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In Cloud Computing This Week [May 14th 2021]

Written by Team Hava | May 14, 2021

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

 

Here's a round up of all things GCP, Azure and AWS for the week ending Friday 14th May 2021. 

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AWS Updates and Releases

Source: aws.amazon.com
 

AMAZON EMR 6.3 NOW SUPPORTS APACHE RANGER FOR FINE-GRAINED DATA ACCESS CONTROL

Amazon EMR integration with Apache Ranger  is now available on EMR 6.3, allowing you to define, enforce, and audit fine-grained data access control. With this feature, you can define and enforce 1/ database, table, and column level authorization policies for Apache Spark and Apache Hive users to access data through Hive Metastore, and 2/ prefix and object level authorization policies when accessing data in Amazon S3 via the Amazon EMR File System (EMRFS), leveraging Amazon CloudWatch to capture auditing logs.

AWS WAF adds support for log filtering

AWS WAF now supports log filtering, enabling you to specify which web requests are logged and which requests are discarded from log after the inspection. You can use log filtering to keep only the information you want to analyze. Log filtering can also help you save on log delivery and storage costs by reducing the amount of log data stored.

Amazon Connect adds near real-time insights into voice call, chat, and task activity

Amazon Connect now allows customers to subscribe to a near real-time stream of contact (voice calls, chat, and task) events (e.g., call is queued) in your Amazon Connect contact center. These events include when a voice call, chat, or task is initiated, queued to be assigned to an agent, connected to an agent, transferred to another agent or queue, and disconnected. Contact events can be used to create analytics dashboards to monitor and track contact activity, integrate into workforce management (WFM) solutions to better understand contact center performance, or to integrate applications that react to events (e.g., call disconnected) in real-time. Amazon Connect contact events are published via Amazon EventBridge, and can be set up in a couple of clicks by going to the Amazon EventBridge AWS console and creating a new rule.

Amazon Athena adds built-in support for cross-account AWS Glue Data Catalogs

Amazon Athena users can now query databases and tables across AWS accounts through built-in support for AWS Glue Data Catalogs in other AWS accounts. Customers need a central data catalog to enable analysts and data scientists to access their data lake without the complexity of replicating catalog metadata in individual AWS accounts. Today’s release makes it easier to connect AWS Glue Data Catalogs in other accounts using the Athena console or API.

Learn how to develop applications with Amazon DynamoDB

AWS have introduced a curriculum of three free, digital courses that help you accelerate your application development skills with Amazon DynamoDB, described below. Designed for new or experienced database developers and architects interested in learning how to develop applications with Amazon DynamoDB, these intermediate courses simulate a real application development project. 
 

Now use AWS Systems Manager Change Calendar to prevent desired-state updates during critical events

You can now use Change Calendar to prevent desired-state configuration updates made usingState Manager. Change Calendar and State Manager are both capabilities of AWS SystemsManager. With Change Calendar, you can schedule calendar events to control when changes can be made to your AWS resources. You can use State Manager to define, enforce, and report on desired state configuration compliance for your infrastructure. With this new integration, you can help ensure that your desired-state configuration updates do not conflict with important business activities, such as sales events or new product launches.

New patch releases for Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL are now available

Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL patch releases are now available for customers using Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition. To review the changes, visit the documentation history  and for detailed release notes, visit our version documentation . You can apply the new patch version in the AWS Management Console, via the AWS CLI, or via the RDS API. 

INTRODUCING DISTRIBUTED LOAD TESTING V1.3

Distributed Load Testing on AWS helps you easily simulate thousands of users connecting to your application so that you can better understand your application performance under load. The solution launches and configures containers on AWS Fargate to generate a specified number of transactions per second without having to provision servers.

Introducing the new Machine Downtime Monitor on AWS solution

Machine Downtime Monitor on AWS is a new solution that provides a dashboard to industrial customers to help them monitor the health of factory floor equipment, which enables easier identification of machine breakdowns and quicker response, improving asset availability. This solution offers an intuitive interface that allows non-technical users to easily configure machines and get up and running quickly. It also empowers production personnel to respond proactively to production interruptions and maximize asset availability.

