In Cloud Computing This Week [Jul 30th 2021]

The Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) SDK for Java 2.x is now available and is compatible with the AWS SDK for Java 2.x. You can build Java applications with accelerated access to DynamoDB and benefit from non-blocking I/O and other features of the latest AWS SDK for Java.

Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra), a scalable, highly available, and fully managed Apache Cassandra–compatible database service, now automatically optimizes client connections made through AWS PrivateLink to improve availability and read/write throughput.

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling now lets you control which instances to terminate during a scale-in event by allowing you to provide a custom function that selects which instances to terminate. Previously, you could use one of the predefined termination policies to determine which instances Auto Scaling would terminate. (For example, the OldestLaunchTemplate termination policy would terminate instances in order of their launch template age, oldest first.) Now, you can provide a custom Lambda function that indicates which instances are safe to terminate on scale in. This feature is useful for stateful applications where you want to control which instances Auto Scaling terminates so that your application is not disrupted on scale in.

Amazon S3 on Outposts now offers two larger storage tiers: 240 TB and 380 TB. These new storage tiers help you meet your needs for workloads with larger object storage requirements, and add to the existing options of: 26 TB, 48 TB, and 96 TB storage tiers.

You can now launch RabbitMQ 3.8.17 brokers on Amazon MQ. This patch update to RabbitMQ contains several fixes and enhancements compared to the previously supported version, RabbitMQ 3.8.11

Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels introduces a simplified on-boarding experience with the ability to explore images, labels, and datasets by one-click creation of example projects. Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels provides out of the box video tutorials, and example projects with hundreds of images for single-class classification, multi-class classification, object detection, and logo detection.

Amazon CloudWatch announced support for the trimmed mean statistic on CloudWatch Metrics. With trimmed mean statistics, customers gain visibility on the average performance of a metric without the noise of outliers. Trends in average performance represented by the trimmed mean can be visualized on CloudWatch Dashboards or used to set thresholds in alarms for proactive alerting.

Amazon Neptune announced support for openCypher , a popular query language for building applications with graph databases. Developers can now use openCypher with Amazon Neptune, giving them more choices to build or migrate graph applications to a highly available, secure, and fully managed graph database. Support for openCypher is compatible with our customers’ existing property graphs and developers can use both Apache TinkerPop Gremlin and openCypher queries within the same graph.

Amazon S3 on Outposts now supports the ability to create and access S3 objects on Outposts directly from your on-premises network. You can now configure S3 endpoints using your customer owned IP  (CoIP) addresses and access your S3 objects from your on-premise network through the Outposts Local Gateway  (LGW). With direct access, applications outside the Outposts Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) can now directly access data stored in S3 buckets on your Outposts. 

Amazon Neptune announces support for SPARQL 1.1 Graph Store HTTP Protocol (GSP)   for graphs using W3C’s Resource Description Framework (RDF). Using GSP on SPARQL 1.1 endpoints, customers now have an efficient method to interact with complete named graphs within a graph store. This can streamline building graph applications using Amazon Neptune and tools that support the W3C Recommendation GSP such as Apache Jena .

Amazon Neptune ML, a machine learning capability for graphs that uses Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), is now generally available in all regions where Amazon Neptune is available. Using the Deep Graph Library (DGL), an open-source library to which AWS contributes, Neptune ML automates the heavy lifting of selecting and training the best ML model for graph data. With Neptune ML, you can improve the accuracy of most predictions for graphs by over 50% when compared to making predictions using non-graph methods.

This week, AWS announced the general availability of AWS IoT SiteWise Edge, a feature of AWS IoT SiteWise that makes it easy for industrial customers to collect, organize, process, and monitor equipment data on-premises (i.e. at the edge). SiteWise Edge software enables factory operators to get visibility into their equipment data and make decisions that help improve equipment uptime, product quality, and process efficiency.

Starting this week, Amazon EC2 D3 instances, the latest generation of the dense HDD-storage instances, are available in the Europe (London) region. 

