In Cloud Computing This Week [May 28th 2021]

We're excited to announce that Redshift ML is now generally available. Amazon Redshift ML enables you to create, train, and deploy machine learning (ML) models using familiar SQL commands. With Amazon Redshift ML, you can now leverage Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed machine learning service, without moving your data or learning new skills

AWS Glue DataBrew now supports nest and unnest transformations to help users pack or unpack data into columns to manipulate their datasets. With these transformations, users can now easily extract data from nested json string fields or combine data without writing any code.

All AWS System and Organization Controls (SOC) (1,2,3) compliant services deployed in AWS Wavelength are now in scope. You can download the SOC Report in AWS Artifact. AWS maintains certifications through extensive audits of its controls to ensure that information security risks that affect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of company and customer information are appropriately managed. 

Amazon FSx for Lustre, a service that provides cost-effective, high-performance, scalable file storage for compute workloads, now supports data compression, enabling you to reduce the cost of storage for machine learning, high performance computing (HPC), and analytics data sets.

Amazon Kendra is an intelligent search service powered by machine learning, that enables organizations to provide more relevant information to customers and employees, when they need it. Starting today, AWS customers can use Amazon Kendra’s Query Suggestions feature to guide end users towards more commonly asked questions and save them time in their search for the information they need.

Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) Anywhere, a new capability of Amazon ECS. Amazon ECS Anywhere provides a fully managed container orchestration service that enables customers to run and manage containerized applications on-premises using the same APIs, cluster management, workload scheduling, monitoring, and deployment pipelines they use with Amazon ECS today. Customers can use Amazon ECS Anywhere on their own infrastructure by connecting their servers or instances to the managed Amazon ECS control plane. Enterprises who need to keep their data on-premises for latency or regulatory reasons can now use a single and consistent cloud-managed container orchestrator across their hybrid footprint.

You can now create Amazon API Gateway REST APIs to trigger a Synchronous Express Workflow from AWS Step Functions and respond with the output of that workflow.

You can now route traffic from your custom root domains (such as example.com) to your Lightsail container services using Lightsail DNS. Lightsail DNS already supported creating CNAME records mapping to your container services. With this launch, Lightsail DNS supports aliasing your custom root domain to your container service’s default domain which was not possible before. Thus, you can create an A/AAAA record in your Lightsail hosted DNS zone pointing the zone apex to a container service.

The Alarms feature in AWS IoT Events allows you to set up, visualize and manage rule-based alerts for devices, equipment, and processes. You can receive alerts via SMS or email in near-real time when equipment data breaches thresholds, allowing operations teams to take timely actions to reduce unplanned equipment downtime.

AWS Training and Certification has launched four, new self-paced digital courses, Building Modern .NET Applications on AWS, How to Buy Cloud - Strategies for Cloud Procurement, Improve your Java Code using Amazon CodeGuru, and Improve your Python Code using Amazon CodeGuru on Coursera, edX, and Udemy. 

AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) Private Certificate Authority (CA) now supports using S3 Block Public Access when storing certificate revocation links (CRL) in S3 buckets.

Starting today, Amazon 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 in US West (Oregon) and AWS GovCloud (US-West) regions. The global availability of these new instances now includes US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), AWS GovCloud (US-West), Europe (Ireland, Frankfurt), and Asia Pacific (Singapore) AWS regions. Customers can start using these new High Memory instances with OD and Savings Plan purchase options. For more information, visit the Amazon EC2 High Memory page.

Amazon Aurora with MySQL compatibility now supports T3.large instances, in addition to the T3.medium, T3.small, and R5 class instances already available. Using T3.large instances with Amazon Aurora MySQL is a cost-effective option for smaller workloads such as test, dev, and QA, while still giving you the option to use larger class instances for production deployments.

AWS Security Hub now supports a bidirectional integration with Atlassian Jira Service Management (JSM) .  You can now automatically create and update issues in Atlassian JSM from AWS Security Hub findings. Updates to those issues in Atlassian JSM will be synced with the findings in AWS Security Hub. This integration is available via the AWS Service Management Connector for JSM  app. After downloading the app, you can decide if you want to send all findings, or only certain findings with specific severity levels to JSM. When you make an update to various fields in an issue, such as state or priority, those changes are automatically sent to AWS Security Hub so that AWS Security Hub always has the latest and correct information about that issue.

You can now launch Apache Airflow 2.0 environments on Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (MWAA). Apache Airflow 2.0 is the latest version of the popular open-source tool that helps customers author, schedule, and monitor workflows.

Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition now maintains read availability through writer node restarts. Previously, when a writer node restarted, all nodes in an Aurora MySQL cluster restarted as well. With today’s launch, reader nodes will continue to serve read requests during a writer node restart, improving read availability in the cluster.  

This week, AWS IoT is announcing the general availability of Fleet Hub for AWS IoT Device Management. The feature enables customers to easily create a fully managed web application to view and interact with their device fleets to monitor fleet and device health, respond to alarms, take remote actions, and reduce time for troubleshooting.

