In Cloud Computing This Week [Feb 5th 2021]

 

Starting this week, Amazon EC2 M5n, M5dn, R5n, and R5dn bare metal instances that can utilize up to 100 Gbps of network bandwidth, and Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) for HPC/ML workloads. are generally available. Amazon EC2 bare metal instances provide your applications with direct access to the Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor and memory resources of the underlying server. These instances are ideal for workloads that require access to the hardware feature set (such as Intel® VT-x), or for applications that need to run in non-virtualized environments for licensing or support requirements. 

 

AWS App Mesh Controller for Kubernetes v1.3.0 is now available and includes support for mTLS (mutual Transport Layer Security) authentication on App Mesh. The AWS App Mesh Controller for Kubernetes provides a way to configure and manage AWS App Mesh using Kubernetes directly. AWS App Mesh is a service mesh that provides application-level networking to standardize how your services communicate, giving you end-to-end visibility and allowing high availability for your applications.

Starting today, with Amazon EBS Local Snapshots on Outposts you can store snapshots of your Amazon EBS volumes locally on Amazon S3 on Outposts to meet your data residency and local data processing needs. EBS Local Snapshots on Outposts require your Outpost to be provisioned with S3 on Outposts. You can also continue to back up your EBS volumes to snapshots stored on S3 in the AWS Region. Snapshots are point-in-time copies of your data which can be used to enable disaster recovery and improve backup compliance.

AWS App Mesh now supports mutual TLS (Transport Layer Security) authentication that offers two-way peer authentication. AWS App Mesh is a service mesh that provides application-level networking to standardize how your services communicate, giving you end-to-end visibility and options to tune for high-availability of your applications.

 

Today, AWS Copilot  launched version 1.2 which now provides more deployment capabilities for applications hosted on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS).

AWS Amplify Hosting now allows users to monitor metrics for Amplify hosted applications in near real-time. Amplify provides a dashboard with metrics for Incoming requests, Bytes downloaded, Bytes uploaded, 4XX/5XX errors, and latency. You can create CloudWatch alarms in the Amplify console that send notifications when specific criteria are met. An alarm watches a single metric and sends an Amazon Simple Notification Service notification when the metric breaches the threshold for a specified number of evaluation periods.

 

AWS Backup adds the ability to monitor your AWS Backup metrics and events via Amazon CloudWatch. AWS Backup enables you to centralize and automate data protection across AWS services and accounts, helping you support your regulatory compliance obligations and meet business continuity goals.

 

You can now author AWS Lambda functions in Node.js 14 and use its new features, such as top-level-await, enhanced diagnostics, modifications of the streams APIs, and a revised JavaScript engine for better performance. Lambda functions written in Node.js 14 run on Amazon Linux 2, the latest generation of Amazon Linux. To learn more about writing functions in Node.js 14, see the Node.js programming model  in the Lambda documentation.  

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) makes it easier to setup reverse Domain Name System (DNS) lookup for your Elastic IP addresses and improves your email deliverability. A reverse DNS lookup for an IP address returns its domain name and is commonly used by email services to filter out spams. This release improves your email deliverability from EC2 by enabling you to set reverse DNS lookup with just a few clicks and meet a key spam filter requirement.

 

Amazon S3 now supports AWS PrivateLink, providing direct access to S3 via a private endpoint within your virtual private network. Simplify your network architecture by connecting to S3 from on-premises or in AWS using private IP addresses in your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), eliminating the need to use public IPs, configure firewall rules, or configure an Internet Gateway to access S3 from on-premises.

We are excited to announce a series of new capabilities that have been added to Amazon Macie to make it easier to configure, scope, and run sensitive data discovery in AWS, including support for scanning jobs that cover Amazon S3 buckets residing across multiple accounts, scoping of scans by object prefix, better cost estimation for visibility of spend before jobs are submitted, and sensitive data location information added to Macie findings.  

Today, AWS X-Ray launches Insights , which helps customers proactively discover issues in applications by using anomaly detection. X-Ray Insights enables developers and DevOps engineers to detect anomalies in fault rate for an application and then notify their teams on these issues and why it occurred.

 

Amazon GuardDuty introduces a new machine learning domain reputation model that can categorize previously unseen domains as highly likely to be malicious or benign based on their behavioral characteristics. GuardDuty uses this new capability to alert customers when an EC2 instance in their AWS environment is communicating with a domain identified as malicious and to improve the accuracy of existing domain based threat detections.

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) now allows you to drive up to 3x higher read throughput on your file system. For example, bursting mode file systems now provide 300MB/s of bursting read throughput, or 300MB/s per TiB of data stored in Amazon EFS standard, whichever is higher. If you have configured 1 GB/s of provisioned throughput, your application can now drive up to 3 GB/s for read operations (and continue to drive 1GB/s for write operations) without any application or configuration changes.  

 

Amazon Managed Blockchain now supports assigning tags to networks, members, proposals, invitations, and nodes. Tags can be assigned to existing resources and to new resources at the time of creation. You can also define fine-grained access controls using tags and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies to control access to resources and actions. Tags are key-value pairs that you can assign to resources to easily organize and search for resources, automate resource activities, create cost allocation reports, and control access to resources.

AWS Glue DataBrew, a visual data preparation tool that makes it easy for data analysts and data scientists to clean and normalize data for analytics and machine learning, is now available in the following six additional AWS Regions:

• US West (N. California)
• Asia Pacific (Singapore)
• Asia Pacific (Mumbai)
• EU (Stockholm)
• EU (London)
• EU (Paris)

 

Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility now supports major version 12. PostgreSQL 12  includes better index management, improved partitioning capabilities, and the ability to execute JSON path queries per SQL/JSON specifications. It also enables nondeterministic collations that support case-insensitive and accent-insensitive comparisons for ICU provided collations, most common-value statistics for improved query plans, creation of generated columns that compute values with an expression, and many additional features.

 

Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports encryption of data at rest and node-to-node encryption on existing domains, enabling organizations hosting sensitive workloads to meet stringent security and compliance requirements.

 

Starting this week, you can launch Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for SQL Server on Amazon EC2 R5d and Amazon EC2 M5d instance types with tempdb configured to use local instance storage. By placing tempdb data files and log files locally, you can achieve lower read and write latencies when compared to the standard EBS based offerings.

 

 

Amazon Redshift, the most widely used cloud data warehouse, doubles the managed storage capacity for RA3.16XL and RA3.4XL node-types to 128 TB per node. If your data is growing rapidly, doubling the managed storage quota will help you analyze even more data without increasing your compute cost or changing your workload.