Happy Friday cloud nation. What a week! We hope that you're not hit too hard by all the restrictions and general craziness gripping the general population and that you've managed to secure a good supply of coffee and TP. There won't be too much to report on the live event front due to everything being cancelled. We truly feel for the events industry at the moment, those guys are getting smashed.
There are still plenty of things to take note of, and on a positive note, we're expecting to see a flood of newly certified cloud professionals when we come out the other side of this.
If you are new to Hava, we provide software that generates AWS, GCP and Azure Diagrams
Google Identity Platform now supports multi-factor authentication with SMS
These days, using a password alone to secure user accounts containing sensitive, identifiable, or private information just isn’t sufficient. Passwords are often subject to reuse and can easily be phished and stolen.
With this in mind, Google recently teamed up with researchers from New York University and the University of California, San Diego to find out just how effective basic account hygiene is at preventing account takeovers. The research showed that simply adding a SMS as a second factor to a Google account can block up to 100% of automated bots, 96% of bulk phishing attacks, and 76% of targeted attacks that occurred during our investigation.
To help you enhance the security of your apps and protect your users, Identity Platform now supports multi-factor authentication (MFA) with SMS in beta.
AWS introduces Materialized Views for Amazon Redshift
Amazon introduced materialized views for Amazon Redshift. this week. A materialized view (MV) is a database object containing the data of a query. A materialized view is like a cache for your view. Instead of building and computing the data set at run-time, the materialized view pre-computes, stores and optimizes data access at the time you create it. Data are ready and available to your queries just like regular table data.
Using materialized views in your analytics queries can speed up the query execution time by orders of magnitude because the query defining the materialized view is already executed and the data is already available to the database system.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/materialize-your-amazon-redshift-views-to-speed-up-query-execution/
Filesystem SDK's for Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 now generally available.
Since the general availability of Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) Gen2 in Feb 2019, Azure customers have been getting insights for their big data analytics workloads at cloud scale. Integration to analytics engines is critical for their analytics workloads, and equally important is the ability to programmatically ingest, manage, and analyze data. This ability is critical for key areas of enterprise data lakes such as data ingestion, event-driven big data platforms, machine learning (ML), and advanced analytics. Programmatic access is possible today using ADLS Gen2 REST APIs, Blob REST APIs, or capabilities via Multi-Protocol Access. As part of Microsoft's developer ecosystem journey, their goal is to make customer application development for programmatic access easier than ever before.
Towards this goal, they're announcing the general availability of Python, .NET, Java, and JS filesystem SDKs for Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) Gen2 in all Azure regions. This includes support for CRUD operations for filesystem, directories, files, and permissions with filesystem semantics for ADLS Gen2. Azure customers can now use this familiar filesystem programming model to simplify application development for ADLS Gen2. These filesystem SDKs streamline their customers’ ability to ingest, manage, and analyze data for ADLS Gen2 and help them gain insights at cloud scale faster than ever before.
gRPC comes to Cloud Run
Cloud Run is a managed serverless compute offering from Google Cloud that lets you run stateless server containers in a fully managed environment, without the hassle of managing the underlying infrastructure. Since its release, Cloud Run has enabled many of our customers to focus on their business logic, while leaving the provisioning, configuring, and scaling to us.
Most applications that run inside Cloud Run use HTTP JSON REST to serve requests, but that’s not the only protocol it supports; in September, it also started to support unary gRPC services.
gRPC is a high performance RPC framework developed by Google and used extensively for traditional workloads and at the edge by companies like Netflix, Cisco, Square, and others. While gRPC offers advantages over traditional HTTP, like strong interface definitions and code generation, setting up the infrastructure to run a gRPC server in production can be a real chore. Cloud Run takes the toil out of this process.
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/serve-cloud-run-requests-with-grpc-not-just-http
Amazon Elasticache Global Datastore for Redis
Introducing Amazon ElastiCache Global Datastore For Redis
In a nutshell, Amazon ElastiCache Global Datastore for Redis lets you replicate a cluster in one region to clusters in up to two other regions. Customers typically do this in order to:
Setting up a global datastore is extremely easy. First, you pick a cluster to be the primary cluster receiving writes from applications: this can either be a new cluster, or an existing cluster provided that it runs Redis 5.0.6 or above. Then, you add up to two secondary clusters in other regions which will receive updates from the primary.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-available-amazon-elasticache-global-datastore-for-redis/
Cloud Computing Spend breaks all records in 2019
According to Anthony Spadafora's article in Techradar drawn from the Canalys report, cloud spending is up 37% with AWS leading the field closely followed by Azure then followed by GCP snapping at their heels.
https://www.techradar.com/au/news/cloud-computing-spending-breaks-all-records-in-2019
Register for this free, 60-minute online event to learn about strategies, insights, and technologies to optimize your hybrid cloud across on-premises, multicloud, and the edge. And, be among the first to hear about the latest innovations in Azure Arc and Azure Stack—two game-changing hybrid cloud offerings from Microsoft.