AWS announced the availability of smaller sized Amazon EC2 G4ad instances that deliver up to 40% better price performance over comparable GPU-based instances for graphics intensive applications such as virtual workstations and game streaming. Like the other G4ad instances, these new sizes are powered by AMD Radeon Pro V520 GPUs and second-generation AMD EPYC processors and are designed to be cost-effective for workloads that don’t need the high vCPU and system memory that current larger G4ad instance sizes offer providing the lowest cost GPU instance in the AWS Cloud.

Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) is now available in the China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet. You can create DAX clusters in this AWS Region for your DynamoDB applications that require microsecond response times.

AWS Lambda larger functions are now available in 3 additional regions enabling AWS customers to provision Lambda functions with a maximum of 10,240 MB (10 GB) of memory, a more than 3x increase compared to the previous limit of 3,008 MB. With larger functions, customers can now more easily use AWS Lambda for workloads such as batch, extract, transform, load (ETL) jobs, and media processing applications perform memory intensive operations at scale.  

AWS DataSync is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region. DataSync can copy data between Network File System (NFS) shares, Server Message Block (SMB) shares, self-managed object storage, AWS Snowcone, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets, Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) file systems, and Amazon FSx for Windows File Server file systems.

CDK Pipelines  is a construct library for the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) that makes it easy to set up simple or complex continuous delivery pipelines with AWS CodePipeline. With CDK Pipelines, development teams can define and share “pipelines-as-code” patterns for deploying their applications. Teams can easily add stages to their pipeline to deploy their applications across multiple AWS accounts or additional AWS Regions.

Master AWS skills with four new AWS Modern Application Development Specializations on Coursera using interactive learning to earn a certificate of completion. Choose an AWS Specialization based on your preferred programming language—Python, Java, .NET, and Node.js—to develop new skills in four months with three hours a week. Learners should have intermediate knowledge of their preferred coding language, though no prior knowledge of AWS is required.  

Amazon DynamoDB global tables are now available in the Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region. With global tables, you can give massively scaled, global applications local access to a DynamoDB table for fast read and write performance. You also can use global tables to replicate DynamoDB table data to additional AWS Regions for higher availability and disaster recovery.

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 Europe (Milan) Region. For a list of regions where AWS Glue DataBrew is available, see the AWS Region Table.

This week AWS announced the availability of Amazon CloudWatch metrics for Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager  (Amazon DLM), which you can use to gain insight into the operations of your lifecycle policy. You can use these metrics to see exactly how many Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) Snapshots and EBS-backed Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) are create, copied, shared and deleted each time a lifecycle policy is run. You can also create alarms to be triggered when resources are not created, copied or deleted by the policy, allowing you to take immediate action to diagnose and fix potential policy issues.

AWS Amplify now supports Sign in with Apple (SIWA), making it easier for app developers to reach a broad base of Apple users. SIWA supplements Amplify’s currently supported Identity Providers (Google, Facebook, and Amazon), and continues to allow developers to easily enable social sign-in to their applications, even without AWS experience.

AWS Outposts can now be shipped and installed at your datacenter and on-premises locations in Argentina*, Chile, and Peru.

This week, AWS announced new functionality in AWS Control Tower that provides you the option to use a single customer provided AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) key to secure the AWS Control Tower deployed services (AWS CloudTrail, AWS Config) and the associated AWS S3 data. The use of AWS KMS encryption gives you enhanced encryption over the default SSE-S3 encryption used by AWS Control Tower.

Starting this week, AWS CloudFormation StackSets  enables you to import existing CloudFormation stacks into a stack set. StackSets extend the functionality of stacks letting you create, update, or delete stacks across multiple AWS accounts and regions with a single operation. You can now bring your existing CloudFormation stacks into the management purview of a new or an existing stack set to easily create resources, applications or environments in other AWS accounts and AWS Regions. That way you can avoid the process of manually replicating and managing the infrastructure in each account and region individually. For example, you can import security resources such as AWS IAM roles described in CloudFormation into a stack set and then centrally manage and deploy those IAM roles across multiple accounts to achieve a consistent organization-wide security compliance in a scalable manner.

