In Cloud Computing This Week [May 21st 2021]

AWS Updates and Releases

Starting this week, AWS customers can easily enable AWS Wavelength Zones themselves from the new “Settings ” section of the EC2 Console or ModifyAvailabilityZoneGroup  API . Once enabled, customers can create and manage resources in the Wavelength Zone using the same APIs and Management Console they use for Availability Zones in AWS Regions.

Amazon SageMaker Pipelines, the first purpose built continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) service for machine learning (ML), now allows customers to specify custom dependencies between the steps of the model building pipeline. Previously, specifying the output of a step as the input to another was the only option for specifying the dependency and the execution order between the two steps of the model building pipeline. Now, customers have the option of explicitly listing the steps that a given step execution needs to wait on.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) now supports using the Amazon EKS console, CLI, and API to install and manage CoreDNS and kube-proxy in addition to existing support for the Amazon VPC CNI networking plugin . This makes it easier to define consistent Kubernetes clusters and keep them up to date using Amazon EKS.

Using the AWS Toolkit for VS Code, customers can now create, locally debug, and deploy Lambda functions written in Java and Go. Java users will be able to step-through debug Lambdas built with Maven and Gradle in Java 8, Java 8.al2, and Java 11, while Go users will be able to do the same with Lambdas built in Golang 1.14+.

Starting today, you can create Amazon Lightsail instances, databases, and more in the AWS Europe (Stockholm) Region.

The Amazon Chime SDK for Javascript now enables developers to support audio and video functionalities in a iOS WKWebView component. With support for WKWebView, developers can now use the Amazon Chime SDK for Javascript within a native iOS application's WKWebView component to enable audio and video capabilities. 

Now you can easily setup monitoring, alarms and dashboards for your applications deployed in Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and Kubernetes on EC2 containers running on AWS with CloudWatch Application Insights. CloudWatch Application Insights is a capability that helps customers monitor and troubleshoot their enterprise applications running on AWS resources. The new feature adds monitoring tier options for capturing the metrics, telemetry and logs for monitoring the health and wellness of applications running in containers on AWS.

We recently updated Customizations for AWS Control Tower, a reference implementation that makes it easier to build your own guardrails and integrations with the AWS Control Tower service. Customizations for AWS Control Tower v2.1 is for new or existing AWS Control Tower customers that want to use the managed service, but have additional requirements that are not yet supported by the service. AWS Partners can also use the framework to develop and package their own custom guardrails and integrations for AWS Control Tower.

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling now natively supports Predictive Scaling so you can proactively scale out your Auto Scaling group to be ready for upcoming demand. Predictive Scaling can help you avoid the need to over-provision capacity, resulting in lower EC2 cost, while ensuring your application’s responsiveness. (Previously, Predictive Scaling was only available via AWS Auto Scaling Plans.)

You can now configure EventBridge to send and receive events between event buses in the same AWS account and Region , to aggregate all your events from different event buses into a single event bus. You can also fan out events from a single event bus to other event buses, making it easier to decouple applications and produce more extensible, maintainable event-driven architectures within your organization.

The AWS Load Balancer Controller provides a Kubernetes native way to configure and manage Elastic Load Balancers that route traffic to applications running in Kubernetes clusters. Elastic Load Balancing offers multiple load balancers that all feature the high availability, automatic scaling, and robust security necessary to help make your applications fault tolerant.

The AWS Solutions team recently updated AWS Streaming Data Solution for Amazon MSK, an AWS Solutions Implementation that provides an automated configuration of the AWS services necessary to easily capture, store, process, and deliver streaming data.

AWS has updated Serverless Bot Framework, an AWS Solutions Implementation that allows customers to automatically set up a chatbot application with sample interactions. The new functionalities help customers scale the use of their chatbots with integrations with AWS Lambda and Amazon DynamoDB.

Today, AWS announced AWS Application Cost Profiler, a managed service that enables you to view apportioned cost of AWS resources for software applications shared by multiple users (a.k.a. tenants).

Amazon SageMaker Autopilot automatically builds, trains, and tunes the best machine learning models based on your data, while allowing you to maintain full control and visibility. Starting today, you have a convenient option to auto deploy the best trained model after running an experiment to create models. With auto deploy option enabled, SageMaker Autopilot will automatically create an endpoint and deploy your best model, enabling you to run real time inference on your endpoint. You can modify or delete the endpoint at anytime to meet your changing inference needs.

This week, AWS Copilot announced the general availability of version 1.7, which enables you to easily deploy request-driven web services with AWS App Runner in addition to Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS). AWS App Runner is a fully managed container application service that makes it easy for customers without any prior containers or infrastructure experience to build, deploy, and run containerized web applications and APIs in just a few clicks.

