This week's roundup of notable cloud news.
Hello Cloud Land, we've read all the cloud computing news again this week, so you don't have to.
A few new releases with codeless app development, automation and network monitoring being the flavour of the week.
Enjoy.
Amazon Honeycode - Build Web & Mobile Apps without writing "code" 
This week AWS launched Amazon Honeycode in beta form. This new fully-managed AWS service gives you the power to build powerful mobile & web applications without writing any code. It uses the familiar spreadsheet model and lets you get started in minutes. If you or your teammates are already familiar with spreadsheets and formulas, you’ll be happy to hear that just about everything you know about sheets, tables, values, and formulas still applies.
Amazon Honeycode includes templates for some common applications that you and other members of your team can use right away like:
-
Simple to-do
- Customer Tracker
- Simple Survey
- Inventory Management
- Content Tracker
- Timeoff Reporting
- Event Management
- Team Task Tracker
- Weekly Demo Schedule
- Field Service Agent
- PO Approvals
You can read all about it and see some examples of what is essentially a spreadsheet based app generator here:
Amazon Database Migration Accelerator
This week, AWS announced the launch of Amazon Database Migration Accelerator (DMA). Amazon DMA brings together AWS Database Migration Service (DMS), AWS Schema Conversion Tool (SCT), and AWS database migration experts to help customers migrate away from traditional commercial databases at fixed prices.
At launch, AWS offer Amazon DMA to customers migrating from Oracle and SQL Server to Amazon Aurora or Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for PostgreSQL or MySQL. Over time, Amazon DMA will expand to include additional source and target databases, data warehouses, and analytics systems.
Learn more at the Amazon Database Migration Accelerator page.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/introducing-the-amazon-database-migration-accelerator/
AWS Solutions Constructs
Cloud applications are built using multiple components, such as virtual servers, containers, serverless functions, storage buckets, and databases. Being able to provision and configure these resources in a safe, repeatable way is incredibly important to automate your processes and let you focus on the unique parts of your implementation.
With the AWS Cloud Development Kit, you can leverage the expressive power of your favorite programming languages to model your applications. You can use high-level components called constructs, preconfigured with “sensible defaults” that you can customize, to quickly build a new application. The CDK provisions your resources using AWS CloudFormation to get all the benefits of managing your infrastructure as code. One of the reasons I like the CDK, is that you can compose and share your own custom components as higher-level constructs.
As you can imagine, there are recurring patterns that can be useful to more than one customer. For this reason, this week AWS launched the AWS Solutions Constructs, an open source extension library for the CDK that provides well-architected patterns to help you build your unique solutions. CDK constructs mostly cover single services. AWS Solutions Constructs provide multi-service patterns that combine two or more CDK resources, and implement best practices such as logging and encryption.
The AWS Solutions Constructs are available now for TypeScript and Python. The AWS Solutions Builders team is working to make these constructs also available when using Java and C# with the CDK, stay tuned. There is no cost in using the AWS Solutions Constructs, or the CDK, you only pay for the resources created when deploying the stack.
Cost Management on AWS Console Mobile Application
This week AWS announced that AWS Cost Management Console is now available on the AWS Console Mobile Application. This means you can now check your cost and usage information anywhere anytime on the go.
Deploy to Azure Container Instances with Docker Desktop 
Microsoft we’re excited this week about the first release of the new Docker Desktop integration with Microsoft Azure. Last month Microsoft and Docker announced this collaboration, and today you can experience it for yourself.
The new edge release of Docker Desktop provides an integration between Docker and Microsoft Azure that enables you to use native Docker commands to run your applications as serverless containers with Azure Container Instances.
You can use the Docker CLI to quickly and easily sign into Azure, create a Container Instances context using an Azure subscription and resource group, then run your single-container applications on Container Instances using docker run. You can also deploy multi-container applications to Container Instances that are defined in a Docker Compose file using docker compose up.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/deploy-to-azure-container-instances-with-docker-desktop/
Azure Load balancer Insights using "Azure Monitor for Networks" 
This week Microsoft Azure team announced that Azure Load Balancer customers now have instant access to a packaged solution for health monitoring and configuration analysis. Built as part of Azure Monitor for Networks, customers now have topological maps for all their Load Balancer configurations and health dashboards for their Standard Load Balancers preconfigured with relevant metrics.
Through this, you have a window into the health and configuration of your networks, enabling rapid fault localization and informed design decisions. You can access this through the Insights blade of each Load Balancer resource and Azure Monitor for Networks, a central hub that provides access to health and connectivity monitoring for all your network resources.
Simplifying declarative deployments in Azure
This week Mark Russinovich Azure's CTO announced some enhancements to ARM template deployment
With the new Azure Resource Manager (ARM) Tools in Visual Studio Code, Azure added support for snippets (pre-created resource definitions), IntelliSense, colorization, ARM template outline, and comments. With comments support in ARM templates, you can deploy any template with comments using CLI, PowerShell, and Azure portal, and it will just work.
More detail and examples can be found on the original post here:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/simplifying-declarative-deployments-in-azure/
GCP Jakarta Region is now open 
The launch of Google's new Jakarta region (asia-southeast2) brings the best of GCP closer to their customers and users. With lower latency access to data and applications, companies doing business in Indonesia can accelerate their digital transformation. It will also help customers meet specific regulatory and compliance requirements, and provide more disaster recovery options for customers across APAC.
The region has three Cloud zones from the start, enabling high availability workloads. With this region, Google Cloud now offers 24 regions and 73 zones across 17 countries worldwide.
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/new-google-cloud-region-in-jakarta-now-open
GCP announces PUB/SUB as a new Cloud Monitoring notification channel
Around the world, operations teams are working to automate their monitoring and alerting workflows, looking to reduce the time they spend on rote operational work, so they can spend more time on valuable work. For instance, Google’s Site Reliability Engineering organization aims to keep this type of work below 50% of an SRE’s time, freeing them up to work on more impactful engineering projects.
GCP's Cloud Monitoring service can alert you through a variety of notification channels. One of these channels, webhook, can be used for building automation into your systems with programmatic ways to respond to errors or anomalies in your applications.
This week, GCP announced a new notification channel type via Cloud Pub/Sub. Now in beta, this integration lets you create automated and programmatic workflows in response to alerts. Pub/Sub is a publish/subscribe queue that lets you build loosely coupled applications. Using Pub/Sub as your notification channel makes it easy to integrate with third-party providers for alerting and incident response workflows, you can use the Pub/Sub as a notification channel through the API and the Google Cloud Console.
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 | June 29th |
| Lighthouse Vision: Rapid Recovery | June 30th |
| Developers Guide to AI | June 30th |
| Bring Identity Components to Apps | July 3rd |
| Modernising Web Apps & Data | July 8th |
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 AU/NZ Community day is coming up. As with all events at the moment, this is Virtual.
Scheduled for 2 days on the 6th & 7th of July - you can find more details here: https://pages.awscloud.com/anz-aws-community-day-online.html
Other 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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