In Cloud Computing This Week [Jul 16th 2021]

AWS Updates and Releases

• Amazon HealthLake is now Generally Available

  Amazon HealthLake, now in General Availability, is a HIPAA-eligible service that enables healthcare providers, health insurance companies, and pharmaceutical companies to securely store, transform, query, and analyze health data at petabyte scale.

   

• Amazon Lex launches support for Indian English

  Jul 15, 2021

  AWS are delighted to announce that Amazon Lex now supports Indian English. Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text. Amazon Lex provides deep learning powered automatic speech recognition (ASR) for converting speech to text, and natural language understanding (NLU) to recognize the intent of the text, to enable you to build applications with highly engaging user experiences and lifelike conversational interactions. With Indian English, you can deliver a robust and localized conversational experience that accurately understands Indian dialects. You can also respond to users with natural sounding Amazon Polly Indian voices to provide a fully localized conversational experience.

   

• New AWS Solutions Implementation: Simple File Manager for Amazon EFS

  Jul 15, 2021

  This week AWS are launching Simple File Manager for Amazon EFS into the AWS Solutions Implementations portfolio. Simple File Manager for Amazon EFS is a serverless solution that provides a user interface for managing data in your Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) file systems. Deploying this solution allows you to seamlessly browse any EFS file system in your Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) account and upload, download, or delete data from virtually any device, without the need to setup or maintain any dedicated Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) or networking infrastructure. As an example, you can use this solution to upload large machine learning (ML) model files to an Amazon EFS file system that is used by an AWS Lambda function for ML inference.

• AWS CloudFormation now supports more stacks per AWS account

  Jul 15, 2021

  AWS CloudFormation now supports increased limits on the default number of stacks allowed per AWS account. The number of stacks that can be created in an account is now 2000 (previously 200).

• FreeRTOS AWS reference integrations now include FreeRTOS 202012.01 LTS libraries

  Jul 15, 2021

  FreeRTOS AWS reference integrations are pre-integrated FreeRTOS projects ported to microcontroller-based evaluation boards that demonstrate end-to-end connectivity to AWS IoT Core. This helps developers save months of development effort and accelerate time to market. FreeRTOS AWS reference integrations now include the new managed AWS IoT Over-the-Air  update (OTA) library, AWS IoT Jobs  library, and the AWS IoT Device Defender  custom metrics feature from the FreeRTOS 202012.01 LTS release, and the coreMQTT Agent  library from the FreeRTOS 202104.00 release.

• AWS IoT Core now supports VPC Endpoints

  Jul 15, 2021

  AWS IoT Core is now integrated with AWS PrivateLink, enabling you to create private IoT Core data endpoints  in your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) using Interface VPC Endpoints . AWS PrivateLink is an AWS technology that enables private communication between your VPC and AWS services, such as IoT Core, by using private IP addresses that are not reachable from the public internet and do not require an internet gateway or NAT device to access. When used in conjunction with one of the many network-to-VPC  connectivity options, your IoT Core VPC endpoint can function as though it were hosted directly on your private network.

   

• AWS IoT SiteWise is expanding its transforms and formula expressions capabilities

  Jul 15, 2021

  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.

• New datasets available on the Registry of Open Data from the National Library of Medicine, Digital Earth Africa, Amazon, and others

  Jul 15, 2021

  Forty-four new or updated datasets from the National Library of Medicine, Digital Earth Africa, Amazon, and others are available on the Registry of Open Data in the following categories.

• Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager launches new console experience

  Jul 15, 2021

  Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM) now offers a new console experience that makes it easier for you to create, modify and manage your DLM policies. The new console allows you to create policies and modify existing policies in a more streamlined manner and provides you more information and easier access to additional resources.

• Introducing AWS for Health

  Jul 15, 2021

  Healthcare and life science organizations are undergoing transformation from bench-top to the point of care — reinventing how they collaborate, make data-driven clinical and operational decisions, enable precision medicine, accelerate therapy development, and decrease the cost of care. Industry leaders like Wellforce, Rush Medical Center, GRAIL, Moderna, and Genomics England use the AWS Cloud to support critical functions in health, while adhering to global compliance requirements.

