In Cloud Computing This Week [July 3rd 2020]

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

.NET Core is the future of .NET!    Version 4.8 of the .NET Framework is the last major version to be released, and Microsoft has stated it will receive only bug-, reliability-, and security-related fixes going forward.

For applications where you want to continue to take advantage of future investments and innovations in the .NET platform, you need to consider porting your applications to .NET Core.

Also, there are additional reasons to consider porting applications to .NET Core such as benefiting from innovation in Linux and open source, improved application scaling and performance, and reducing licensing spend. Porting can, however, entail significant manual effort, some of which is undifferentiated such as updating references to project dependencies.

This week  AWS announced the Porting Assistant for .NET, a new tool that helps customers analyze and port their .NET Framework applications to .NET Core running on Linux. The Porting Assistant for .NET assesses both the application source code and the full tree of public API and NuGet package dependencies to identify those incompatible with .NET Core and guides developers to compatible replacements when available.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/announcing-the-porting-assistant-for-net/

AWS App2Container - A Containerizing tool for Java and .NET Applications

AWS customers are increasingly developing their new applications with containers and serverless technologies, and are using modern continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) tools to automate the software delivery life cycle.

They also maintain a large number of existing applications that are built and managed manually or using legacy systems. Maintaining these two sets of applications with disparate tooling adds to operational overhead and slows down the pace of delivering new business capabilities. As much as possible, they want to be able to standardize their management tooling and CI/CD processes across both their existing and new applications, and see the option of packaging their existing applications into containers as the first step towards accomplishing that goal.

However, containerizing existing applications requires a long list of manual tasks such as identifying application dependencies, writing dockerfiles, and setting up build and deployment processes for each application. These manual tasks are time consuming, error prone, and can slow down the modernization efforts.

This week AWS launched AWS App2Container, a new command-line tool that helps containerize existing applications that are running on-premises, in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), or in other clouds, without needing any code changes. App2Container discovers applications running on a server, identifies their dependencies, and generates relevant artifacts for seamless deployment to Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS. It also provides integration with AWS CodeBuild and AWS CodeDeploy to enable a repeatable way to build and deploy containerized applications.

AWS App2Container generates the following artifacts for each application component: Application artifacts such as application files/folders, Dockerfiles, container images in Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR), ECS Task definitions, Kubernetes deployment YAML, CloudFormation templates to deploy the application to Amazon ECS or EKS, and templates to set up a build/release pipeline in AWS Codepipeline which also leverages AWS CodeBuild and CodeDeploy.

Starting now, you can use App2Container to containerize ASP.NET (.NET 3.5+) web applications running in IIS 7.5+ on Windows, and Java applications running on Linux—standalone JBoss, Apache Tomcat, and generic Java applications such as Spring Boot, IBM WebSphere, Oracle WebLogic, etc.

According to AWS, by modernizing existing applications using containers, you can make them portable, increase development agility, standardize your CI/CD processes, and reduce operational costs.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-app2container-a-new-containerizing-tool-for-java-and-asp-net-applications/

Amazon RDS Proxy now GA

At AWS re:Invent 2019, AWS launched the preview of Amazon RDS Proxy, a fully managed, highly available database proxy for Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) that makes applications more scalable, more resilient to database failures, and more secure. Following the preview of MySQL engine, AWS extended to the PostgreSQL compatibility. This week AWS were pleased to announce that RDS proxy is now generally available for both engines.

Many applications, including those built on modern serverless architectures using AWS Lambda, Fargate, Amazon ECS, or EKS can have a large number of open connections to the database server, and may open and close database connections at a high rate, exhausting database memory and compute resources.

Amazon RDS Proxy allows applications to pool and share connections established with the database, improving database efficiency, application scalability, and security. RDS Proxy reduces client recovery time after failover by up to 79% for Amazon Aurora MySQL and by up to 32% for Amazon RDS for MySQL. Also, its authentication and access can be managed through integration with AWS Secrets Manager and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM).

Amazon RDS Proxy can be enabled for most applications with no code change, and you don’t need to provision or manage any additional infrastructure and only pay per vCPU of the database instance for which the proxy is enabled.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-rds-proxy-now-generally-available/

Build, distribute and deploy application updates to Azure VM Scale Sets 

As the needs of your business grow, and you deploy business-critical applications at cloud scale, the complexity and administrative overhead of managing those applications can increase substantially. To help reduce this management overhead, Azure continues to invest in new capabilities that make it easier to build and distribute application updates across distributed cloud environments.

