In Cloud Computing This Week [Jun 4th 2021]

The AWS Systems Manager Session Manager plugin for the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) is now open source. Customers can access the source code for the Session Manager plugin for the AWS CLI on GitHub, contribute to its development, and use it as a building block to embed Session Manager capabilities into their own applications.

AWS IoT Core for LoRaWAN enables customers to set up a private LoRaWAN network without operating a LoRaWAN Network Server (LNS) by connecting their own LoRaWAN devices and gateways directly to the AWS Cloud. AWS IoT Core for LoRaWAN now supports three new features to help manage LoRaWAN gateways at scale. These new features enable you to query gateway connection status, customize gateway configuration with the desired frequency sub-bands for devices-to-gateway (uplink) communication, and filter messages at the gateway locally to control gateway backhaul connectivity costs.

We are excited to announce that Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels now makes it easier and faster to deploy your trained models in Rekognition Custom Labels with a simple button click. Once your model is trained and ready, navigate to the model details page under your project, select the use model tab, and then click the Start button. No coding is required for model hosting.

AWS has updated its service level agreement (SLA) for AWS Transit Gateway  to 99.99%.

S3 Inventory and S3 Batch Operations add support to identify and copy objects to use S3 Bucket Keys , reducing the costs of Server-Side Encryption (SSE) with AWS Key Management Service (KMS). S3 Bucket Keys reduce the request costs of SSE-KMS by decreasing the request traffic from S3 to KMS. You can configure your bucket to use an S3 Bucket Key for AWS KMS-based encryption on new objects. With this update, you can use S3 Inventory and S3 Batch Operations to configure S3 Bucket Keys while creating encrypted copies of millions or billions of existing objects, reducing the cost of server-side encryption requests with AWS KMS.

AWS Lambda Extensions are a new way to integrate your favorite operational tools for monitoring, observability, security, and governance with AWS Lambda. Starting today, extensions are generally available in all commercial regions, with new performance improvements and an expanded set of partners including Imperva, Instana, Sentry, Site24x7, and the AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry.

AWS are excited to announce the update to Amazon GameLift Server SDK. An AWS managed service that is trusted by some of the most successful game companies in the world like Wargaming, Ubisoft, and IllFonic, GameLift deploys, operates, and scales dedicated servers in the cloud for multiplayer games. You as a mobile game developer expect to be able to develop iOS and Android games for Realtime-servers (RTS) using IL2CPP, so we have provided that support. This update allows you to expand the audience your games can reach by building RTS clients for the latest mobile devices.

Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra), a scalable, highly available, and fully managed Apache Cassandra–compatible database service, is now in scope for AWS System and Organization Controls (SOC) Reports to help you run highly regulated Cassandra workloads more easily.

Learn how to leverage the power of machine learning to automatically identify critical issues, security vulnerabilities, and hard-to-find bugs during application development with our new digital course, Improve Code Quality with Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer. In this course, you’ll learn how to use Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer to identify recommendations to improve the quality and security of your code.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) now allows you to specify custom Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) security groups for pods running on AWS Fargate, enabling fine grained control over incoming and outgoing network traffic.

We recently updated Amazon WorkSpaces Cost Optimizer, a reference implementation that monitors Amazon WorkSpaces usage patterns and automatically updates the billing mode to the most cost-efficient option (hourly or monthly) depending on usage. The Amazon WorkSpaces Cost Optimizer solution saves customers time and money by autonomously managing Amazon WorkSpaces billing so customers can focus on their core business.

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

Amazon Cognito now supports SMS Sandbox in Amazon SNS. Amazon Cognito makes it easy to add authentication, authorization, and user management to your web and mobile apps. Amazon Cognito scales to millions of users and supports sign-in with social identity providers, such as Apple, Facebook, Google, and Amazon, and enterprise identity providers via standards such as SAML 2.0 and OpenID Connect.

We are delighted to announce the addition of Disaster Recovery for AWS IoT to the AWS Solutions Implementations portfolio. AWS Solutions Implementations help you solve common problems and build faster using the AWS platform.

Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra), a scalable, highly available, and fully managed Cassandra-compatible database service, now supports customer managed customer master keys (CMKs) for encryption of data at rest to help you meet your compliance and regulatory requirements.

NICE DCV is a high-performance remote display protocol that helps customers securely access remote desktop or application sessions, including 3D graphics applications hosted on servers with high-performance GPUs.

This week, AWS announced Amazon Location Service, a fully managed service that helps developers easily and securely add maps, points of interest, geocoding, routing, tracking, and geofencing to their applications without compromising on data security, user privacy, or cost. With Amazon Location Service, you retain control of your location data, protecting your privacy and reducing enterprise security risks. Amazon Location Service provides a consistent API across high-quality LBS data providers (Esri and HERE), all managed through one AWS console.

NICE DCV is a high-performance remote display protocol that helps customers securely access remote desktop or application sessions, including 3D graphics applications hosted on servers with high-performance GPUs.

Starting today, AWS WAF and AWS Shield Advanced are available in Asia Pacific (Osaka).

Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) is a fully-managed messaging service that supports application-to-person (A2P) workloads, including mobile text messaging (SMS). Now, when you start using Amazon SNS to send SMS, your SMS workloads start in an isolated testing environment, called the SMS sandbox. 

Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (Amazon QLDB) now supports enhanced Amazon Identity Access Management (IAM) based permissions for QLDB authentication, query, and data access. This release builds on the existing Amazon QLDB permissions model, adding separation of access by PartiQL command and ledger table. With this feature, QLDB customers will now be able to implement more granular database authorization and access policy that meets strict security requirements.

Synchronous Express Workflows can now be triggered with Amazon API Gateway’s REST APIs, allowing you to build interactive applications and orchestrate high-volume, short-duration microservices.

Amazon CloudWatch now gives operators and developers visibility and actionable insights into their utilization of control plane APIs across AWS services. You can find API call count metrics organized by AWS service in the CloudWatch console, and search and discover usage metrics from thousands available in the AWS/Usage namespace.