AWS Outposts is a fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs, and tools to virtually any datacenter, co-location space, or on-premises facility for a truly consistent hybrid experience. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) placement groups allow you to influence the placement strategy of instances on the underlying hardware. You can select from cluster, spread or partition placement strategies, depending on the needs of the workload.

The Amazon Redshift Data API enables you to painlessly access data from Amazon Redshift with all types of traditional cloud-native, and containerized, serverless web services-based applications and event-driven applications. You can use the Data API with languages supported with the AWS SDK such as Python, Go, Java, Node.js, PHP, Ruby, and C++.

This week AWS were terribly excited to announce that you can now automatically setup Amazon CodeGuru Profiler on your Lambda functions from within the Lambda console. This makes it easier for you to understand your Lambda function’s runtime and optimize their performance and costs.

This week, AWS Service Catalog is releasing a new Getting Started Library (GSL) experience that simplifies discovering best practice templates and offers better guidance for Service Catalog Administrators when they use the library. The GSL contains more than 250 AWS best practice solutions for a wide variety of technical and business problems. The Library is regularly enriched with new solutions, with “New Relic AWS Control Tower Integration” or “Amazon EKS Architecture” as recent additions.

Amazon Interactive Video Service (Amazon IVS) now gives you the ability to send live video from your mobile applications to an Amazon IVS channel as an input for a live stream using the Amazon IVS mobile broadcast SDK for Android and iOS.

AWS Solutions has updated the AWS MLOps Framework, an AWS Solutions Implementation that streamlines the pipeline deployment process and enforces architecture best practices for machine learning (ML) model productionization. This solution addresses common operational pain points that customers face when adopting multiple ML workflow automation tools.

Today, we are announcing that a new version of the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate exam is now available. This is the first AWS Certification exam to allow candidates to demonstrate skills with exam labs. AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate is intended for system administrators in cloud operations roles to validate technical skills.

AWS are excited to announce the launch of MLOps Engineering on AWS, a three-day classroom training course from AWS Training and Certification. This course will help ML data platform engineers, DevOps engineers, and developers/operations staff responsible for operationalizing ML models bring DevOps-style practices into the building, training, and deployment of ML models. 

AWS Network Firewall is now a Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliant service. AWS Network Firewall is a managed firewall service that makes it easy to deploy essential network protections for all your Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs). The service automatically scales with network traffic volume to provide high-availability protections without the need to set up or maintain the underlying infrastructure. AWS Network Firewall is integrated with AWS Firewall Manager to provide you with central visibility and control of your firewall policies across multiple AWS accounts.

AWS Snowcone now supports multicast streams, routing, load balancing, and other networking use cases by enabling instances on a Snowcone 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 Snowcone device along with improved network performance, enabling use cases that were previously not possible.

The Amazon Virtual Andon solution provides a scalable digital Andon system to optimize factory floor processes, reduce issue resolution time, support the transition to predictive maintenance, and prevent issues. The solution provides a workflow to help users monitor manufacturing workstations for events, log events, and then route specific events to the correct engineer for resolution. The solution is fully customizable and allows users to update available issue types and root causes as processes evolve and change.

AWS IoT SiteWise is a managed service to collect, store, organize and monitor data from industrial equipment at scale. Today, we are announcing support for exporting your AWS IoT SiteWise data to Amazon S3. With this feature, you can configure AWS IoT SiteWise to export your equipment data to your industrial data lake in Amazon S3. Once your data is exported, you can leverage a host of other AWS services such as AWS IoT Analytics, Amazon Athena, Amazon SageMaker, and Amazon QuickSight, to perform analytics and build machine learning (ML) models. You can also join and augment your equipment data from AWS IoT SiteWise with other data sources in your data lake (such as from Enterprise Resource Planning systems) to get even richer insights that enable you to optimize your maintenance and operations activities.

