In Cloud Computing This Week [Jun 25th 2021]

AWS recently updated AWS DevOps Monitoring Dashboard, a reference implementation that automates the setup of DevOps metrics dashboards so that customers developing on AWS can measure development activity and identify areas for continued improvement.

Database Activity Streams (DAS) for Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for Oracle provides a near real-time stream of all audited statements (SELECT, DML, DDL, DCL, TCL) executed in your DB instance. The audit data is collected from the unified database audit, while the storage and processing of database activity is managed outside your database. This prevents database users and administrators from modifying the audit stream.

Starting this week, Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB) is available in the Europe (London) region. Amazon QLDB is a fully managed ledger database that provides a transparent, immutable, and cryptographically verifiable transaction log. You can use QLDB to track all application data changes, and maintain a complete and verifiable history of changes to your data over time.

You now can further enhance the security of your applications by encrypting data in transit between your applications and your Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX) clusters, and between the nodes within a DAX cluster. To use this new feature, enable encryption in transit when creating a DAX cluster and use the latest version of any of the DAX clients. If you enable encryption in transit for a DAX cluster, all requests and responses between your applications and clusters are encrypted by Transport Layer Security (TLS), and connections to the cluster can be authenticated by verification of a cluster X.509 certificate. In addition, the data in transit between the nodes within a cluster also is encrypted. You can enable encryption in transit in the DynamoDB console, AWS CLI, AWS SDKs, and AWS CloudFormation. 

You can now use Tax Registration Numbers (TRN) as an additional filter for mapping your purchase orders to your invoices with AWS Purchase Order Management. AWS Purchase Order Management allows you to easily manage your purchase orders (POs) in a self-service manner, define PO-invoice association rules, track PO balance and expiration, and receive email alerts for POs approaching expiration or running out of balance.

You can now build serverless applications with new AWS-supported container images that simplify continuous integration tasks. Container images work natively with continuous integration systems such as CloudBees CI/Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, GitHub Actions, CircleCI, and AWS CodeBuild. These make it easier to build and package serverless applications using Serverless Application Model CLI (AWS SAM CLI) – a developer tool that makes it easier to build, locally test, package, and deploy serverless applications.

With Advance Pay, you can now pay for your AWS usage in advance, and pay your future invoices automatically. Once you add funds to Advance Pay, AWS will automatically use them to pay for your invoices when they become due for payment. 

Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is a fast, scalable, highly available, and fully managed document database service that supports MongoDB workloads. Amazon DocumentDB makes it easy and intuitive to store, query, and index JSON data.

You can now specify up to 30 EC2 instance types for each of your master, core, and task node groups when using EMR Instance Fleets with allocation strategy. Previously, this was limited to 15 for tasks nodes, and only 5 for master and core nodes. This increase allows you to specify a broader range of instance sizes, generations, and families that your workloads can operate across to improve your access to both Spot and On-Demand capacity.

Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer is a developer tool that leverages automated reasoning and machine learning to detect potential defects that are difficult to find in your code and offers suggestions for improvements. Today, we are announcing a new CI/CD experience for CodeGuru Reviewer that allows you to trigger code quality and security analysis as a step within your CI workflow using GitHub Actions. Additionally, we are also introducing 20+ new detectors for CodeGuru Reviewer to help identify security vulnerabilities and check for security best practices in your Java code.  

You can now simplify the process of configuring GitHub Actions workflows for building serverless applications with a single line. The new AWS-supported setup-sam  GitHub Action makes it easier to keep consistency across GitHub Actions runners, stay up-to-date with AWS Serverless Application Model CLI (AWS SAM CLI) tooling, and select its versions. The AWS SAM CLI is a developer tool that makes it easier to build, locally test, package, and deploy serverless applications. GitHub Actions is a service that helps automate tasks within the software development lifecycle. GitHub Actions runner is the application that runs a job from a GitHub Actions workflow.