   

• AWS Private Certificate Authority introduces integration with Kubernetes

  Jul 15, 2021

  AWS Private Certificate Authority (CA) now supports an open source plugin for cert-manager that offers a more secure certificate authority solution for Kubernetes containers. cert-manager is a widely-adopted solution for TLS certificate management in Kubernetes. Customers who use cert-manager for application certificate lifecycle management can now use this solution to improve security over the default cert-manager CA, which stores keys in plaintext in server memory. Customers with regulatory requirements for controlling access to and auditing their CA operations can use this solution to improve auditability and support compliance.

• AWS IoT SiteWise launches support for AWS PrivateLink for control plane APIs

  Jul 15, 2021

  AWS IoT SiteWise has now launched AWS PrivateLink support for control plane APIs to manage AWS IoT SiteWise resources such as gateways, asset models, and assets. You can now securely create, update or delete your AWS IoT SiteWise resources without crossing the public Internet and without using public IP addresses. For more information, please visit the updated AWS IoT SiteWise and interface VPC endpoints  page in our developer guide.

• Announcing availability of event-driven workflows with AWS Glue and Amazon EventBridge

  Jul 15, 2021

  Customers use AWS Glue workflows  to create and visualize complex extract, transform, and load (ETL) activities involving multiple crawlers, jobs, and triggers. AWS Glue now supports event-driven workflows, a new capability that lets customers start AWS Glue workflows based on events delivered by Amazon EventBridge. With this new integration, you can trigger a data integration workflow using events generated from your applications, integrated Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, and AWS services. For example, customers can trigger a data integration workflow as soon as a hundred files land in an S3 bucket.

• AWS App Mesh Constructs for AWS CDK are now generally available

  Jul 15, 2021

  The AWS App Mesh constructs module for AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) is now generally available. The new AWS App Mesh service construct for AWS CDK simplifies provisioning of AWS App Mesh resources into your CDK infrastructure stacks. Strongly typed interfaces make it easy to select the appropriate configurations for your mesh, as well as integrate with other supported AWS Services.

• AWS Elemental MediaPackage Now Available in US East (Ohio) Region

  Jul 15, 2021

  AWS Elemental MediaPackage is a video origination and just-in-time packaging service that allows video distributors to securely and reliably deliver live streaming or on-demand content at scale. From a single video input, MediaPackage creates video streams formatted to play on connected TVs, mobile phones, computers, tablets, and game consoles. It makes it easy to implement popular video features commonly found on DVRs, such as start-over, pause, and rewind. The service can also protect your content using Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies.

• Amazon EC2 now supports custom time windows for Scheduled Events

  Jul 15, 2021

  Amazon EC2 now provides customers the flexibility to specify weekly recurring time window(s) for Scheduled Events  that reboot, stop or terminate EC2 instances. AWS schedules infrequent events, such as a reboot, stop, or termination, for EC2 instances when it detects irreparable failure of the underlying host or when it must perform tasks such as maintaining the underlying host. With the flexibility to specify event windows, customers can set up Scheduled Events for their EC2 instances to occur during off-peak periods. Customers can also align these time windows with their internal maintenance schedules. Software vendors can leverage this capability to customize time windows for scheduled events based on their customers’ preferences.

• AWS Certificate Manager provides expanded usage of imported ECDSA and RSA Certificates

  Jul 14, 2021

  AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) now allows you to import Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) X.509 certificates of additional key types and key sizes, including Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) and RSA 3072 and 4096 keys and bind them with integrated services like Amazon CloudFront and Application Load Balancer. Previously, you could use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to import and use these certificate types as ACM only supported usage of imported RSA 1024 or RSA 2048 key certificates.

• Amazon Kendra releases Principal Store for secure search

  Jul 14, 2021

  Amazon Kendra is an intelligent search service powered by machine learning, enabling organizations to provide relevant information to customers and employees, when they need it.

