In Cloud Computing This Week [May 1st 2020]

Hello cloud land,  as usual, we've read the news, so you don't have to.  

Here's this week's round up of everything that's happening in cloud computing this week. 

Not a huge amount going on. Jeff Bezos appears to be doing ok, although Amazon are budgeting $4bn for Covid-19 mitigation so are giving investors a heads up that profit might be a little scarce for a while.

Integration seems to be the theme of the week, with both AWS and Azure announcing new ways to interconnect your applications and data.

Still no movement on the live event front. Hopefully we're over the pandemic peak and can start to return to normal. That said, we've seen a LOT of people that are kind of cool with the new world order, so maybe it will be some time before the conference scene gets back on track, thats assuming that it ever will.

Did you check out our latest blog post on places to source cloud training courses for free or mostly free?  You can find it here:  https://www.hava.io/blog/best-free-aws-gcp-and-azure-training-in-2020

Enjoy.

Cloud Computing Market to Hit USD 760.98 Billion by 2027   

The global cloud computing market size is projected to reach USD 760.98 billion by 2027, exhibiting a CAGR of 18.6% during the forecast period. Rising preference for omni-cloud systems will prove highly beneficial for the growth of this market, states Fortune Business Insights™ in its report, titled "Cloud Computing Market Size, Share & Industry Analysis, By Type (Public Cloud, Private Cloud, Hybrid Cloud), By Service (Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS)), By Industry (Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance (BFSI), IT and Telecommunications, Government, Consumer Goods and Retail, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Others (Energy and Utilities, Education, Media and Entertainment etc.)), and Regional Forecast, 2020-2027".

https://www.prnewswire.co.uk/news-releases/cloud-computing-market-to-hit-usd-760-98-billion-by-2027-rising-demand-for-improved-virtual-access-to-information-among-industries-to-foster-steady-growth-fortune-business-insights-tm--855567612.html

Amazon EventBridge Schema Registry   

Amazon EventBridge is a serverless event bus that makes it easy to connect applications together. It can use data from AWS services, your own applications, and integrations with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) partners. Last year at re:Invent, AWS introduced in preview EventBridge schema registry and discovery, a way to store the structure of the events (the schema) in a central location, and simplify using events in your code by generating the code to process them for Java, Python, and Typescript.

This week, AWS announced that the EventBridge schema registry is generally available, and that they added support for resource policies. Resource policies allow to share a schema repository across different AWS accounts and organizations. In this way, developers on different teams can search for and use any schema that another team has added to the shared registry.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-eventbridge-schema-registry-is-now-generally-available/

Use AWS Transit Gateway & Direct Connect to Centralize and Streamline Your Network Connectivity 

Last resident AWS Blog contributor Jeff Barr showed you how to Use an AWS Transit Gateway to Simplify Your Network Architecture. As he said at the time:

You can connect your existing VPCs, data centers, remote offices, and remote gateways to a managed Transit Gateway, with full control over network routing and security, even if your VPCs, Active Directories, shared services, and other resources span multiple AWS accounts. You can simplify your overall network architecture, reduce operational overhead, and gain the ability to centrally manage crucial aspects of your external connectivity, including security. Last but not least, you can use Transit Gateways to consolidate your existing edge connectivity and route it through a single ingress/egress point.

In that post Jeff also promised you support for AWS Direct Connect, and he's happy to announce that this support is available today for use in the US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (N. California), and US West (Oregon) Regions. The applications that you run in the AWS Cloud can now communicate with each other, and with your on-premises applications, at speeds of up to 10 Gbps per Direct Connect connection. You can set it up in minutes (assuming that you already have a dedicated or hosted connection running at 1 Gbps or more) and start using it right away.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/use-aws-transit-gateway-direct-connect-to-centralize-and-streamline-your-network-connectivity/

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) for VPC Endpoints   

AWS customers can now connect directly from Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) to Amazon SES through a VPC Endpoint, powered by AWS PrivateLink, in a secure and scalable manner. You can now access Amazon SES through your VPC without requiring an Internet gateway, NAT device, VPN connection, or AWS Direct Connect connection. When you use an interface VPC Endpoint, communication between your VPC and Amazon SES APIs stays within the Amazon network, adding increased security.