Four new EC2 High Memory instances with up to 12TB of memory are now available with On-Demand and Savings Plan purchase options

Starting this week, the new EC2 High Memory instances with 6TB, 9TB, and 12TB of memory (u-6tb1.56xlarge, u-6tb1.112xlarge, u-9tb1.112xlarge, and u-12tb1.112xlarge) are available for usage with On-Demand (OD) and Savings Plan purchase options. This launch gives AWS customers greater flexibility for instance usage and procurement. Customers can choose from two instances with 6TB of memory - u-6tb1.56xlarge and u-6tb1.112xlarge - both offering 100Gbps network and 38Gbps EBS bandwidth, and with 224 vCPUs and 448 vCPUs, respectively. These new instances provide additional flexibility for customers with memory-bound workloads and helps further optimize workload price/performance. The 9TB and 12TB instances offer 448 vCPUs, 100Gbps network and 38Gbps EBS bandwidth. 

AWS SaaS Boost released as an open source project

At re:Invent 2020, AWS announced the preview of AWS SaaS Boost, an open source tool that helps software developers migrate their existing solutions to a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery model. SaaS Boost significantly offloads development effort by accelerating application transformation to SaaS, freeing up software developers to focus on features that differentiate their products. After receiving interest from hundreds of developers in the project, today we’re pleased to announce its public availability on GitHub . All SaaS products need the foundational capabilities to onboard users, provision infrastructure for tenants, monitor consumption trends, configure tenant profiles, integrate with a billing systems, and surface key metrics. These functions are critical for helping SaaS providers to scale. If every SaaS company spent their resources building these capabilities before building their actual applications, it would result in burning finite capital and slowing down their time to market.

AMAZON EC2 P4D INSTANCES NOW AVAILABLE IN EUROPE (FRANKFURT) AND ASIA PACIFIC (SEOUL) REGIONS

Amazon EC2 P4d instances which provide the highest performance for machine learning training and high performance computing in the cloud are now available in the Europe (Frankfurt) and Asia Pacific (Seoul) regions.

Amazon EKS managed node groups adds support for Kubernetes node taints

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) managed node groups now supports Kubernetes node taints, simplifying node lifecycle management for clusters with varying application resource requirements.

AMAZON EMR ON EKS IS NOW AVAILABLE IN THE EU (PARIS AND STOCKHOLM) REGION

Starting this week, Amazon EMR on Amazon EKS is now available in the EU (Paris and Stockholm) region

Announcing the General Availability of AWS Local Zones in Boston, Houston, and Miami

AWS announced the general availability of AWS Local Zones in Boston, Houston, and Miami. AWS customers can now use these new AWS Local Zones to deliver applications that require single-digit millisecond latency to end-users or on-premises installations in Boston, Houston, and Miami metro areas.

NEW DIGITAL TRAINING AND AWS CERTIFICATION GUIDE FOR AWS END USER COMPUTING

AWS added seven free, digital training courses to the series of AWS End User Computing Digital Training curriculums. Use these new Amazon WorkSpaces Deep Dive and Amazon AppStream 2.0 Primer courses to learn how to administer, optimize, and troubleshoot your cloud-based desktops and applications. Designed for desktop or virtual desktop infrastructure managers and IT administrators, these interactive, self-paced courses include presentations, videos, and quizzes.  

AMAZON FRAUD DETECTOR NOW SUPPORTS AWS CLOUDFORMATION

Amazon Fraud Detector now supports AWS CloudFormation for creating and configuring Amazon Fraud Detector resources such as detectors and rules along with the rest of your AWS infrastructure. Amazon Fraud Detector is a fully managed service that makes it easy to identify potentially fraudulent online activities, such as the creation of fake accounts or online payment fraud.  