Amazon Redshift, a fully-managed cloud data warehouse, now supports case-insensitive collation with column and expression level overrides. Starting today, you can use the COLLATE clause within a CREATE DATABASE statement to specify the default collation for all CHAR and VARCHAR columns in the database as case-sensitive or case-insensitive. You can also specify a COLLATE clause in a CREATE TABLE statement to specify collation for columns in that table. In addition, the COLLATE() function allows you to override the collation of a string column or an expression.

Amazon EMR on Amazon EKS announced support for Custom Images, a new capability that enables customers to customize the Docker container images used for running Apache Spark applications on Amazon EMR on EKS. Custom images enables you to install and configure packages specific to your workload that are not available in the public distribution of EMR’s Spark runtime into a single immutable container. An immutable container promotes portability and simplifies dependency management for each workload and enables you to integrate developing applications for EMR on EKS with your own continuous integration (CI) pipeline.

AQUA (Advanced Query Accelerator) for Amazon Redshift is now generally available in three additional AWS regions: Europe (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Asia Pacific (Singapore).

AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM) framework launches four new templates for building machine learning inference-based applications on AWS Lambda. Now, customers can leverage these templates as a starting point to build, test, and deploy their container-based Serverless ML applications.

AWS Managed Services (AMS) now offers self-service reporting on key operational metrics. AWS Managed Services provides operational reports on your Managed Environment  for both traditional and next generation workloads. You can access the rich set of operational reports in your managed accounts through AWS Managed Services console. You can also access the operational reporting data through a secure S3 bucket that AMS provides for your analytics and business intelligence needs.

AWS Training and Certification is excited to announce the updated one-day classroom course and new digital course, AWS Technical Essentials. These courses are ideal for technical learners who need to understand fundamental AWS Cloud concepts to make informed decisions about IT solutions based on business requirements.  

Amazon Translate – a fully managed neural machine translation service that delivers high-quality, affordable, and customizable language translation in 71 languages and variants –now supports translation of XML Localization Interchange File Format – XLIFF documents. Starting today, customers can submit their XLIFF documents for batch processing by Amazon Translate. Amazon Translate only translates sections where the target segment is empty. If the target section contains non-empty strings or pre-translated strings, Amazon Translate will not modify or overwrite the translation. You only pay for what you translate. This feature allows customers to continue using Translation Memory to translate content prior to machine translation and keep the machine translation costs low

Starting this week, you can launch additional configurations of the R5 instance class when using Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for Oracle. Featuring up to 4x the RAM per vCPU of existing R5 instance classes, the new configurations are available in the following AWS Regions:

• US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), AWS GovCloud (US East), AWS GovCloud (US
  West), Canada (Central)

South America

• South America (Sao Paulo)

Europe, Middle East and Africa

• EU (Frankfurt), EU (Ireland), EU (London), EU (Milan), EU (Paris), EU (Stockholm), Middle East (Bahrain), Africa (Cape Town)

Asia Pacific

• Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Osaka), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo)

AWS Client VPN now supports SAML based federated authentication for opening a VPN connection from a Linux Desktop Operating system (Ubuntu 64bit 18.04 and 20.04 LTS). The Linux Desktop client has feature parity with the existing Windows and macOS Desktop clients. AWS Client VPN Desktop Clients are available free of charge, and can be downloaded here.

AWS Outposts is now supported in AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region. AWS Outposts is a fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs, and tools to virtually any customer datacenter, co-location space, or on-premises facility. Outposts is ideal for workloads that require low latency access to on-premises systems, local data processing, data residency, and migration of applications with local system interdependencies.

AWS Lambda customers can now enable functions to access Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) in the Asia Pacific (Osaka) region. With AWS Lambda support for Amazon EFS, customers can easily share data across function invocations, read large reference data files, and write function output to a persistent and shared data store.