• Amazon Lex announces tooling to migrate bots from Lex V1 console to Lex V2 console

  Jul 14, 2021

  Amazon Lex is a service for building natural language conversational interfaces using voice and text into your application. Earlier this year, AWS launched an enhanced V2 management console and APIs. The V2 API makes it easier for bot developers to add new languages to a bot and also deliver natural conversational experiences such as wait and continue (“Can you wait while I get my credit card?”). Today, we introduce tooling to automate migration of bots from Lex V1 Console to the Lex V2 Console. The migration tool uses existing intents and slot types to create corresponding resources in the Lex V2 Console.

• Amazon Lightsail now offers object storage for storing static content

  Jul 14, 2021

  Amazon Lightsail now provides you with the ability to store your static content such as images, videos or HTML files in an object storage that can be used for your websites and applications. Lightsail object storage can be associated to your Lightsail CDN distribution with a few simple clicks, making it quick and easy to accelerate the delivery of your content to a global audience. It can also be used as a low cost, secure backup solution. Lightsail object storage comes with the same predicable pricing as its other offerings with three different flat rate bundles starting at $1/month.

• Amazon CloudFront now supports ECDSA certificates for HTTPS connections to viewers

  Jul 14, 2021

  Starting today, you can use Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) P256 certificates to negotiate HTTPS connections between your viewers and Amazon CloudFront. As noted by NIST , ECDSA certificates can provide comparable security strength with smaller key sizes than RSA. As a result, conducting TLS handshakes with ECDSA certificates requires less networking and computing resources making them a good option for IoT devices that have limited storage and processing capabilities.

• Mark individual best practices as not applicable within the AWS Well-Architected Tool

  The AWS Well-Architected Tool (AWS WA Tool) now offers the ability for customers and AWS Partners to mark individual best practices as not applicable during their workload review.

• AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory and AD Connector are now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region

  Posted On: Jul 14, 2021

  AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory, also known as AWS Managed Microsoft AD, and AD Connector  are now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region.

• EC2 Image Builder now supports parameters in components for creating custom images

  Jul 14, 2021

  Image Builder components, which are a set of documents that enable image customization in EC2 Image Builder, now support parameters as an input in the image build process. You can now reuse your existing component investments in EC2 Image Builder to create different custom images by easily passing component parameters, such as installation directory or software version, in the image recipe.

• Amazon SageMaker Pipeline introduces a automatic hyperparameter tuning step

  Jul 13, 2021

  Amazon SageMaker Pipelines, the first purpose-built continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) service for machine learning (ML), is now integrated with SageMaker's automatic model tuning capability . Customers can add a model tuning step (TuningStep) in their SageMaker Pipelines which will automatically invoke a hyperparameter tuning job. The hyperparameter tuning finds the best version of a model by running many training jobs on the dataset using the algorithm and the ranges of hyperparameters specified by the customer. They can then register the best version of the model into the model registry using the RegisterModel step.

• Now view inventory and patch compliance of stopped instances using AWS Systems Manager

  Jul 13, 2021

  Patch Manager, a feature of AWS Systems Manager, now provides a more holistic view of the patch compliance and inventory of your fleet of instances by additionally reporting on stopped instances. This feature helps you to further simplify patch compliance and inventory reporting because information is now readily available for stopped instances.

• AWS Glue DataBrew is now available in AWS Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) Region

  Jul 13, 2021

  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 AWS Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) Region. For a list of regions where AWS Glue DataBrew is available, see the AWS Region Table.

• AWS IoT Core for LoRaWAN now supports VPC endpoints

  Jul 12, 2021

  AWS IoT Core for LoRaWAN now supports customer endpoints in VPCs. With this feature, your IoT devices and applications can communicate with IoT Core for LoRaWAN from your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) without the need to allow traffic from the VPC to public IP addresses. VPC endpoints are powered by AWS PrivateLink, an AWS technology that enables private communication between your VPC and AWS services, like AWS IoT Core for LoRaWAN, on the private AWS network.

• Amazon announces new AWS Deep Learning Containers to deploy Hugging Face models faster on Amazon SageMaker

  Posted On: Jul 12, 2021

  This week AWS were excited to announce AWS Deep Learning Containers (DLCs) with integrated SDKs for inference that enable customers to easily deploy Hugging Face models in Amazon SageMaker at scale. This was the number one requirement from AWS customers that have been leveraging the Hugging Face AWS DLCs for training (Hugging Face training DLCs) that released in March 2021.

