Here's a cloud round up of all things GCP, Azure and AWS for the week ending Friday 4th March 2022
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Source: aws.amazon.com
Amazon Keyspaces helps you to run Apache Cassandra workloads more easily at scale by using a fully managed and serverless database service. Amazon Keyspaces works with your existing Cassandra drivers and Cassandra Query Language (CQL) API code. In addition, Amazon Keyspaces is integrated with AWS CloudFormation to help you automate provisioning and management of Amazon Keyspaces resources, such as keyspaces and tables.
You also can use CloudFormation to manage encryption and point-in-time recovery (PITR) settings. Now, you also can create and manage Amazon Keyspaces resources by using the AWS SDK. AWS SDK support also allows you to use third-party automation tools that depend on the AWS SDK to manage your AWS resources.
Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for Oracle now supports the October 2021 Patch Set Update (PSU) for Oracle Database 12.1. October 2021 Release Updates (RU) for Oracle Database 12.2 and 19c is already launched.
Amazon Kendra is an intelligent search service powered by machine learning, and helps organizations provide more relevant information to customers and employees, when they need it. Starting today, AWS customers can use Amazon Kendra’s Spell Checker to suggest spell corrections for misspelled words in a query.
You can configure the SQLNET.ALLOW_WEAK_CRYPTO_CLIENTS parameter to allow or deny an outgoing client connection using a non-secure cipher, SQLNET.ALLOW_WEAK_CRYPTO parameter to allow or deny incoming connections when the client uses non-secure ciphers like DES, 3DES, RC4, and non-secure checksumming algorithms like MD5. Both parameters are set to TRUE by default, but it is recommended to set these to FALSE where possible.
Amazon EMR is the industry-leading cloud big data platform for processing vast amounts of data using open source tools such as Apache Spark, Apache Hive, Apache HBase, Apache Flink, Apache Hudi, and Presto. Today, we are excited to announce that Amazon EMR now supports auto termination of idle clusters in Europe (Milan), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Africa (Cape Town), and Middle East (Bahrain) regions.
You can now use AWS CloudFormation to manage Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) cluster configurations and SASL/SCRAM secrets. To learn more about Amazon MSK support for AWS CloudFormation, refer to our AWS CloudFormation documentation.
The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Java (JDBC) Driver for MySQL is now generally available for use with your Amazon RDS or Amazon Aurora MySQL-compatible edition database clusters. This database driver minimizes failover time by monitoring database cluster status and caching the cluster’s topology. The cache is then used to improve DNS name resolution speed if a node fails, reducing failover time from minutes to seconds.
Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for PostgreSQL and for MySQL now supports a new Multi-AZ deployment option with one primary and two readable standby database (DB) instances across three Availability Zones (AZs). This deployment option is optimized for write transactions and is ideal when your workloads require lower write latency, automated failovers, and more read capacity.
With the introduction of LZ4 data compression, you can now choose from two different compression options on Amazon FSx for OpenZFS file systems. LZ4 provides another highly popular performance-optimized compression option (in addition to Z-Standard) to help you optimize storage efficiency and performance based on the needs of your individual workloads.
Today AWS launches the 2022 season of the award-winning AWS DeepRacer League Virtual Circuit. Developers of all-skill levels advance their machine learning (ML) skills and compete in the world’s first global autonomous racing league.
Starting March 1st, developers from around the globe compete for prizes up to $20,000, a trip to re:Invent in Las Vegas, and glory in the 2022 season of AWS DeepRacer League. From March to October, developers start in the Open Division of the Virtual Circuit to earn digital rewards such as customizable virtual cars. Racers then climb the leaderboard to land in the top 10% to score a Pro Welcome kit with exclusive AWS DeepRacer merchandise and an official AWS DeepRacer League Pro driver’s license, and take on the best in the world in the Pro Division.
AWS Trusted Advisor Priority is now available in preview for AWS Enterprise Support customers, and provides a prioritized view of cloud optimization recommendations and the ability to track the status of these recommendations.
AWS Trusted Advisor Priority provides a prioritized dashboard of recommendations including operational best practices, architectural risks, and account team curated guidance. The dashboard enables you to track the status of your recommendations in conjunction with your account team, and work with them to mitigate your critical outstanding risks.
You can now connect your Apache Kafka applications to Amazon MSK Serverless in the Europe (Ireland) AWS Region.
Amazon MSK is a fully managed service for Apache Kafka and Kafka Connect that makes it easier for you to build and run applications that use Apache Kafka as a data store. Amazon MSK Serverless is a cluster type for Amazon MSK that allows you to run Apache Kafka without having to manage and scale cluster capacity. MSK Serverless automatically provisions and scales compute and storage resources, so you can use Apache Kafka on demand.
Amazon Detective has improved search capabilities by adding support for wildcard characters and classless inter-domain routing (CIDR) notation on IP addresses. Amazon Detective helps customers conduct security investigations by distilling and organizing data from sources such as, AWS CloudTrail, Amazon VPC Flow Logs, and Amazon GuardDuty, into a graph model that summarizes resource behaviors and interactions observed across a customer’s AWS environment.