AWS License Manager now allows you to take periodic snapshots of your license usage across all your AWS accounts and store these reports directly into your S3 bucket. You can use these reports to track your historical license usage, manage compliance, and reduce licensing spend by accounting for maximum license usage. You can enable, disable, and modify the frequency of report generation based on your license tracking requirements. 

Today, we are pleased to announce that AWS Compute Optimizer now supports exporting Amazon EBS volume and AWS Lambda function memory size recommendations as csv files to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3).

AWS IoT Core Device Advisor, a fully managed cloud-based test capability for validating IoT devices, is now generally available in us-east-1, us-west-2, eu-west-1, and ap-northeast-1 regions. Now, developers can use pre-built tests provided by Device Advisor to validate that their IoT devices implement best practices for reliable and secure connectivity with AWS IoT Core. Device Advisor’s pre-built tests help developers to quickly validate their device software against best practices for usage of TLS , MQTT , Device Shadow , and IoT Jobs  thereby reducing the cost and time of development, testing and deployment.

Kubernetes is rapidly evolving, with frequent feature releases and bug fixes. Highlights of the Kubernetes 1.20 release include RuntimeClass  and Process ID Limits  reaching stable status, API Priority and Fairness  being enabled by default, and kubectl debug  reaching beta status. Learn more about Kubernetes version 1.20 in the Kubernetes project release notes .  

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) has expanded its integrity and confidentiality of secure communication to Apache Kafka self-managed and Amazon MSK endpoints. Using AWS DMS with improved Transport Layer Security (TLS) authentication and encryption, you can now use SSL encryption and authentication or SASL-SSL to secure Kafka endpoint connections. This security enhancement addresses the increasing demand of cloud security and improves the security of AWS DMS.  

AWS  announced the general availability of AWS App Runner, a fully managed container application service that makes it easy for customers without any prior containers or infrastructure experience to build, deploy, and run containerized web applications and APIs in just a few clicks. Customers simply provide source code, a container image, or deployment pipeline, and App Runner automatically builds and deploys the web application, load balances traffic, scales on demand, and monitors application health.

AWS Amplify Hosting now supports deploying and hosting server-side rendered (SSR) apps built with the Next.js framework with zero configuration. Frontend developers can now leverage all of Amplify Hosting’s CI/CD and hosting capabilities for deploying SSR apps. Next.js is a React framework that combines build-time static site generation (SSG) and dynamic server-side rendering (SSR) to enable developers to build performant, SEO-friendly web apps. Amplify Hosting supports all Next.js features in version 9.x.x including SSR API routes, dynamic pages, and automatic pre-rendering.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the general availability of AWS Application Migration Service (AWS MGN), a new service that enables organizations to move applications to AWS without making changes to the applications, their architecture, or the migrated servers. AWS Application Migration Service is the primary migration service recommended for lift-and-shift migrations to AWS. Customers currently using CloudEndure Migration or Server Migration Service (SMS) are encouraged to switch to AWS Application Migration Service for future migrations. Visit the product comparison page for specific reasons to use CloudEndure Migration or SMS.

AWS CloudFormation announces the general availability of AWS CloudFormation Guard 2.0. This release makes Guard a general-purpose policy-as-code evaluation tool. With Guard 2.0, developers can write policy rules for any JSON- and YAML-formatted file such as Kubernetes configurations and Terraform JSON configurations, in addition to already supported CloudFormation templates.

Amazon Macie now allows you to define a run-time criteria to determine which S3 buckets should be included in a sensitive data discovery job. When a job runs, Macie identifies the S3 buckets that match your criteria and automatically adds or removes them from the job’s scope. This capability makes it easier for you to manage S3 buckets that should be monitored for sensitive data and also removes the need to create new jobs to monitor newly created or modified S3 buckets.

Starting today, you can now add or remove filters by activity type on a file to narrow your results for both iOS and Android. The Activity Feed is designed to easily track all activities related to your files and folders, allowing you to stay connected to what’s going on. Now with the ability to filter by activity type, you can apply filters to refine your search which allows you to quickly read through updates and changes in real-time for the files you own as well as those that have been shared with you.  

Amazon DynamoDB global tables now support AWS CloudFormation, which means you can create global tables and manage their settings with CloudFormation templates. Global tables build upon the global footprint of DynamoDB to deliver a fully managed, multi-Region, multi-active database. You can use global tables to replicate table updates automatically across the AWS Regions you select, and you can set up global tables at any time with just a few clicks in the AWS Management Console or by using the AWS SDK.