• Amazon ml.Inf1 instances are now available on Amazon SageMaker in 4 additional AWS Regions

  Jul 12, 2021

  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. The Amazon Inf1 instance is powered by AWS Inferentia, a custom chip built from the ground up by AWS to accelerate ML inference workloads. Starting today, Amazon ml.Inf1 instances are additionally available on Amazon SageMaker in the Asia Pacific (Sydney), Europe (Stockholm), Europe (Milan), and AWS GovCloud (US-West) regions.

• Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL Supports New Minor Versions 13.3, 12.7, 11.12, 10.17, and 9.6.22

  Jul 12, 2021

  Following the announcement of updates to the PostgreSQL database , we have updated Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL to support PostgreSQL minor versions 13.3, 12.7, 11.12, 10.17, and 9.6.22. This release closes security vulnerabilities in PostgreSQL and contains bug fixes and improvements done by the PostgreSQL community.

• AWS Organizations increases quotas for tag policies

  Jul 12, 2021

  Tag policies help you govern tag consistency across resources in your organization's accounts. For example, with tag policies, you can define rules on tag keys, including how they should be capitalized and their allowed values. With this release, the maximum size of a tag policy document has been increased from 2.5k to 10k characters for both new and existing tag policies. The number of allowed policies has also been increased from 5 to 10.

• The Amazon Redshift Data API is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region

  Jul 12, 2021

  You can now use the Amazon Redshift Data API in the AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region to access Amazon Redshift. The Redshift Data API simplifies data access, ingest, and egress from languages supported with the AWS SDK such as Python, Go, Java, Node.js, PHP, Ruby, and C++.

• AWS AppSync Now Available in Asia Pacific (Osaka)

  Jul 12, 2021

  Starting today, AWS AppSync is available in the Asia Pacific (Osaka) region.

• AWS CLOUD MAP SUPPORTS CONFIGURING NEGATIVE CACHING FOR DNS QUERIES

  Jul 12, 2021

  AWS Cloud Map now provides the ability to configure the negative caching for DNS queries. AWS Cloud Map is a cloud resource discovery service that allows customers to define custom names for their application resources, such as Amazon Elastic Container Services (ECS) tasks, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, Amazon DynamoDB tables, or any other cloud resource. They can then use these custom names to discover the network location and metadata of these cloud resources from their applications using AWS SDK and authenticated API queries.

• NoSQL Workbench for Amazon DynamoDB now helps you run frequent operations more easily to modify and access table data

  Jul 12, 2021

  NoSQL Workbench for DynamoDB , a client-side tool that helps you design, visualize, and query nonrelational data models by using a point-and-click interface, now helps you run frequent data-plane operations more easily to modify and access table data. Now, you can save or bookmark as many as 50 DynamoDB data-plane operations in the NoSQL Workbench operation builder.

• Amplify Flutter now supports Null Safety

  Jul 12, 2021

  This week AWS announced that they have updated AWS Amplify’s tools and libraries for Flutter to support null safety for all AWS use cases. Flutter developers can now enjoy all the easy-to-integrate Amplify functionality with higher reliability and improved developer ergonomics. Sound null safety is a Dart language feature in which code is non-nullable by default and turns runtime null-dereference errors into edit-time analysis errors. This enables developers to reduce bugs in their code and benefit from performance improvements through smaller binaries and faster execution.

   

Config Connector 1.56.0 is now available.

Added support for ComputeInstanceGroupManager resource (Issue #314).

Added support for BinaryAuthorizationPolicy resource.

Added cluster.kmsKeyRef field to BigtableInstance.

Added expire, rotation, topics, and ttl fields to SecretManagerSecret (Issue #471).

Fixed bug that was causing CloudIdentityGroup to go through infinite updates.

Added timestamp to log messages.

Aggregated the cnrm-admin ClusterRole to the admin and edit ClusterRoles, and aggregated the cnrm-viewer ClusterRole to view ClusterRole.