Amazon SageMaker Pipelines, the first purpose-built continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) service for machine learning (ML), is now integrated with popular third-party source code repositories such as GitHub and BitBucket; and software development automation tool - Jenkins. Customers can now leverage the same tools that they use for managing the software development lifecycle for building and deploying ML models as well, eliminating the need to adopt new tools for managing the ML lifecycle and speeding up their ML projects.

AWS IoT Analytics now supports JOIN operation on AWS IoT Analytics data stores, enabling customers to combine data from two or more AWS IoT Analytics data stores based on a common attribute between them. Customers can now create a AWS IoT SiteWise data backed AWS IoT Analytics data store and join it with other S3 backed AWS IoT Analytics data stores to discover insights about their industrial assets such as viewing properties and relationships between various AWS IoT SiteWise assets, run statistical queries on AWS IoT SiteWise and S3 data, and perform advanced analytics. You can use this feature to create an AWS IoT Analytics SQL query data set that uses a join operation (inner join, left, right and full outer join, self join and cross join ) to combine two or more customer managed AWS IoT Analytics data stores and AWS IoT SiteWise managed data stores on a join condition using attribute names that exist in both data stores.

Amazon Textract, a machine learning service that extracts text and structured data from any document or image, now offers specialized support for invoices and receipts. Until today, these important documents were difficult to process at scale because they do not follow set design rules, and often require context to interpret correctly. For example, customers might need to extract the vendor name from the Amazon logo at the top of an invoice even though it is not labeled “Vendor: Amazon”. Now with Textract, customers can extract explicitly labeled data, implied data, and line items from itemized list of goods or services from almost any invoice or receipt without any templates or configuration.

AWS Batch is a cloud-native batch scheduler that enables anyone - from enterprises, to scientists and developers - to easily and efficiently run batch jobs on AWS. Whether you have a few jobs or hundreds of thousands, AWS Batch dynamically provisions the optimal quantity and type of compute resources based on the volume and specific resource requirements of the work you submit. With AWS Batch, there is no need to install and manage batch computing software or server clusters that you use to run your jobs, allowing you to focus on analyzing results and solving problems. AWS Batch plans, schedules, and executes your batch computing workloads across AWS compute services and features, such as AWS Fargate, Amazon EC2, and Spot Instances.

This week, AWS announced the general availability of Amazon Route 53 Application Recovery Controller, a new capability in Route 53 that makes it easy for developers to continuously monitor their applications’ ability to recover from failures and control their recovery across AWS Regions, Availability Zones, and on-premises infrastructure. Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable cloud Domain Name Service that routes end-user and application requests to internet applications. Application Recovery Controller triggers traffic fail overs between redundant application copies, or replicas, running in separate AWS or on-premises locations. Application Recovery Controller also monitors AWS resource configurations and routing policies associated with your applications and alerts you when changes are made that affect the ability of your applications to recover using replicas. 

AWS Snowball now supports multicast streams, routing, load balancing, and other networking use cases by enabling instances on a Snowball 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 Snowball devices along with improved network performance, enabling use cases that were previously not possible. 

This week AWS announced the general availability of AWS Local Zones in Denver. AWS customers can now use the new Local Zone to deliver applications that require single-digit millisecond latency to end-users or on-premises installations in the Denver metro area.

The Amazon VPC Container Networking Interface (CNI) Plugin  now supports running more pods per node on AWS Nitro based EC2 instance types. To achieve higher pod density, the VPC CNI plugin leverages a new VPC capability  that enables IP address prefixes to be attached to EC2 instances.

AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) is now available in the Europe (Paris) region. For a full list of the regions where AWS SSO is available, see the AWS Regional Services List.

Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text. With Amazon Lex, you can quickly and easily build sophisticated, natural language, conversational bots (“chatbots”), virtual agents, and IVR systems. Today, Amazon Lex launches UK Postal Code built-in slot type. You can now design bots to capture postal codes in the UK region. The postal codes extracted from user responses can then be used to fulfill user requests. For example, a retail chain may need to collect a caller’s postal code to provide the nearest store location and hours. With UK Postal Code built-in slot type, developers can easily capture the postal code and resolve it to a standardized format.