Microsoft recently announced the general availability of automatic image-based upgrades for custom images, providing you the ability to automatically deploy new versions of virtual machine (VM) images to your virtual machine scale sets. Automatic image upgrade natively integrates with Shared Image Gallery, combining the scalable distribution of VM images with the ease and safety of orchestrated infrastructure updates, to offer an end-to-end solution from image publishing to workload deployment.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/build-distribute-and-deploy-application-updates-to-azure-virtual-machine-scale-sets/

Azure Firewall Manager is now GA 

Azure Firewall Manager is now generally available and includes Azure Firewall Policy, Azure Firewall in a Virtual WAN Hub (Secure Virtual Hub), and Hub Virtual Network. In addition, Microsoft are introducing several new capabilities to Firewall Manager and Firewall Policy to align with the standalone Azure Firewall configuration capabilities.

Key features in this release include:

• Threat intelligence-based filtering allow list in Firewall Policy is now generally available.
• Multiple public IP addresses support for Azure Firewall in Secure Virtual Hub is now generally available.
• Forced tunneling support for Hub Virtual Network is now generally available.
• Configuring secure virtual hubs with Azure Firewall for east-west traffic (private) and a third-party security as a service (SECaaS) partner of your choice for north-south traffic (internet bound).
• Integration of third-party SECaaS partners are now generally available in all Azure public cloud regions.
• Zscaler integration will be generally available on July 3, 2020. Check Point is a supported SECaaS partner and will be in preview on July 3, 2020. iboss integration will be generally available on July 31, 2020.
• Support for domain name system (DNS) proxy, custom DNS, and fully-qualified domain name (FQDN) filtering in network rules using Firewall Policy are now in preview.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-firewall-manager-is-now-generally-available/

Presto Optional Component for Dataproc now GA 

Presto is an open source, distributed SQL query engine for running interactive analytics queries against data sources of many types. Google are pleased to announce the GA release of the Presto optional component for Dataproc, their fully managed cloud service for running data processing software from the open source ecosystem. This new optional component brings the full suite of support from Google Cloud, including fast cluster startup times and integration testing with the rest of Dataproc. 

The Presto release of Dataproc comes with several new features that improve on the experience of using Presto, including supporting BigQuery integration out of the box, Presto UI support in Component Gateway, JMX and logging integrations with Cloud Monitoring, Presto Job Submission for automating SQL commands, and improvements to the Presto JVM configurations. 

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/data-analytics/presto-optional-component-now-available-on-dataproc

Google Cloud VMware Engine now generally available 

This week Google were happy to announce that Google Cloud VMware Engine is generally available, enabling you to seamlessly migrate your existing VMware-based applications to Google Cloud without refactoring or rewriting them. You can run the service in the us-east4 (Ashburn, Northern Virginia) & us-west2 (Los Angeles, California) regions, and will be expanded into other Google Cloud regions around the world in the second half of the year.

Google Cloud VMware Engine provides everything you need to run your VMware environment natively in Google Cloud. The service delivers a fully managed VMware Cloud Foundation hybrid cloud platform, including VMware technologies vSphere, vCenter, vSAN, NSX-T, and HCX—in a dedicated environment on Google Cloud’s high performance and reliable infrastructure, to support your enterprise production workloads.With this service, you can extend or bring your on-premises workloads to Google Cloud in minutes—and without changes—by connecting to a dedicated VMware environment. 

https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/hybrid-cloud/google-cloud-vmware-engine-is-generally-available

Google Bare Metal Solution available in 5 more regions 

Last November, Google announced Bare Metal Solution, which lets businesses run specialized workloads such as Oracle databases close to Google Cloud, while lowering overall costs and reducing risks associated with migration.

This week they announced the availability of Bare Metal Solution in five more regions: Ashburn, Virginia; Frankfurt; London; Los Angeles, California; and Sydney. By the end of this year they plan to launch four more sites: Amsterdam, São Paulo, Singapore, and Tokyo. 

Bare Metal Solution is designed for the performance and high availability needs of mission-critical, enterprise-grade applications. To deliver that, Bare Metal Solution offers state-of-the-art dedicated servers based on 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (Cascade Lake) that come in a variety of sizes. Depending on your needs, you can choose a Bare Metal server with as few as 16 cores, or all the way up to 112 cores with 3 terabytes of DRAM, all to handle your most demanding workloads.

These servers are certified by almost all major software companies. GCP deploy Bare Metal Solution in a region extension with less than two millisecond latency to Google Cloud; in most cases they measured the latency to be sub-millisecond.

One key aspect of any enterprise workload solution is storage performance and high availability. Bare Metal Solution leverages some of the world’s most advanced NVMe based storage that is fully tuned to provide a target level of IOPS and throughput out of the box. In addition, automated snapshots help provide data protection. 

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/bare-metal-solution-comes-to-five-new-google-cloud-regions

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