This week's roundup of all the cloud news.
Hi Cloud Land, we've read all the cloud computing news from AWS, Azure and GCP again this week, so you don't have to.
AWS and GCP had a bit going on this week, Azure not so much. All the details below. Here at Hava we made some more improvements to our AWS diagram generator which has kept the team busy.
You're welcome.
Create AWS RDS DB Instances on AWS Outposts. 
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. AWS Outposts is ideal for workloads that require low latency access to on-premises systems, local data processing, or local data storage.
Amazon RDS is a fully managed service that allows you to launch, operate and scale a relational database.
This week AWS announced that you can now create RDS DB instances on AWS Outposts with initial support being provided for MySQL and PostgreSQL
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-create-amazon-rds-db-instances-on-aws-outposts/
Create Snapshots from any Block Storage using EBS direct APIs 
This week AWS announced that you can now create Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) snapshots from any block storage data, such as on-premises volumes, volumes from another cloud provider, existing block data stored on Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), or even your own laptop
AWS customers using the cloud for disaster recovery of on-premises infrastructure all have the same question: how can I transfer my on-premises volume data to the cloud efficiently and at low cost? You usually create temporary Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, attach Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes, transfer the data at block level from on-premises to these new Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes, take a snapshot of every EBS volumes created and tear-down the temporary infrastructure. Some of you choose to use CloudEndure to simplify this process.
To simplify this, AWS are announced 3 new APIs that are part of EBS direct API, a new set of APIs announced at re:Invent 2019. AWS initially launched a read and diff APIs. They extend it with write capabilities. These 3 new APIs allow to create Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) snapshots from your on-premises volumes, or any block storage data that you want to be able to store and recover in AWS.
With the addition of write capability in EBS direct API, you can now create new snapshots from your on-premises volumes, or create incremental snapshots, and delete them. Once a snapshot is created, it has all the benefits of snapshots created from Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes. You can copy them, share them between AWS Accounts, keep them available for a Fast Snapshot Restore, or create Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes from them.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-create-snapshots-from-any-block-storage/
Major updates to AWS Well Architected
The AWS Well Architected framework outlines best practice for designing and building AWS powered applications. The framework is built on five pillars:
Operational Excellence – The ability to run and monitor systems to deliver business value and to continually improve supporting processes and procedures.
Security – The ability to protect information, systems, and assets while delivering business value through risk assessments and mitigation strategies.
Reliability – The ability of a system to recover from infrastructure or service disruptions, dynamically acquire computing resources to meet demand, and mitigate disruptions such as misconfigurations or transient network issues.
Performance Efficiency – The ability to use computing resources efficiently to meet system requirements, and to maintain that efficiency as demand changes and technologies evolve.
Cost Optimization – The ability to run systems to deliver business value at
the lowest price point.
This week AWS released a lot of updates to the framework
Amazon Forecast now supports resource tagging
Amazon Forecast is a fully managed service that uses machine learning (ML) to generate accurate forecasts without requiring any prior ML experience. Amazon Forecast can be used in a wide variety of use cases, including product demand forecasting, inventory planning, workforce planning and cloud infrastructure usage forecasting.
Starting this week, you can assign tags to dataset groups, datasets, dataset import jobs, predictors, forecasts and forecast export jobs within Forecast. Each tag is a simple label consisting of a customer-defined key and an optional value that can make it easier to manage and filter resources. Tagging allows you to better manage and classify your Forecast resources and enables several use cases including providing access control and security risk management to name a few.
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/07/amazon-forecast-supports-resource-tagging/
Google Cloud Command Line Tool Cheat-Sheet 
This week Google released a handy online and printable cheat sheet covering the major gcloud commands, gclod being the GCP primary command line tool.
The gcloud command-line tool cheat sheet is available as a one-page sheet, an online resource, and quite fittingly, a command itself, gcloud cheat-sheet.
