In Cloud Computing This Week [May 29th 2020]

Hello cloud land, we've read all the cloud news again this week, so you don't have to.  

There's a little bit of everything going on this week. Nothing huge but a few cool services made it to general release.

Enjoy.

AWS SSO expands integration to include Okta Universal Directory 

Enterprises adopting the AWS Cloud want to effectively manage identities. Having one central place to manage identities makes it easier to enforce policies, to manage access permissions, and to reduce the overhead by removing the need to duplicate users and user permissions across multiple identity silos.

Having a unique identity also simplifies access for all of us, the users. We all have access to multiple systems, and we all have challenges remembering multiple distinct passwords. Being able to connect to multiple systems using one single combination of user name and password is a potential daily security and productivity gain.

Being able to link an identity from one system with an identity managed on another trusted system is known as “Identity Federation“, which single sign-on is a subset of. Identity Federation is made possible thanks to industry standards such as Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), OAuth, OpenID and others.

Recently, AWS announced a new evolution of AWS Single Sign-On, allowing users to link AWS identities with Azure Active Directory identities. They did not stop there. This week, AWS  announced the integration of AWS Single Sign-On with Okta Universal Directory.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/single-sign-on-between-okta-universal-directory-and-aws/

 

AWS Amplify Libraries for Android and iOS 

When you develop mobile applications, you must develop a set of cloud-powered functionalities for each project. For example, most applications require user authentication or detailed in-app analytics. Your application most probably calls REST or GraphQL APIs and is required to support offline scenarios and data synchronization. AWS Amplify makes it easy to integrate such functionalities in your mobile and web applications.

AWS Amplify is a set of tools and services for building secure, scalable mobile and web applications. It is made out of three components: an open source set of libraries and UI components for adding cloud-powered functionalities, a command line interactive toolchain to create and manage a cloud backend, and the AWS Amplify Console, an AWS Service to deploy and host full stack serverless web applications.

This week AWS announced the availability of Amplify iOS and Amplify Android libraries and tools, to help mobile application developers to easily build secure and scalable cloud-powered applications. 

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-amplify-libraries-for-android-and-ios/

 

Server-side encryption of ephemeral storage using AWS Fargate-managed keys in AWS Fargate platform version 1.4 

This week, AWS introduced server-side encryption of ephemeral storage in AWS Fargate platform version 1.4. The ephemeral task storage is automatically encrypted with industry-standard AES-256 encryption algorithm using AWS Fargate-managed keys for the updated platform version.

This feature requires no additional configuration from AWS customers for new Amazon ECS tasks and services launched in platform version 1.4. Amazon EKS pods launched on AWS Fargate use platform version 1.4, hence any pods launched starting today will also use encrypted ephemeral storage with Fargate-managed keys.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/containers/introducing-server-side-encryption-ephemeral-storage-using-aws-fargate-managed-keys-aws-fargate-platform-version-1-4/

 

How to replicate Amazon FSx for Windows File Server data across AWS Regions

AWS Customers who have special compliance or disaster recovery requirements have asked for the ability to replicate data in Amazon FSx for Windows File Server (Amazon FSx) to another AWS Region. Although AWS Regions and Amazon FSx have multiple tiers of resiliency built-in, replication can protect customer data in the unlikely scenario of a catastrophic loss of an AWS Region.

For example, a customer could have their Amazon FSx infrastructure on the east coast of the United States, and may want to have a copy of that data in on the west coast (as in the graphic: N. Virginia and Oregon Regions). 

In this blog post, Dean Suzuki details how to set it up.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/storage/how-to-replicate-amazon-fsx-file-server-data-across-aws-regions/

 

Centralize Amazon CloudWatch Logs using AWS CDK 

One of the most common use cases that AWS customers try to implement is to centralize various types of logs in their AWS infrastructure so that these logs can be utilized for security, monitoring or analytics purposes.

Centralizing AWS services logs means pushing all the logs generated by the various AWS services used to one single location. With a central location, AWS customers can easily manage logs generated across all the accounts in their organization and enforce restrictions and security for this data. Centralizing logs also allows to setup a process to backup this data and setup life-cycle policies for data retention.

In this article, Naveen Balaraman explains how to use Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, AWS Lambda, S3 and the AWS CDK to set this up.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/developer/build-infrastructure-for-centralized-logging-using-aws-cdk/

Optimize for internet traffic with Peering Service and the routing preference option

Last week at the Microsoft Build conference, Azure announced that Azure Peering Service is now generally available. They also introduced “routing preference,” a new option for Azure customers to further architect and optimize their traffic to and from Azure over the “public Internet.”

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/optimize-for-internet-traffic-with-peering-service-and-the-routing-preference-option/

Microsoft and Docker collaborate on new ways to deploy containers on Azure

Now more than ever, developers need agility to meet rapidly increasing demands from customers. Containerization is one key way to increase agility. Containerized applications are built in a more consistent and repeatable way, by way of defining desired infrastructure, dependencies, and configuration as code for all stages of the lifecycle. Applications often start and stop faster at runtime too, which often helps quickly start, stop, scale out, and update in the cloud.

With this in mind, Azure announced a new partnership earlier today between Microsoft and Docker to integrate Docker Desktop more closely with Microsoft Azure and the Visual Studio line of products.  

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-and-docker-collaborate-on-new-ways-to-deploy-containers-on-azure/

 

Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes preview and new ecosystem partners

In November 2019, Azure announced the preview of Azure Arc, a set of technologies that unlocks new hybrid scenarios for customers by bringing Azure services and management to any infrastructure across datacenters, edge, and multi-cloud.

Based on the feedback and excitement of all the customers in the private preview, Microsoft are able to deliver Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes in preview to thier customers. With this, anyone can use Azure Arc to connect and configure any Kubernetes cluster across customer datacenters, edge locations, and multi-cloud. 

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-arc-enabled-kubernetes-preview-and-new-ecosystem-partners/

 

Google Cloud adds smart analytics frameworks for AI Platform Notebooks

Google Cloud is announcing the beta release of smart analytics frameworks for AI Platform Notebooks. Smart Analytics Frameworks  brings closer the model training and deployment offered by AI Platform with the ingestion, preprocessing, and exploration capabilities of our smart analytics platform.

With smart analytics frameworks for AI Platform Notebooks, you can run petabyte-scale SQL queries with BigQuery, generate personalized Spark environments with Dataproc Hub, and develop interactive Apache Beam pipelines to launch on Dataflow, all from the same managed notebooks service that provides Google Cloud AI Platform.

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/data-analytics/enterprise-notebooks-for-ai-ml-analytics

 

Java 11 on Google Cloud Functions

The Java programming language recently turned 25 years old, and it’s still one of the top-used languages powering today's enterprise application customers. On Google Cloud, you can already run serverless Java microservices in App Engine and Cloud Run.

This week GCP announced Java 11 was delivered to Google Cloud Functions, an event-driven serverless compute platform that lets you run locally or in the cloud without having to provision servers. That means you can now write Cloud Functions using your favorite JVM languages (Java, Kotlin, Groovy, Scala, etc) with our Functions Framework for Java, and also with Spring Cloud Functions and Micronaut!

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/application-development/introducing-java-11-on-google-cloud-functions