AMAZON KINESIS DATA ANALYTICS NOW SUPPORTS ROLLBACKAPPLICATION, LISTAPPLICATIONVERSIONS, AND DESCRIBEAPPLICATIONVERSION APIS IN PREVIEW

Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics for Apache Flink now supports three new application management APIs in preview. RollbackApplication  allows you to restore your application to the last running version and application state from the most recent, successful snapshot. ListApplicationVersions  allows you to get all application versions and a summary of the associated configurations. DescribeApplicationVersio n gives you the most comprehensive view of the application configuration of a particular version.

ANNOUNCING AMAZON RDS FOR SQL SERVER ON AWS OUTPOSTS

Amazon RDS for SQL Server on AWS Outposts is now available to all AWS Outposts customers. Amazon RDS on AWS Outposts allows you to deploy fully managed database instances in your on-premises environments. AWS Outposts is a fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs, and tools to virtually any datacenter, co-location space, or on-premises facility for a truly consistent hybrid experience.

AWS Lake Formation now supports Tag-based access control (TBAC)

AWS Lake Formation now supports tagging data lake resources (databases, tables and columns) and creating logical access control policies based on those tags. Tag-based access control (TBAC) decouples policy creation from resource creation which helps data stewards govern large number of databases, tables, and columns by removing the need to update policies every time a new resource is added to the data lake. TBAC ensures that governance can be scaled easily by replacing the policy definition from 1000s of resources down to a small number of logical tags.

Introducing Incident Manager from AWS Systems Manager

This week, AWS announced Incident Manager, a new capability of AWS Systems Manager that enables faster resolution of critical application availability and performance issues. Incident Manager helps you prepare for incidents with automated response plans that bring the right people and information together. The Incident Manager console provides a unified user interface to view operational data from multiple AWS services and track incident updates, such as alarm status changes and response plan progress. Incident Manager helps you improve service reliability by suggesting post-incident action items, such as automating a runbook step or adding a new alarm.

Amazon SageMaker now supports Elastic Fabric Adapter for distributed training

Amazon SageMaker now supports Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) for training machine learning models. EFA is a network interface for Amazon EC2 instances that enables customers to run applications requiring high levels of inter-node communications at scale on AWS. EFA can significantly speed up distributed training on SageMaker at no additional cost. For example, AWS trained the BERT natural language processing model with SageMaker’s distributed data parallel library on 32 ml.p4d.24xlarge instances. The training was up to 130% faster with EFA compared to Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) .

MIGRATION EVALUATOR ANNOUNCES A FASTER WAY TO PROJECT AWS CLOUD COSTS WITH QUICK INSIGHTS

Building a business case for the cloud can be a time-consuming process on your own. With Migration Evaluator, organizations can accelerate their evaluation and decision-making for migration to AWS. Quick Insights - a new capability of Migration Evaluator, provides customers with a one-page summary of their projected AWS costs based on measured on-premises provisioning and utilization. This complimentary pre-migration assessment enables customers to rapidly understand the projected cost of running their on-premises estate in the AWS Cloud.

Amazon RDS for SQL Server supports Managed Disaster Recovery (DR) with Amazon RDS Cross-Region Automated Backups

Starting today Amazon RDS for SQL Server supports Amazon RDS Cross-Region Automated Backups. This feature extends the existing RDS backup functionality, giving you the ability to setup automatic replication of system snapshots and transaction logs from a primary AWS Region to a secondary AWS Region.

AMAZON ATHENA DRIVERS NOW SUPPORT AZURE AD AND PINGFEDERATE AUTHENTICATION

With the latest release of JDBC  and ODBC  drivers for Amazon Athena, you can use Microsoft’s Azure Active Directory (AD) or Ping Identity’s PingFederate for authentication with compatible business intelligence, SQL, or embedded analytics applications



 

Google Cloud Releases and Updates

 
Source: cloud.google.com
BigQuery

BigQuery now supports the following SQL query clauses and operators:

This feature is in Preview.


Cloud BigTable

You can now use IAM conditions to define and enforce conditional access control for Cloud Bigtable instances, clusters, and tables. This feature is generally available.