GCP have organized the gcloud command-line tool cheat sheet around common command invocations (like creating a Compute Engine virtual machine instance), essential workflows (such as authorization and setting properties for your configuration), and core tool capabilities (like filtering and sorting output). This list of useful commands, all neatly packed into a single double-sided page, is ready to be downloaded and printed. As a bonus, the cheat sheet also includes a quick rundown of how gcloud commands are structured, enabling you to easily discover commands beyond this list.
Whether you’re new to the gcloud command-line tool and need a good starting point, or are a seasoned user and need a map to situate yourself, the gcloud command-line tool cheat sheet is a nifty companion as you traverse the expansive landscape of Google Cloud. You can access the cheat sheet online, or download the printable PDF. Or if you’ve already got the latest version of Cloud SDK installed, give the cheat sheet a whirl right now with gcloud cheat-sheet.
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/management-tools/new-gcloud-cheat-sheet-available
Google Cloud Active Assist
This week GCP announced Active Assist, a portfolio of intelligent tools and capabilities to help actively assist you in managing complexity in your cloud operations. Active Assist extends the core concepts they initially introduced with Policy Intelligence at Next ‘19 and applies them to the rest of Google Cloud. It leverages data, machine learning, automation, and intelligence, to bring “Google magic” to you, so you can enjoy a simpler, smarter cloud experience in your day-to-day operations.
Active Assist’s portfolio will help you with three key activities: making proactive improvements to your cloud with smart recommendations, preventing mistakes from happening in the first place by giving you better analysis, and helping you figure out why something went wrong by using intuitive troubleshooting tools. With Active Assist as your sidekick, these tasks become simple and fast, helping you shift your time from administration to things like innovation.
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/management-tools/active-assist-comes-to-google-cloud
Amazon ECS announces AWS CoPilot
This week, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) announced AWS Copilot, a command line interface tool that helps customers develop, release, and operate containerized applications on AWS. With a single command, AWS Copilot creates all infrastructure and artifacts required to run production-ready service on Amazon ECS and AWS Fargate, including task definitions, image repositories, and AWS resources like load balancers, deployment pipelines.
With AWS Copilot, users can focus on developing their applications rather than setting up infrastructure.
With AWS Copilot you can launch your service using one of the built in service patterns providing you secure and scalable infrastructure. Once your service is up and running, AWS Copilot has built in commands to easily add more services, infrastructure like databases or Amazon S3 Buckets, or even new deployment environments in different accounts and regions.
While getting started and growing your application is important, AWS Copilot wants to make it easy for you to release and operate your application too. AWS Copilot lets you set up a fully functional CI/CD AWS CodePipeline with just two commands to safely deploy through multiple deployment stages. Additionally, you can view all of your services' logs and health in seconds without having to leave your terminal.
Finally, with AWS Copilot, you can choose a collaboration model that fits your team. When using AWS Copilot you can work alone or share your application with other users in your AWS account.
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/07/amazon-ecs-announces-aws-copilot/
Upcoming Events: 
Alexa Live - July 22, 2020
Voice is becoming part of the tech landscape as is natural language processing. In this virtual developer education event, AWS will cover the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK), Voice Service, Connect kit, Smart home skill API
The event is free.
Google Cloud Next OnAir
Google's 9 Week Digital Event kicks off on July 14th with diverse topics being covered each week.
| Industry Insights | July 14th |
| Productivity & Collaboration | July 21st |
| Infrastructure | July 28th |
| Security | August 4th |
| Data Analytics | August 11th |
| Data Management and Databases | August 18th |
| Application Modernization | August 25th |
| Cloud AI | September 1st |
| Business Application Platform | September 8th |
Full Information and Session times here: https://cloud.withgoogle.com/next/sf
Azure Virtual Events
Microsoft have a full schedule of Virtual Events
| Azure Fundamentals | July 14th |
| Modernising Web Apps & Data | July 14th |
| Azure BCDR Solutions | July 15th |
| Delivering the Modern Data Warehouse | July 15th |
These are a small selection of the virtual events available from Azure - 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, we hope you found something useful.
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