Amazon SageMaker Pipelines, the first purpose-built continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) service for machine learning (ML), is now integrated with SageMaker Experiments, a capability that lets customers organize, track, compare, and evaluate their ML experiments. Customers can now compare metrics such as model training accuracy across multiple executions of their SageMaker Pipelines just as easily as they compare such metrics across multiple trials of a ML model training experiment. SageMaker Pipelines automatically creates an Experiment with the pipeline name and an Experiment trial for every execution of the pipeline. The creation of an experiment for a pipeline and a trial for every pipeline execution is turned on by default. You can choose to opt-out of the auto-creation.

AWS IoT is excited to announce the public preview of “Job Templates” for AWS IoT Device Management Jobs. Job Templates make deploying remote actions faster, easier, and more secure. IoT developers and fleet administrators can pre-define the remote operations to be executed on their IoT devices, and specify key deployment parameters like rollout rates, abort thresholds, and timeout criteria. Fleet operators and technicians who focus on fleet monitoring and troubleshooting can identify and select specific groups of devices as targets, and use these pre-defined Job Templates to securely deploy remote actions to their targets.

AWS Transfer Family customers can now use AWS Managed Microsoft Active Directory (AD), on-premises and self-managed AD in AWS to authenticate their file transfer end users, enabling seamless migration of file transfer workflows that rely on AD, without changing end users’ credentials or needing a custom authorizer.

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) now supports Apache Kafka version 2.7.1 for new and existing clusters. Apache Kafka 2.7.1  includes several bug fixes. For a complete list of fixes, see the Apache Kafka release notes for 2.7.1.

Amazon Braket now offers a fully managed, density matrix simulator, DM1, to simulate quantum circuits with noise. DM1 helps you investigate the effects of realistic noise on your quantum algorithms to inform error mitigation strategies to get more accurate results from today’s quantum computing devices. With DM1, you can simulate circuits with up to 17 qubits and run up to 35 simulations in parallel, to speed up your experiments. For rapid prototyping and debugging, you can now also use the local noise simulator in the Amazon Braket SDK.

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) has expanded functionality by adding support for PostgreSQL version 13  in preview mode. Using AWS DMS, you can now perform live migrations from any AWS DMS supported sources  to PostgreSQL 13 databases, and from PostgreSQL 13 databases to any AWS DMS supported targets . 

Data subscribers on AWS Data Exchange can now pay for their data products in installments with custom payment schedules created by their data provider. Before this launch, subscribers paid the total price of their private offer at the start of the subscription. With the introduction of payment schedules, providers can now create private offers for subscribers that generate up to 36 invoices on specific dates throughout a subscription.

Starting today Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for Oracle supports the creation of a DB instance with a single pluggable database (PDB) using the Oracle multitenant architecture, which enables the DB instance to operate as a multitenant container database (CDB). A PDB is a set of schemas, schema objects, and non-schema objects that logically appears to a client as a non-CDB.  

AWS Lambda Extensions are a new way to integrate your favorite operational tools for monitoring, observability, security, and governance with AWS Lambda. Starting today, extensions are generally available with new performance improvements and an expanded set of partners including Imperva, Instana, Sentry, Site24x7, and the AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry.

You can now view and manage all Amazon CloudWatch Logs transactional API service quotas with Service Quotas. Service Quotas consolidates the default values and your account specific quotas for CloudWatch Logs in one single view with the Service Quotas console. With the CloudWatch Logs and Service Quotas integration you can now easily view and adjust your quotas.

AWS Compute Optimizer is a service that recommends optimal AWS resources for your workloads to reduce costs and improve performance by using machine learning to analyze historical utilization metrics. Today, Compute Optimizer is launching several updates to its EC2 instance type recommendations. Through these updates, Compute Optimizer has improved recommendation quality, doubled the number of supported EC2 instance types, offered deeper insights into the recommendations, and provided customers a way to identify OS configuration changes needed to apply recommendations.

Starting today, you can create and manage reserved capacity on Amazon EC2 instances on your Outposts. You can also share the Capacity Reservations on Outposts with other AWS accounts within your organization. With Capacity Reservations on Outposts, you can ensure that you always have access to EC2 capacity when you need it, for as long as you need it.

Amazon Lumberyard 1.28 Beta is now available for download, bringing you a range of updates including updated Twitch Gem, an improved setup and installation experience, plus various smaller improvements and over 40 bug fixes.

You can now use Amazon EC2 On-Demand Capacity Reservations (ODCRs) while creating clusters in Amazon EMR. When rotating a long running cluster, you might have strict requirements on the instance types and Availability Zones for the new instances you provision. Using Capacity Reservations, you can get capacity assurance to complete the cluster rotation without interruptions. You can also use Capacity Reservations to provision a group of successive short-lived clusters for individual workloads such that when you terminate a cluster, the next cluster can use the Capacity Reservations.