Cloud Billing

Cloud Billing Reports now show the target budget amount when you open the report from a budget

GKE

Dataplane V2 is generally available in newly created clusters using GKE versions 1.20.6-gke.700 and later.

The GKE Gateway controller, Google Cloud's implementation of the Gateway API, is available in Preview in GKE version 1.20 and later. See Deploying Gateways for how to expose applications using Gateway.

 
 

Microsoft Azure Releases And Updates

Source: azure.microsoft.com

A regular Azure API Management service update was started on May 5, 2021, and included the following new features, bug fixes, and other improvements.

 

Azure Purview now supports Private Endpoints in public preview

Add a layer of security and network isolation to your Purview account.

 

Public preview: Application Gateway Mutual Authentication

Application Gateway now supports fronted mutual authentication and listener specific SSL policies.

Azure Static Web Apps is now generally available

 

Azure Static Web Apps, now includes a standard plan for advanced capabilities supported by an enterprise Service Level Agreement (SLA).

PUBLIC PREVIEW: AZURE DATABASE FOR MYSQL– FLEXIBLE SERVER: ANNOUNCING SSL ENFORCEMENT AND MINIMUM TLS VERSION CHOICE

Now you can choose to enforce encrypted connection or Transport Layer Support version on Azure Database for MySQL - Flexible Server.

THE PUBLIC PREVIEW OF AZURE DATABASE FOR POSTGRESQL – FLEXIBLE SERVER NOW SUPPORTED IN NEW REGIONS

Provision new Flexible Server deployments in France Central and Brazil South regions for Azure Database for PostgreSQL, a managed service running the open source Postgres database on Azure.

AZURE DATABASE FOR MYSQL - FLEXIBLE SERVER: POWERSHELL MODULE IN PUBLIC PREVIEW

Use PowerShell to manage dependent resources and Azure Database for MySQL- Flexible Servers.

Zone redundant storage (ZRS) option for Azure managed disks in public preview

Now available in public preview in West Europe, North Europe, West US 2, and France Central, Zone Redundant Storage (ZRS) option for Azure managed disks protect disks from zonal failures which may occur due to natural disasters or hardware issues.

CAPACITY CALCULATOR WITH AZURE COSMOS DB API FOR MONGODB NOW GENERALLY AVAILABLE

Use the Azure Cosmos DB capacity calculator to estimate your RU/s for your API for MongoDB workloads.

GENERAL AVAILABILITY: ANNOUNCING LOWER PRICING FOR PROVISIONED THROUGHPUT ON AZURE ULTRA DISKS

Provisioned throughput price on Azure Ultra Disks is reduced by 65% in all regions where Ultra Disks are available

GENERAL AVAILABILITY | AZURE NETAPP FILES : APPLICATION CONSISTENT SNAPSHOT TOOL (AZACSNAP)

AzAcSnap is a command-line tool for simplifying data protection for third-party databases in Linux environments

AZURE DATABASE FOR POSTGRESQL – HYPERSCALE (CITUS) MANAGED PGBOUNCER IN PUBLIC PREVIEW

PgBouncer, a popular connection pooler for Postgres, is now part of the Azure Database for PostgreSQL - Hyperscale (Citus) managed service.

AZURE DATABASE FOR POSTGRESQL – FLEXIBLE SERVER WITH MANAGED PGBOUNCER IN PREVIEW

PgBouncer, a popular connection pooler for Postgres, is now part of the Azure Database for PostgreSQL - Flexible Server managed service

General availability: Azure DevOps updates for May 2021

There are several new announcements for May 2021 including repos as protected resource in YAML pipelines and updates to Delivery Plans 2.0.

GENERAL AVAILABILITY: AZURE IOT CENTRAL NEW AND UPDATED FEATURES—APRIL 2021

April updates include API general availability, new guidance articles, dashboard updates, IoT Edge updates, and device connectivity events.

General availability: Enable Azure Site Recovery (ASR) while creating Azure Virtual Machines

With ASR, you can now protect your business-critical Azure virtual machines from regional outages at the time of VM creation.

 
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