Join live and learn about:
You’ll also get to ask experts your questions about hybrid cloud during the live Q&A.
https://info.microsoft.com/ww-registration-azure-hybrid-virtual-event.html
Where: Sydney AU
When : 6-7th April 2020
For the first time HashiDays is coming to APAC: get ready for HashiDays Sydney at the Roslyn Packer Theatre on 7 April.
However - there's a Virtual Day being held instead on the 7th of April: https://www.hashicorp.com/webinars/hashicorp-virtualdays-apac-april2020/
Redhat Virtual Summit
When: April 28-29
https://www.redhat.com/en/summit
DockerCon Live
When: May 28
https://www.docker.com/dockercon/
Think 2020 IBM
When: May 5-7
https://www.ibm.com/events/think/
Cloud Data Summit North America
When: May 26-27
https://www.clouddatasummit.com/na/
Where: Darling Harbour Sydney AU ** Cancelled **
When : Mar 31 - Apr 2 2020
AWS Summits were happening all over the globe - however due to the COVID-19 health warnings, it looks like all events in the AWS Summit lineup have been cancelled.
| Location | Date |
| Paris, France | March 17, 2020 ** Cancelled ** |
| Dubai UAE | March 24, 2020 ** Cancelled ** |
| Brussels, Belgium | April 2, 2020 ** Cancelled ** |
| Amsterdam, Netherlands | April 8, 2020 ** Cancelled ** |
| Mumbai, India | April 8, 2020 ** Cancelled ** |
| San Francisco, CA USA | April 14, 2020 ** Cancelled ** |
| Singapore | April 15, 2020 ** Cancelled ** |
| Seoul, South Korea | April 16, 2020 ** Cancelled ** |
| London, UK | April 29, 2020 ** Cancelled ** |
If you need a fix of AWS goodness, there is an extensive program of online tech talks scheduled:
Join AWS for live, online presentations led by AWS solutions architects and engineers. AWS Online Tech Talks cover a range of topics and expertise levels, and feature technical deep dives, demonstrations, customer examples, and live Q&A with AWS experts.
Note – All sessions are free and in Pacific Time. Can’t join them live? Access webinar recordings and slides on the On-Demand Portal.
Tech talks this month, by category, are:
March 23, 2020 | 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM PT – Build and Deploy Full-Stack Containerized Applications with the New Amazon ECS CLI – Learn to build, deploy and operate your containerized apps, all from the comfort of your terminal, with the new ECS CLI V2.
March 23, 2020 | 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM PT – Understanding High Availability and Disaster Recovery Features for Amazon RDS for Oracle – Learn when and how to use the High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) features to meet recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) requirements for mission critical Oracle databases running on Amazon RDS.
March 23, 2020 | 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM PT – Intro to AWS IAM Access Analyzer – Learn how you can use IAM Access Analyzer to identify resource policies that don’t comply with your organization’s security requirements.
March 24, 2020 | 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM PT – Introducing HTTP APIs: A Better, Cheaper, Faster Way to Build APIs – Building APIs? Save up to 70% and reduce latency by 60% using HTTP APIs, now generally available from Amazon API Gateway.
March 24, 2020 | 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM PT – Move to Managed Windows File Storage – Move to Managed: Learn about simplifying your Windows file shares with Amazon FSx for Windows File Server.
March 24, 2020 | 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM PT – Advanced Architectures with AWS Transit Gateway – Learn how to use AWS Transit Gateway with centralized security appliances to improve network security and manageability.
March 25, 2020 | 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM PT – How a U.S. Government Agency Accelerated Its Migration to GovCloud – Learn how a government agency mitigated risk and accelerated its migration of 200 VMs to GovCloud using CloudEndure Migration.
March 25, 2020 | 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM PT – Machine Learning-Powered Contact Center Analytics with Contact Lens for Amazon Connect – Every engagement your customer has with your contact center can provide your team with powerful insights. Explore how with ML-powered analytics, register for this Tech Talk to learn how Contact Lens for Amazon Connect helps you deeply understand your customer conversations.
