In Cloud Computing This Week [Jun 11th 2021]

AWS Updates and Releases

Amazon SageMaker Pipelines, the first purpose-built continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) service for machine learning (ML), now supports a new callback step that allows customers to integrate any task or job outside Amazon SageMaker as a step in the model building pipeline. When a callback step is invoked, the current execution of a SageMaker model building pipeline will pause and wait for an external task or job to return a task token that was generated by SageMaker at the start of call back step execution. You can use the call back step to include processing jobs external to SageMaker such a Spark job running on an Amazon EMR cluster or an extract-transform-load (ETL) task in AWS Glue as part of the SageMaker model building pipeline.

By default, Amazon Cognito refresh tokens expire 30 days after a user signs in to a user pool. When you create an app, you can set the app's refresh token expiration to any value between 60 minutes and 10 years. Amazon Cognito now enables you to revoke refresh tokens in real time so that those refresh tokens cannot be used to generate additional access tokens.

The latest query engine for Amazon Athena is generally available in all 24 AWS Regions where Athena is available. Customers who use Athena engine version 2 benefit from new features and performance enhancements that make analyzing data easier and more cost-effective than before. 

Starting today AWS Transit Gateway supports internet group management protocol (IGMP) multicast in the Africa (Cape Town), EU (Milan), Middle East (Bahrain), and Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) AWS Regions.

You can now launch NAT Gateways in your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) without associating an internet gateway to your VPC. Internet Gateway is required to provide internet access to the NAT Gateway. However, some customers use their NAT Gateways with Transit Gateway or virtual private gateway to communicate privately with other VPCs or on-premises environments and thus, do not need an internet gateway attached to their VPCs.

Amazon AppFlow, a fully managed integration service that helps customers securely transfer data between AWS services and cloud applications expands its features with Veeva. Customers can now export documents from Veeva Vault into Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). When choosing the document option for the Veeva connector in AppFlow, customers can choose to bring just the latest version (default) or all versions of documents, along with document metadata.

This week, AWS Systems Manager Quick Setup announced support for Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS), enabling you to set up Amazon EFS client (amazon-efs-utils) across all the Amazon EC2 instances in your organization with a few clicks. In addition to installing and configuring the Amazon EFS client, Quick Setup also supports periodically updating the client to the latest available version.

This week, AWS announced the general availability of AWS Proton, the first fully managed delivery service for container and serverless applications. It is designed to provide platform teams the management tools, governance, and visibility needed to provide consistent standards and best practices when managing deployments, while helping to increase developer productivity and innovation.

Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler reduces the time it takes to aggregate and prepare data for machine learning (ML) from weeks to minutes. With SageMaker Data Wrangler, you can simplify the process of data preparation and feature engineering, and complete each step of the data preparation workflow, including data selection, cleansing, exploration, and visualization from a single visual interface. Starting today, you can now use Snowflake as a data source in Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler to easily prepare data in Snowflake for machine learning.

Amazon FSx for Windows File Server now supports auditing end-user access to files, folders, and file shares. You can publish logs to Amazon CloudWatch Logs or stream logs to Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, enabling you to query, process, store, and archive logs and trigger actions to further advance your security and compliance goals.

You can now launch Apache ActiveMQ 5.16.2 brokers on Amazon MQ. This version update to ActiveMQ contains several fixes, improvements, and new features compared to the previously supported version, ActiveMQ 5.15.15.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) now supports AWS Graviton2-based database (DB) instances in the regions of AWS GovCloud (US), Asia Pacific (Seoul), and Europe (Stockholm). Depending on DB engine, version, and workload, Graviton2 instances provide up to 35% performance improvement and up to 52% price/performance improvement over comparable current generation x86-based instances for Amazon RDS for MySQL, MariaDB, and PostgreSQL.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) on AWS Outposts now supports PostgreSQL 13.2, 13.1, and 12.6 for production deployment. Amazon RDS on Outposts allows you to deploy fully managed database instances in your on-premises environments. 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. You can deploy Amazon RDS on Outposts to set up, operate, and scale MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server and PostgreSQL relational databases on-premises, just as you would in the cloud.

AWS Glue Studio now includes a code editor for customizing the extract-transform-and-load (ETL) code it generates from your input in its visual ETL job editor. Previously, you needed to download and modify scripts themselves if you needed to customize the code. Now, you can use AWS Glue Studio’s visual editor to get started quickly and then write code only for the unique components of your ETL job.

AWS Audit Manager is now available in the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) and Canada (Central) Regions.

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