In Cloud Computing This Week [Jan 15th 2021]

The graphical user interface of Porting Assistant for .NET is now available in open source . AWS users can now view, modify, and contribute to its source code. The Porting Assistant for .NET data store and analytics engine , which includes information such as package compatibility and their known replacements, is already available through open source. With the new release, user can also participate in the UI development process.

AWS announced the availability of Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights, a fully managed, integrated, and pay-as-you-go container monitoring and analytics service for CloudWatch on AWS Graviton2. CloudWatch Container Insights enables you to explore, analyze, and visualize your container metrics, Prometheus metrics, application logs, and performance events through automated dashboards in the CloudWatch console. These dashboards summarize the performance and availability of clusters, nodes or EC2 instances, services, tasks, pods, and containers running on Amazon Elastic Containers (ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), AWS Fargate, and Kubernetes. 

The AWS Solutions team recently updated Multi-Region Application Architecture, a reference architecture that models a serverless active/passive workload with asynchronous replication of application data and failover from a primary to a secondary AWS Region.

Amazon AppStream 2.0 now supports the use of smart cards such as Personal Identity Verification (PIV)  and Common Access Card (CAC)  smart cards for authentication to AppStream 2.0 streaming instances. Smart cards are also supported for in-session authentication for streaming applications. With this launch, your users can use a smart card reader and smart card connected to their local computer to sign in to an AppStream 2.0 streaming instance that is joined to a Microsoft Active Directory domain. They can also use their local smart card reader and smart card to sign in to applications within their streaming session.  

View change data through azure monitor

With the recent Amplify Library release, Amplify DataStore gains the ability to selectively sync a subset of your app data and to sort your app data. DataStore provides frontend web and mobile developers a persistent on-device storage repository for you to write, read, and observe changes to data even if you are online or offline, and seamlessly sync to the cloud as well as across devices.  

The AWS Snow Family console  has been enhanced to make it easier for you to create and monitor your Snow data transfer and compute jobs. In addition to an improved user experience, the AWS Snow Family console will enable you to more easily understand which Snow device is more suitable for your use case depending on the size and type of your workloads. You can also now order an AWS Snow Family device with just a few clicks in the AWS Snow Family console.

Amazon Fraud Detector is a fully managed service that makes it easy to identify potentially fraudulent online activities, such as the creation of fake accounts or online payment fraud, using customized machine learning (ML) models. In just a few clicks you can create and train a fraud detection model, with no prior machine learning experience required.

AWS IoT SiteWise now supports usage of methods in formula expressions through Uniform Function Call Syntax (UFCS).

Following the announcement of updates to the PostgreSQL database , AWS have updated Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL to support PostgreSQL minor versions 12.5, 11.10, 10.15, 9.6.20, and 9.5.24. This release closes security vulnerabilities in PostgreSQL and contains bug fixes and improvements done by the PostgreSQL community. AWS recommend that customers upgrade to any of the new minor versions to fix known security vulnerabilities in prior versions of PostgreSQL.

AWS Snowcone now supports multicast streams, routing, load balancing, and other networking use cases by enabling instances on a Snow device to have direct access to an external network. By providing instances with layer 2 network access without any intermediary translation or filtering, customers gain increased flexibility over the network configuration of their Snow device along with improved network performance, enabling use cases that were previously not possible. 

You can now grant the privilege to run COPY and UNLOAD commands to specific users and groups in your Amazon Redshift cluster to create more fine-grained access control policy.

Amazon Lightsail now supports Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) on Lightsail resources like instances, containers, load balancers and CDN. With this launch, Lightsail resources operate in dual-stack mode, accepting both IPv4 and IPv6 client connections. This helps unlock application scenarios where some end user clients are IPv6 only.

Starting today, you can perform an in-place upgrade of your Amazon Aurora database cluster from MySQL major version 5.6 to 5.7. Instead of backing up and restoring the database to the new version, you can upgrade with just a few clicks in the Amazon RDS Management Console  or by using the AWS SDK or CLI. 