March 25, 2020 | 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM PT – Monitoring Serverless Applications Using CloudWatch ServiceLens – In this tech talk, we will provide an introduction to CloudWatch ServiceLens and how it enables you to visualize and analyze the health, performance, and availability of your microservice based applications in a single place.
March 26, 2020 | 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM PT – End User Computing on AWS: Secure Solutions for the Agile Enterprise – Learn how tens of thousands of companies are accelerating their cloud migration and increasing agility with Amazon End-User Computing services.
March 26, 2020 | 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM PT – Bring the Power of Machine Learning to Your Fight Against Online Fraud – Learn how machine learning can help you automatically start detecting online fraud faster with Amazon Fraud Detector.
March 26, 2020 | 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM PT – Bring-Your-Own-License (BYOL) on AWS Made Easier – Learn how to bring your own licenses (BYOL) to AWS for optimizing Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) with a new, simplified BYOL experience.
March 27, 2020 | 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM PT – Intro to Databases for Games: Hands-On with Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon Aurora – Making a game and need to integrate a database? We’ll show you how!
March 27, 2020 | 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM PT – Accelerate Your Analytics by Migrating to a Cloud Data Warehouse – Learn how to accelerate your analytics by migrating to a cloud data warehouse.
March 30, 2020 | 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM PT – Optimizing Lambda Performance for Your Serverless Applications – Learn how to optimize the performance of your Lambda functions through new features like improved VPC networking and Provisioned Concurrency.
March 30, 2020 | 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM PT – Protecting Your Web Application Using AWS Managed Rules for AWS WAF – Learn about the new AWS WAF experience and how you can leverage AWS Managed Rules to protect your web application.
March 30, 2020 | 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM PT – Migrating ASP.NET applications to AWS with Windows Web Application Migration Assistant – Join this tech talk to learn how to migrate ASP.NET web applications into a fully managed AWS Elastic Beanstalk environment.
March 31, 2020 | 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM PT – Forrester Explains the Total Economic Impact™ of Working with AWS Managed Services – Learn about the 243% ROI your organization could expect from an investment in AWS Managed Services from the Forrester Total Economic Impact™ study.
March 31, 2020 | 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM PT – Getting Started with AWS IoT Greengrass Solution Accelerators for Edge Computing – Learn how you can use AWS IoT Greengrass Solution Accelerators to quickly build solutions for industrial, consumer, and commercial use cases.
March 31, 2020 | 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM PT – A Customer’s Perspective on Building an Event-Triggered System-of-Record Application with Amazon QLDB – UK’s Dept. of Vehicle and Licensing shares its perspective on building an Event-triggered System of Record Application with Amazon QLDB.
April 1, 2020 | 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM PT – Containers for Game Development – Learn the basic architectures for utilizing containers and how to operate your environment, helping you seamlessly scale and save cost while building your game backend on AWS.
April 1, 2020 | 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM PT – Friends Don’t Let Friends Manage Data Streaming Infrastructure – Eliminate the headaches of managing your streaming data infrastructure with fully managed AWS services for Apache Kafka and Apache Flink.
April 2, 2020 | 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM PT – How to Train and Tune Your Models with Amazon SageMaker – Learn how Amazon SageMaker provides everything you need to tune and debug models and execute training experiments.
April 2, 2020 | 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM PT – Enterprise Transformation: Migration and Modernization Demystified – Learn how to lead your business transformation while executing cloud migrations and modernizations.
April 2, 2020 | 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM PT – How to Build Scalable Web Based Applications for Less with Amazon EC2 Spot Instances – Learn how you can scale and optimize web based applications running on Amazon EC2 for cost and performance, all while handling peak demand.
April 3, 2020 | 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM PT – Migrating File Data to AWS: Demo & Technical Guidance – In this tech talk, we’ll touch upon AWS storage destination services in brief, and demo how you can use AWS DataSync and AWS Storage Gateway to easily and securely move your file data into AWS for file services, processing, analytics, machine learning, and archiving, as well as providing on-premises access where needed.
April 3, 2020 | 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM PT – Building Real-Time Audio and Video Calling in Your Applications with the Amazon Chime SDK – Learn how to quickly build real-time communication capabilities in your own applications for engaging customer experiences.
Source : https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/community/events/
Some are going ahead, but we'd suggest contacting the organisers before putting any concrete plans in place.
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