This week's roundup of all the cloud news.
Here's a cloud round up of all things GCP, Azure and AWS for the week ending Friday 11th March 2022
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AWS Updates and Releases
Source: aws.amazon.com
Amazon Lightsail Object Storage provides you with the ability to store your static content such as images, videos or HTML files that can be used for your websites and applications. Effective immediately, the account-level block public access setting in Amazon S3 applies to buckets in the Lightsail object storage service.
Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) now allows custom configuration providers for MSK Connect. With this capability, you can store secrets with providers such as Amazon Secrets Manager and avoid storing passwords and other credentials in connector and worker configuration properties. You can supply any Apache Kafka compatible ConfigProvider as part of an MSK Connect plugin, and use this to fetch configuration.
Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports M6i and R6i instances. M6i instances are the 6th generation of Amazon EC2 x86-based General Purpose compute instances, designed to provide a balance of compute, memory, storage, and network resources. R6i instances are the 6th generation of Amazon EC2 memory optimized instances, designed for memory-intensive workloads. Both M6i and R6i instances are built on the AWS Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and lightweight hypervisor, which delivers practically all of the compute and memory resources of the host hardware to your instances.
Amazon EC2 now adds a new property called ‘lastLaunchedTime’ for owners of Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). This property helps AMI owners view the timestamp of the last time the AMI was used for an EC2 instance launch. It allows AMI owners to understand the usage of their AMIs, especially publicly-shared AMIs, and to make informed decisions about deprecating or deregistering their AMIs.
Amazon Elastic Container Services (Amazon ECS) now supports updating Elastic Load Balancers, Service Registries, Tag Propagation, and ECS Managed Tags for an existing ECS service. The added flexibility makes it easier for customers to update their Amazon ECS service configurations, without having to recreate their services, thus reducing operational overhead and potential service disruption.
PartiQL is a SQL-compatible query language and you can run PartiQL statements to query, insert, update, or delete data in your DynamoDB tables. Now you can control the number of items processed by using the Limit request option. Using the Limit request option can help reduce the cost and duration of each request when you know you need less than a certain number of items.
Amazon Connect Customer Profiles, which combines contact history from Amazon Connect with disparate customer data from third-party applications into a unified customer profile, now provides a no-code experience for configuring how customer data from sources such as Salesforce and S3 is aggregated into a profile. This helps makes it simple for admins to provide agents with the customer information they need by customizing how data is added to customer profiles without writing code.
Through the Amazon Connect AWS console, admins can customize how data is mapped to a customer profile, create user-defined data attributes on a profile, and customize the search keys available to find profiles. At launch, the following data sources are supported: Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Salesforce, ServiceNow, Zendesk, and Marketo.
You can now create your own Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) resources using AWS CloudFormation templates in multiple new regions. Amazon SES is a scalable, cost-effective, and flexible cloud-based email service that allows digital marketers and application developers to send marketing, notification, and transactional emails from within any application. To learn more about Amazon SES, visit this page. SES can be used via SDK, CLI, Console, and AWS CloudFormation templates
Amazon QuickSight now supports auto refresh for direct query controls every 24 hours. This new feature provides a more streamlined experience for QuickSight readers to use controls for their dashboards without having to manually refresh the control values from their direct query datasets. For further details about QuickSight data refreshing, visit here.
Amazon Braket, the quantum computing service from AWS, now supports OpenQASM 3.0 for gate-based quantum devices and simulators. With this launch, customers have the choice of using the Braket SDK to build and run programs as before, or directly supply equivalent OpenQASM 3.0 strings via the Braket SDK and API. Amazon Braket’s introduction and ongoing support for OpenQASM 3.0, will continue to make it easier for customers to migrate quantum programs between different development environments.
Inspired by GNU Make, Snakemake specifies workflows as rules that breakdown the workflow into smaller steps of dependencies. Snakemake automatically determines dependencies between rules and also provides additional controls via python-based rule definition syntactic structures. The benefits of reproducibility and transparency that workflow management tools, like Snakemake, provide are realized at scale via the Amazon Genomics CLI.
Amazon Genomics CLI simplifies and automates the deployment of cloud resources like workflow engines and compute clusters, providing genomics and life science customers with an easy-to-use command line to quickly setup and run genomics workflows on Amazon Web Services (AWS). By removing the heavy lifting from setting up and running genomics workflows in the cloud, software developers and researchers can automatically provision, configure and scale cloud resources to enable faster and more cost-effective population-level genetics studies, drug discovery cycles, and more.
Bottlerocket, a Linux based operating system that is purpose built to run container workloads, now supports GPU based EC2 instance types that are powered by NVIDIA. Customers can now benefit from using the same container focused host operating system for both their non-GPU and GPU workloads, including machine learning, video encoding, and streaming workloads. This helps customers standardize on a single operating system that utilizes the underlying specialized compute hardware.
Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition now supports Multi Major Version Upgrades which allows you to perform major version upgrades across multiple different major versions.
Previously, major version upgrades could only be done to one higher version at a time. For example, PostgreSQL 9.6.X could only be upgraded to PostgreSQL 10.X. If you wanted to upgrade your older instances to the latest major version, you would have to perform multiple major version upgrades until you reached your target version.
You can perform an in-place upgrade of your database cluster to PostgreSQL major version 11.X, 12.X and 13.X. Instead of backing up and restoring the database to the new version, you can upgrade with just a few clicks in the Amazon RDS Management Console or by using the AWS SDK or CLI. With the multi major version upgrade feature, you can perform any of the following upgrades seamlessly in a single step, thus reducing downtime substantially.
- Upgrade from PostgreSQL 9.6.X to PostgreSQL 11.X
- Upgrade from PostgreSQL 9.6.X to PostgreSQL 12.X
- Upgrade from PostgreSQL 10.X to PostgreSQL 12.X
- Upgrade from PostgreSQL 10.X to PostgreSQL 13.X
- Upgrade from PostgreSQL 11.X to PostgreSQL 13.X
Google Cloud Releases and Updates
Source: cloud.google.com
Cloud Composer 1.18.2 and 2.0.6 release started on March 8, 2022. Get ready for upcoming changes and features as GCP roll out the new release to all regions. This release is in progress at the moment. Listed changes and features might not be available in some regions yet.
(Available without upgrading) New version aliases for Cloud Composer images. Now you can specify the latest version of Cloud Composer 2 with composer-2-airflow-x.y aliases. New composer-1-airflow-x.y aliases point to the latest version of Cloud Composer 1.
(Airflow 2) Added a new try-number label to Airflow task log entries.
Compute Engine
Generally available: NVIDIA® T4 GPUs are now available in the following additional regions and zones:
- Council Bluffs, Iowa, North America :
us-central1-c - Eemshaven, Netherlands, Europe :
europe-west4-a
For more information about using GPUs on Compute Engine, see GPUs on Compute Engine.
Dataproc
New sub-minor versions of Dataproc images:
1.5.58-debian10, 1.5.58-ubuntu18, and 1.5.58-rocky8
2.0.32-debian10, 2.0.32-ubuntu18, and 2.0.32-rocky8
GKE
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GKE cluster versions have been updated.
New versions available for upgrades and new clusters
The following Kubernetes versions are now available for new clusters and for opt-in control plane upgrades and node upgrades for existing clusters. For more information on versioning and upgrades, see GKE versioning and support and Upgrades.
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Identity Service for GKE is now generally available. You can authenticate to GKE clusters with external identity providers that use OpenID Connect (OIDC).
Security Command Center
To support a rich query experience on complex array elements, the contains() filter function was introduced. You can use this function in your finding queries to do the following:
- Exact element matching: Match array elements that contain the exact string,
"example". - Specific number operations: Match array elements that are greater than or equal to
100. - Complex filtering against array structures: Match array elements that contain property
xwith a corresponding valuey.
For more information, see Filtering on array-type fields.
Vertex AI
Vertex AI Feature Store online store autoscaling is available in Preview. The online store nodes automatically scale to balance performance and cost with different traffic patterns. The offline store already scales automatically.
You can now mount Network File System (NFS) shares to access remote files when you run a custom training job. For more information, see Mount an NFS share for custom training.
This feature is in Preview.
Google Cloud Pipeline Components SDK v1.0 is now generally available.
Microsoft Azure Releases And Updates
Source: azure.microsoft.com
Public preview: On-demand capacity reservation with Azure Site Recovery safeguards VMs failover
Integrating Site Recovery with capacity reservation to reserve compute capacity in the disaster recovery region and use that for failover.
Public preview: Azure Purview workflows
You can now manage approvals for business terms or self-service data access requests for your entire data estate without having to use manual controls like emails or worksheets.
Public preview: Azure Backup support for trusted launch Azure Virtual Machines
Trusted Launch VM Backup support from Azure Backup helps to protect Trusted Launch VMs which improves the security of generation 2 VMs in Azure.
Generally available: Azure Chaos Studio Key Vault and Classic Cloud Services faults
Azure Chaos Studio has new faults available for denying access to a Key Vault and shutting down a Classic Cloud Service.
Public preview: Schedule automated emails of your saved cost views
Subscribe to daily, weekly, or monthly updates of your saved cost views in Azure Cost Management to stay informed about changes in cost.
General availability: SOAP and XML request and response validation
Minimize API attack surface for SOAP or XML- based REST APIs with custom schemas in addition to the schemas specified in the API's definition.
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