preview.

Event notifications sends information about changes to your secrets and secret versions to Pub/Sub. These notifications can be used to trigger arbitrary workflows, such as restarting an application when a new secret version is added, or notifying security engineers when a secret is deleted.

VPC

The ability to connect VM interfaces other than nic0 to a Shared VPC is now available in General Availability. This feature presently only GA for individual VM instances. Support for instance templates and managed instance groups is still Preview.

 

Microsoft Azure Releases And Updates

 

This week there were a bucket load of announcements about Azure services retiring on the 29th Feb 2024 including
  • Classic Azure Migrate
  • Data Lake storage pre Gen2
  • Cosmos DB Java SDK
  • Classic Alerts in Azure Monitor for Gov Cloud
  • Classic Alerts for Azure China 21Vianet
  • Azure Stack Edge Pro FPGA
  • Batch rendering VM images & licencing
  • Standard version of custom voice
  • Azure AD Connect sync
  • Azure batch transcription and customization Rest API v2
  • Application Gateway analytics
  • Scripts need to use PowerShell modules
  • AKS legacy AAD integration
  • Jenkins plug-ins
  • Network Watcher connection monitor (classic)
  • Network Performance monitor

Also from 28th Feb 2022:

  • G5 and GS5 Azure VMs will no longer be hardware isolated
  • GS5 VMs will no longer be SAP HANA Certified
  • E64i_v3 & E64is_v3 will no longer be hardware isolated

General availability: Data flows in Azure Data Factory and Azure Synapse now support Reserved Instance

Azure Data Factory (ADF) and Azure Synapse Analytics (Synapse) now offer discounted pricing on data flows based on 1-year and 3-year reservations.

Azure Image Builder Service now generally available

Use Azure Image Builder to streamline your image building pipeline and integrate your DevOps application life-cycle with the cloud native tools.

 

UPComing Training & 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).

 

New digital class and lab on DevOps on AWS

AWS are excited to announce the launch of their new digital course, Getting Started with DevOps on AWS, together with the optional Getting Started with DevOps on AWS self-paced lab. This course explores the basics of developing, delivering, and maintaining high-quality secure applications and services at high velocity on AWS. The course covers the philosophies, practices, and tools used to implement a DevOps environment on AWS, while the lab gives you practical experience with the technologies discussed in the course.

 

Updated digital course on Coursera and edX - AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials

AWS Training and Certification were excited to announce the launch of the updated AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials digital course on Coursera and edX. If you’re new to the cloud or in a technical or non-technical role such as finance, legal, sales, or marketing, this course provides you with an understanding of fundamental AWS Cloud concepts to help you gain the confidence to contribute to your organization’s cloud initiatives.

 

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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