With this launch, the traffic to Amazon SES does not transit over the Internet and never leaves the Amazon network to securely connect their VPC to Amazon SES without imposing availability risks or bandwidth constraints on their network traffic. You can centralize Amazon SES across your multi-account infrastructure and provide it as a service to your accounts without the need to utilizing an Internet gateway.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-simple-email-service-ses-for-vpc-endpoints/

Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) is Now Generally Available 

Amazon Keyspaces is built on Apache Cassandra, and you can use it as a fully managed, serverless database. Your applications can read and write data from Amazon Keyspaces using your existing Cassandra Query Language (CQL) code, with little or no changes. For each table, you can select the best configuration depending on your use case:

• With on-demand, you pay based on the actual reads and writes you perform. This is the best option for unpredictable workloads.
• With provisioned capacity, you can reduce your costs for predictable workloads by configuring capacity settings up front. You can also further optimize costs by enable auto scaling, which updates your provisioned capacity settings automatically as your traffic changes throughout the day.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-keyspaces-for-apache-cassandra-is-now-generally-available/

Cross Region Restore (CRR) for Azure Virtual Machines using Azure Backup

Azure Backup uses Recovery Services vault to hold customers' backup data which offers both local and geographic redundancy. To ensure high availability of backed up data, Azure Backup defaults storage settings to geo-redundancy.

By virtue, backed up data in the primary region is geo-replicated to an Azure-paired secondary region. If Azure declares a disaster in the primary region, the data replicated in the secondary region is available to restore in the secondary region only.

With the introduction of this new feature, the customer can initiate restores in a secondary region at will to mitigate real downtime disaster in the primary region for their environment. This makes the secondary region restores completely customer-controlled. Azure Backup utilizes the backed-up data replicated to the secondary region for such restores. 

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/cross-region-restore-crr-for-azure-virtual-machines-using-azure-backup/

Azure Container Reg: Mitigating data exfiltration with dedicated data endpoints

Azure Container Registry announces dedicated data endpoints, enabling tightly scoped client firewall rules to specific registries, minimizing data exfiltration concerns. 

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-container-registry-mitigating-data-exfiltration-with-dedicated-data-endpoints/

Windows Server containers and private clusters for Azure Kubernetes Service

Microsoft announced the general availability of Windows Server container support on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). 

AKS simplifies the deployment and management of Kubernetes clusters and provides a highly reliable and available environment for your applications. It integrates seamlessly with world-class development tools such as GitHub and Visual Studio Code and is built on years of Microsoft security expertise focusing on data protection and compliance.

With the general availability of Windows Server containers, you can now lift and shift your Windows applications to run on managed Kubernetes service with Azure and get the full benefits of AKS for your production workloads using consistent tools and processes. For example, you can create, upgrade, and scale Windows node pools in AKS through the standard tools (portal/CLI) and Azure will help manage the health of the cluster automatically.

Running both Windows and Linux applications side by side in a single AKS cluster, you can modernize your operations processes for a broader set of applications while increasing the density (and thus lowering the costs) of your application environment.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-the-general-availability-of-windows-server-containers-and-private-clusters-for-azure-kubernetes-service/

Anthos in depth: What new AWS multi-cloud support means for you

Support for Anthos for AWS is generally available. This release includes several of the top features that you have been asking for, bringing a variety of benefits:

1. High reliability: Your clusters can be deployed in a high availability (HA) configuration, where both control plane instances, as well as node pools, can be placed across multiple availability zones. AWS Auto Scaling groups are also used for resiliency.

2. Auto-scaling: Automatically resize your number of nodes based on traffic volumes so you are only paying for the resources you need.

3. Integration with an existing AWS environment: Anthos can be deployed into your existing AWS VPCs, and you can leverage existing security groups to secure those clusters. If your existing AWS setup has been approved by your security team, you can deploy Anthos into it, as long as the firewalls allow connections back to Google. You can also expose services via AWS load balancers so deploying Anthos is easy and configuration of the environment is minimal.

4. Operational consistency: Now, you can manage workloads running on Google Cloud as well as AWS from one place. The Google Cloud Console provides single-pane-of-glass management for all your clusters. Additionally, system logs for all these environments can be stored in Cloud Logging (formerly Stackdriver).

5. Integration with the full Anthos stack: You can set policy on your AWS workloads with Anthos Config Management, and use Anthos Service Mesh to securely connect and manage your resources running in AWS so your policies and monitoring have a view of your entire application and not just a silo of one part.

https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/anthos/multi-cloud-features-make-anthos-on-aws-possible

Amazon's cloud generated over $10 billion in net quarterly sales for the first time ever — up 33% from a year ago 

• Amazon Web Services surpassed $US10 billion in net sales for the first time ever this past quarter.
• AWS generated $US10.2 billion in net sales, up 33% from last year – although that figure slightly missed Wall Street analyst revenue expectations of $US10.29 billion.
• This quarter also saw AWS’s biggest revenue growth slowdown since the company started disclosing its cloud revenue.
• That slowdown may be because of competitive pressure from rivals like Microsoft or Google Cloud. It could also just be because of the law of large numbers, with AWS’ growing revenue base making that much harder to demonstrate large growth percentages every quarter.

https://www.businessinsider.com.au/amazon-earnings-aws-amazon-web-services-10-billion-quarterly-revenue-2020-4