Amazon SageMaker customers can now select ml.G4dn instances to run Batch Transform and Processing Jobs. Amazon SageMaker Batch Transform  enables you to run predictions on datasets stored in Amazon S3. It is ideal for scenarios where you are working with large batches of data and don’t need sub-second latency. Amazon SageMaker Processing  enables you to run your pre- or post-processing workloads, such as feature engineering, data validation, model evaluation, and model interpretation with a fully managed experience.

AWS Control Tower announces enhancements to accessibility and improvements in both the console and overall performance of the service.

Amazon Textract is a machine learning service that automatically extracts text, handwriting and data from scanned documents that goes beyond simple optical character recognition (OCR) to identify, understand, and extract data from forms and tables. We continuously improve the underlying machine learning models based on customer feedback to provide even better accuracy. Today, we are pleased to announce an accuracy enhancement update to our forms extraction feature. Starting today, Textract more accurately detects the checkboxes and key-value pairs within documents and images. The accuracy is especially improved for invoices and receipts, but customers will see improvements across many documents in finance, healthcare, legal, public sector, and more.

We are excited to announce that Amazon Lookout for Metrics now allows you to detect anomalies on your Amazon CloudWatch data. Amazon Lookout for Metrics uses machine learning (ML) to automatically detect and diagnose anomalies (outliers from the norm) without requiring any prior ML experience. Amazon CloudWatch provides you with actionable insights to monitor your applications, respond to system-wide performance changes, optimize resource utilization, and get a unified view of operational health.

Amazon Connect now allows you to enable Amazon Connect Customer Profiles in Canada (Central) region, equipping contact center agents with the most up to date information about the incoming contact to provide faster and more personalized customer service. Customer Profiles automatically brings together customer information from multiple applications such as Salesforce, Amazon S3 and ServiceNow into a unified customer profile, delivered to agents at the beginning of the customer interaction. 

Amazon Aurora now allows you to create clones between Aurora Serverless v1 and provisioned Aurora DB clusters to enable quick sharing of data. 

Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra), a scalable, highly available, and fully managed Apache Cassandra–compatible database service, now helps you monitor and improve application read/write performance and throughput by using new Amazon CloudWatch metrics.

The MariaDB audit plug-in is now available for Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MySQL instances using MySQL major version 8.0. The MariaDB audit plug-in is also available for instances using MySQL major versions 5.6 and 5.7, and provides event logging for database activity to help customers meet compliance and audit requirements, and troubleshoot application issues. Some of the key details for implementing the plugin are:

• Enabling and disabling the audit plug-in – Users can enable audit plug-in by creating an option group, adding MARIADB_AUDIT_PLUGIN option to the group, and attaching the option group to an RDS instance. Audit logging can be disabled by removing the option group from the instance.
• SERVER_AUDIT_EVENTS variables – These variables allow users to specify the events they want to include in the logs (CONNECTION: users connecting and disconnecting, QUERY: queries and their result, and TABLE: which tables are affected by the queries).
• SERVER_AUDIT_EXCL_USERS and SERVER_AUDIT_INCL_USERS variables – These variables specify which users' activity should be excluded from or included in the audit. SERVER_AUDIT_INCL_USERS has higher priority and all users' activity is recorded by default.

AWS CloudFormation announces the launch of the CloudFormation Public Registry , a new searchable collection of extensions  that allows you to discover, provision, and manage third-party extensions, which include resource types (provisioning logic) and modules published by AWS Partner Network (APN) Partners and the developer community. You can also create and publish your own extensions on the CloudFormation Public Registry, allowing anyone to use them. Today, you can centrally search and use over 35 extensions published on the Public Registry by APN Partners and AWS Quick Starts. You can view the identity verification for each extension publisher on the Public Registry. APN Partners who collaborated on this launch include MongoDB, Datadog, Atlassian Opsgenie, JFrog, Trend Micro, Splunk, Aqua Security, FireEye, Sysdig, Snyk, Check Point, Spot by NetApp, Gremlin, Stackery, and Iridium.