Amazon MQ is now available in a total of 26 regions, with the addition of the Asia Pacific (Jakarta) region.
Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) customers can now inject task-level container failures using AWS Fault Injection Simulator (FIS) experiments. With this new AWS FIS fault action you can stop running tasks in your container-based applications, whether they are deployed on AWS Fargate or Amazon EC2 infrastructure, so that you can uncover the hidden bugs, monitoring blind spots, and performance bottlenecks that are difficult to find in distributed systems. AWS FIS experiments can help you measure, validate, and improve the resilience of your applications in use cases such as chaos engineering, gameday testing, and continuous delivery.
Starting today customers can calculate the environmental impact of their AWS workloads with the new customer carbon footprint tool. This new tool uses easy-to-understand data visualizations to provide customers with their historical carbon emissions, evaluate emission trends as their use of AWS evolves, approximate the estimated carbon emissions they have avoided by using AWS instead of an on-premises data center, and review forecasted emissions based on current use.
The forecasted emissions are based on current usage, and show how a customer’s carbon footprint will change as Amazon stays on path to powering its operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025, five years ahead of its original target of 2030, and drives toward net-zero carbon by 2040 as part of The Climate Pledge.
This week AWS are announcing the launch of IoT Application Kit for AWS IoT SiteWise, an open source front end library, that enables developers to quickly build applications to visualize industrial data from processes, devices, and equipment that are connected to AWS IoT SiteWise. The IoT Application Kit provides user interface (UI) components for managing and visualizing IoT data, including bar charts, line charts, scatter plots and timeline views. Developers can use these UI components to build their own applications tailored to different use cases and their unique business needs.
You can now record Amazon Fault Injection Simulator (FIS) experiment activities by sending logs to Amazon CloudWatch Logs or Amazon S3. AWS FIS experiment logs contain detailed information about experiments, actions, and targets, including start and end times, action names, and target resource ARNs.
You can use these logs to identify the activities performed by AWS FIS experiments and correlate them with your systems’ responses and monitoring and observability tools, so that you can implement improvements. In addition, you can use experiment timeline charts in the AWS Management Console to monitor a running or completed experiment.
AWS Application Migration Service (AWS MGN) has added support for Windows Server 2003 (32-bit and 64-bit) and Windows Server 2008 (32-bit and 64-bit). You can now use Application Migration Service to rehost applications running on these legacy operating systems. Application Migration Service has also added support for Windows 10 and Windows Server 2022. View a complete list of the service’s supported operating systems.
Starting today, NAT64 and DNS64 capabilities are available in all AWS Commercial and the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.
Your IPv6 AWS resources in Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) can use NAT64 (on AWS NAT Gateway) and DNS64 (on Amazon Route 53 Resolver) to communicate with IPv4 services. As you transition your workloads to IPv6 networks, they would continue to need access to IPv4 network and services. With NAT64 and DNS64, your IPv6 resources can communicate with IPv4 services within the same VPC or connected VPCs, your on-premises networks, or the Internet.
AWS Backup now supports AWS PrivateLink, providing direct access to AWS Backup via a private endpoint within your virtual private network in a scalable manner. With PrivateLink, you can now simplify your network architecture by connecting to AWS Backup using private IP addresses in your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), eliminating the need to use public IPs, firewall rules, or an Internet Gateway.
Amazon Braket, the quantum computing service from AWS, adds support for a new superconducting gate-based quantum processing unit (QPU) from Oxford Quantum Circuits (OQC) named Lucy, located in the UK. With this launch, European customers can now access more types of quantum hardware during the typical EU workday. Furthermore, customers can now run quantum programs on two different superconducting, gate-based devices on Amazon Braket, allowing them to compare and contrast quantum hardware across different providers.
AWS Solutions has updated the AWS QnABot, an open source, multi-channel, multi-language conversational chatbot built on Amazon Lex, that responds to your customer’s questions, answers, and feedback. Without programming, the AWS QnABot solution allows customers to quickly deploy self-service conversational AI on multiple channels including their contact centers, web sites, social media channels, SMS text messaging, or Amazon Alexa.
The EC2 Hibernation feature is now available in the Asia Pacific (Jakarta) and (Osaka) AWS Regions. Hibernation gives you the ability to launch EC2 instances, set them up as desired, and then pause and resume them again whenever you need to. Your instances and applications will pick up right where they left off instead of rebuilding their memory footprint from a cold boot. Hibernation enables you to maintain a fleet of pre-warmed instances, getting you to a productive state in less time and without modifying your existing applications. Hibernation is available for instances running Linux and Windows OSes.
Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights adds support for Helm chart for Amazon EKS on EC2 using AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT), enabling customers to easily define, install, and upgrade applications built on EKS.
Following the announcement of updates to the PostgreSQL database by the open source community, AWS has updated Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition to support PostgreSQL versions 13.5, 12.9, 11.14, and 10.19 in commercial and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. These releases contain bug fixes and improvements by the PostgreSQL community.
AWS were excited to announce the unified AWS Health Dashboard, a new destination that brings together the AWS Service Health Dashboard and Personal Health Dashboard into a single connected experience. This new home is designed to provide a more responsive and accurate view, improved usability, and greater operational resilience.