AWS CloudTrail now supports logging of data events for Amazon EBS direct APIs that customers can use to identify when their Amazon EBS snapshots are accessed using the ListSnapshotBlocks, ListChangedBlocks, GetSnapshotBlock, or PutSnapshotBlock APIs by users in their AWS account. These data events are delivered to an Amazon S3 bucket and Amazon CloudWatch Events, and help customers’ security and operations teams detect unauthorized access and take immediate action. Until now, customers could use management events logged in AWS CloudTrail to identify when EBS snapshots were created, copied, or shared with other AWS accounts. With this new capability, customers can also identify when users in their AWS account access Amazon EBS snapshots at the block level using EBS direct APIs.

FreeRTOS 202107.00 now includes the Simple Network Time Protocol (SNTP) client library to make it easier for developers to add time information in their FreeRTOS-based IoT applications. The SNTP client library, named coreSNTP, is used to synchronize clocks between two devices or a device and the cloud. 

The Amazon Connect Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) Adapter for Salesforce  now provides an improved guided setup after installing the CTI Adapter AppExchange package. Customers leveraging the guided setup will accelerate the time to deploy and take the first call to minutes. In addition, each step of the guide will have contextual documentation links for additional information on the setup. The guided setup will validate configuration settings to minimize risk of misconfigurations when installing the CTI Adapter into Salesforce Lightning or Classic.

AWS App2Container (A2C) now supports containerization and deployment of multi-tier Windows applications. This is in addition to A2C support for ASP.NET applications. With this release, customers can now containerize the following types of Windows applications: a) Multi-tier Windows applications — IIS applications or Windows services running in multi-tier architecture containerized separately, deployed to ECS or EKS clusters, and create network resources for communication between deployed applications, b) Cooperating applications on the same host - multiple applications running on the same host containerized in a single container. This release also allows customers to containerize a Windows service in a stand-alone container. Customers can continue to deploy these containerized multi-tier applications to their choice of container platforms, ECS or EKS using A2C.

Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition supports the Partition Manager (pg_partman) extension in AWS GovCloud (US) regions. pg_partman is a PostgreSQL extension that helps you to manage both time series and serial-based table partition sets, including automatic management of partition creation and runtime maintenance. pg_partman works with PostgreSQL native partitioning so users can benefit from significant performance enhancements.

Amazon S3 Access Points aliases allow any application that requires an S3 bucket name to easily use an access point. With S3 Access Points, you can create hundreds of unique policies to easily control access to shared datasets. Now, you can use S3 Access Point aliases anywhere you use S3 bucket names to access data in S3. With this update, you can use S3 Access Point aliases with AWS services, including Amazon EMR, Amazon Storage Gateway, and Amazon Athena, open-source packages, such as Apache Spark and Apache Hive, and Amazon Partner Network (APN) solutions without any code changes and at no additional cost.

Amazon SageMaker Autopilot automatically builds, trains and tunes the best machine learning models based on your data, while giving you full control and visibility, and Amazon SageMaker Automatic Model Tuning (AMT)  automatically finds the best version of a machine learning model for any algorithm and data set. Autopilot and AMT now support enhanced access control using Amazon SageMaker-specific condition keys. You can use these keys in the Condition element of an Identity and Access Management (IAM) policy to further refine the conditions under which the policy statement applies.

AWS IoT Device Tester for FreeRTOS and AWS IoT Device Tester for AWS IoT Greengrass are test automation tools for your IoT devices running FreeRTOS and AWS IoT Greengrass.

Amazon SageMaker JumpStart helps you quickly and easily solve your machine learning problems with one-click access to popular model collections from TensorFlow Hub, PyTorch Hub and Hugging Face (also known as “model zoos”), and to 16 end-to-end solutions that solve common business problems such demand forecasting, fraud detection and document understanding.