Azure Public IP SKU upgrade GA

You can now monitor the storage size of your Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) resources using Amazon CloudWatch. Using the Amazon EFS or Amazon CloudWatch consoles, you can view your file system's storage size over time, including size in each of the EFS storage classes  - EFS Standard, and the cost-optimized EFS Infrequent Access.

The Amazon EC2 API now supports the IPv6 protocol, allowing applications to connect over IPv6. This allows you to more easily meet IPv6 compliance requirements, more easily integrate with existing IPv6-based on-premises applications, and remove the need for expensive networking equipment to handle the address translation between IPv4 and IPv6.

Using AWS CloudFormation, you can now model and provision AWS DataSync resources, along with other resources within your AWS infrastructure, in a safe, predictable, and repeatable way. This enables you to standardize the creation of DataSync resources such as Tasks and Locations across deployments.

Amazon EMR now natively integrates with Apache Ranger , allowing you to define, enforce, and audit fine-grained data access control. With this feature, you can define and enforce 1/ database, table, and column level authorization policies for Apache Spark and Apache Hive users to access data through Hive Metastore, and 2/ prefix and object level authorization policies when accessing data in Amazon S3 via the Amazon EMR File System (EMRFS) , leveraging Amazon CloudWatch to capture auditing logs.

AWS have updated the AWS Config console to make it more efficient for you to track your AWS resource configuration changes, and monitor your AWS Config rule and conformance packs compliance. The new AWS Config console experience now includes features, such as Advanced Query, Aggregators, and resource configuration and compliance timeline pages.

Amazon API Gateway now supports data mapping definitions from an HTTP API’s method request data (e.g. path parameters, query string and headers) to the corresponding integration request parameters and from the integration response data (e.g. headers) to the HTTP API method response parameters. 

AWS Transfer Family now supports file transfers for Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) file systems, enabling AWS Transfer Family customers to easily and securely provide their business partners and end customers access to files stored in Amazon EFS file systems for use cases such as data distribution, supply chain workflows, content management, and web serving applications. With this launch, you can use AWS Transfer Family and Amazon EFS to migrate your file transfer workflows that rely on file storage without impacting your end users or application integrations, while eliminating the need to manage any file transfer infrastructure. 

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Java (JDBC) Driver for MySQL is now available in preview. This open source database driver helps applications take advantage of clustered databases, such as Amazon Aurora with MySQL compatibility, reducing failover times from minutes to seconds.

Starting this week, AWS Network Firewall is now available in the Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region.  

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling now supports using up to 40 instance types with mixed instances policies. This doubles the number of instance types you can specify. Previously, you could only specify 20 instance types. Now, you can specify up to 40 instance types when you first create an Auto Scaling group, and when you update existing Auto Scaling groups. You can use the Overrides section in your mixed instances policy structure to input up to 40 instance types that Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling can use to provision your On-Demand and Spot Instances. By using a variety of instance types, you can maintain your workload’s availability as you can provision your application’s resources across more Spot instance pools per Availability Zone and reduce the chance of getting insufficient capacity error in case of On-Demand. Running your application's resources across diverse Spot instance pools also allows you to further reduce your operating costs over time. 

Amazon CloudSearch has updated the existing search instances with new instances that provide better availability and performance at the same pricing. The new instances are one to one replacements, but leverage newer generation EC2 instances underneath, thereby improving the overall stability of your domain.  

The Serverless Image Handler solution combines highly available, trusted AWS services and the open source image processing suite Sharp  to enable fast and cost-effective image manipulation on the AWS Cloud. The solution automatically deploys and configures a serverless architecture that is optimized for dynamic image manipulation, and uses Amazon CloudFront for global content delivery and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for reliable and durable cloud storage at a low cost. 

Built-in Azure Policy support for NSG flow logs

GCP Memorystore of Redis enables TLS Encryption

GCP Monitoring Query Language (MQL) now GA

AWS were excited this week to announce a free new digital course: Configuring and Deploying VPCs with Multiple Subnets. The course covers how to create a secure AWS network environment with Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) service. This intermediate, one-hour course includes reading modules, video demonstrations, a quiz, and an optional self-paced lab. The course is designed for network engineers, solutions architects, and cloud architects.