If you pay a visit to the AWS Health Dashboard, you still get an overview of AWS service health. However, this page has been updated to follow the latest AWS design standards, including a searchable history of events, automatic in-line refresh, a more mobile-friendly experience, and faster page load times
Amazon FinSpace customers can now manage their Amazon FinSpace application users with the AWS SDK and CLI. Using these APIs, customers can integrate Amazon FinSpace into their identity management provisioning process to help Amazon FinSpace meet their organization’s access management rules. For example, when a user joins a quantitative research team that uses FinSpace, they can have a user account in FinSpace automatically created. Similarly, when a user leaves the customer’s organization or switches roles, they can be automatically deactivated in FinSpace as part of their organization-wide application entitlement workflows. This new feature adds to Amazon FinSpace’s existing single-sign-on capability to give customers more effective controls to manage access.
Anthos clusters on bare metal 1.9.5 is now available for download. To upgrade, see Upgrading Anthos on bare metal. Anthos clusters on bare metal 1.9.5 runs on Kubernetes 1.21.
1.12.4-asm.2 is now available.
Anthos Service Mesh includes the features of Istio 1.12 subject to the list of Anthos Service Mesh supported features.
Cloud Asset Inventory
The following resource types are now publicly available through the Export APIs (ExportAssets and BatchGetAssetsHistory) and the Feed API:
firestore.googleapis.com/DatabaseCloud Build
The operating system of the machine that Cloud Build uses to run builds has been upgraded to Debian 11. This results in faster build start up time when you run builds on:
e2-highcpu-8 or e2-highcpu-32 in the default pool.Cloud Composer
Cloud Composer 2 supports Customer Managed Encryption Keys (CMEK).
Java Client for Cloud Composer version 1.1.3 is released. You can use this library to interact with Cloud Composer API from Java.
Cloud Composer 1.18.1 and 2.0.5 release started on February 28, 2022. Get ready for upcoming changes and features as we 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.
(New environments only) Temporary Pub/Sub topics created during environment operations are now labeled.
(Airflow 2) The google-cloud-datastore package was added to the list of preinstalled packages.
(Airflow 2) Fix the problem with task logs not being exported to Cloud Logging.
(Airflow 1) The apache-airflow-backport-providers-google package is updated to version 2022.2.11.
(Cloud Composer 2) Fixed the problem with an environment having 0 workers after an unsuccessful upgrade operation is rolled back.
(Available without upgrading) Improved the handling of errors in DAG UI for tasks without a set operator.
Cloud Composer 1.18.1 and 2.0.5 images are available:
Cloud Load Balancing
You can now use a combination of zonal NEGs (of type GCE_VM_IP_PORT) and hybrid NEGs (of type NON_GCP_PRIVATE_IP_PORT) as backends for your global external HTTP(S) load balancers. For all supported backend combinations, see the table at Backend services.
Cloud Monitoring
GA: Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus, Google Cloud's fully managed, Prometheus-compatible monitoring solution, is now generally available. You can use the managed service anywhere that you use standard Prometheus today. The collector retains all expected Prometheus functionality, such as local storage and rule evaluation.
Cloud SQL for MySQL
Cloud SQL for MySQL 8.0.26 is now the default minor version. To upgrade your existing instance to the new version, see Set the MySQL minor version.
Dataproc Metastore
gRPC endpoint protocol is available in Preview.
Deep Learning Containers
Eventarc
Eventarc triggers for Workflows is now available in Preview.
Google Cloud Deploy
Security Command Center
You can now configure automatic exports of Security Command Center findings to a BigQuery dataset. For more information, see Export findings to BigQuery for analysis.
Storage Transfer Service
Storage Transfer Service now supports Cloud Client Libraries, which are the recommended option for accessing Cloud APIs programmatically. This launch significantly reduces the amount of code you need to write; see Getting started and Migrating to the Cloud Client Library for more details.
Workflows
Support for VPC Service Controls is now in Beta stage.
Eventarc triggers for Workflows is now available in Preview.
Microsoft Azure Releases And Updates
Source: azure.microsoft.com
The Azure Percept February update includes fixes related to security.
You can now use Azure IoT Central in South Central (United States) and Canada Central (Canada) to build reliable, scalable, and secure enterprise grade IoT Solutions.
Configuration file now allows you to specify version for supported API language runtimes.
Use Azure Synapse Spark 3.1 to partition your Azure Cosmos DB data in analytical store for improved query performance.
Public preview enhancements and updates released for Azure SQL.
Public preview enhancements and updates released for Azure SQL.
Use the new SKU recommendation support in the Azure SQL Migration extension in Azure Data Studio for Azure SQL Managed Instance and SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines.
Azure Form Recognizer now supports extraction from custom documents, W-2 forms, access to the read API, additional human languages and enhancements.
Azure Backup now acquires a lease on the snapshots taken by scheduled/on-demand backup jobs.
The 22.02 release includes new and changed features in the OS and the SDK.
Data stewards can now certify assets that meet their organization's quality standards in the Azure Purview data catalog
Benefit from new features and enhancements in OpenShift release 4.9.
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