Hava Blog and Latest News

In Cloud Computing This Week [Nov 13th 2020]

Written by Team Hava | November 13, 2020

This week's roundup of all the cloud news.

 

Happy Friday the 13th !

It's been a busy week here at Hava with the release of a new AWS reporting module,  the ability to embed your fully interactive network diagrams anywhere (that supports iframes) and beta release of our new 3d visualisation.  Lot's more new on these new features next week. 

Here's all the news from AWS, Azure and GCP for the week ending November 13th 2020.

Amazon VPC CNI plugin version 1.7 now default for Amazon EKS clusters

Amazon VPC Container Networking Interface (CNI) Plugin  version 1.7 is now the default for newly created Amazon EKS clusters.

 

AWS Lambda now makes it easier to send logs to custom destinations

You can now send logs from AWS Lambda functions directly to a destination of your choice by using AWS Lambda Extensions. AWS Lambda Extensions are a new way for monitoring, observability, security, and governance tools to integrate with Lambda, and today, you can use extensions that send logs to the following providers: Datadog, New Relic, Sumo Logic, Honeycomb, Lumigo, and Coralogix.

 

Amazon Polly launches a new Australian English neural text-to-speech voice

Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech. Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Olivia, Polly’s first Australian English voice, available via Neural Text-to-Speech (NTTS). Thanks to its unique vocal personality, the voice sounds expressive, natural and it is easy to follow. Amazon Polly customers can now enjoy a selection of three Australian English voices: Russell, Nicole and Olivia. 

 

AWS CodePipeline Source Action for AWS CodeCommit Supports git clone

AWS CodePipeline Source Action now supports cloning of AWS CodeCommit repositories. With this improvement, when you define a Source Action, CodePipeline will clone the CodeCommit git repository to fetch the commit history and metadata.

 

AWS Systems Manager Explorer now provides a multi-account, multi-region summary of AWS Config compliance

Starting this week, AWS Systems Manager Explorer provides a summary of AWS Config rules and associated resource compliance, to help you check overall compliance status and quickly find non-compliant resources. Systems Manager Explorer is an operations dashboard that provides a view of your operations data across your AWS accounts and Regions, helping you see where you may need to investigate and remediate operational issues. AWS Config enables you to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of your AWS resources.

 

Amazon Redshift announces support for TIME and TIMETZ data types

Amazon Redshift, a fully-managed cloud data warehouse, now adds native support for TIME and TIMETZ data types. TIME data type stores the time of day without timezone information, and TIMETZ stores the time of day including timezone information. This new data type builds on the existing support in Amazon Redshift for DATE, TIMESTAMP and TIMESTAMPTZ data types that can store date and date-and-time values.

 

Amazon Neptune now supports Event notifications

You can now sign up to receive event notifications on your Amazon Neptune DB clusters, DB instances, DB cluster snapshots, parameter groups, or security groups. Whenever certain events occur, event notifications can be sent in any notification form supported by the Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) for an AWS Region, such as an email, a text message, or a call to an HTTP endpoint.


Amazon Redshift announces automatic refresh and query rewrite for materialized views

Amazon Redshift, a fully-managed cloud data warehouse, now supports automatic refresh and query rewrite capabilities to simplify and automate the usage of materialized views. The automatic refresh feature helps administrators to keep materialized views up-to-date, while the automatic query rewrite feature enables end-users to easily benefit from improved query performance.


New Amazon S3 console improves upload speed, simplifies common tasks, and makes it even easier to manage storage

We’ve updated the Amazon S3 console to make it even easier for you to manage your storage. In addition to a refreshed look and feel, the updated Amazon S3 console now simplifies common tasks by presenting contextual information about your storage resources and other S3 features throughout the console. Some key changes include streamlining the work to copy bucket settings when creating new buckets, indicating the bucket level settings you have permissions to change, improving the performance of uploads, and having a new page that gives more visibility into upload progress.  


Introducing AWS Gateway Load Balancer

Today AWS announced the availability of AWS Gateway Load Balancer, a new service that helps you deploy, scale, and manage third-party virtual network appliances such as firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention systems, analytics, visibility and others. An addition to the Elastic Load Balancer family, AWS Gateway Load Balancer combines a transparent network gateway (that is, a single entry and exit point for all traffic) and a load balancer that distributes traffic and scales your virtual appliances with the demand.

 

Memcached 1.6.6 now available on Amazon ElastiCache

Amazon ElastiCache for Memcached has added support for the latest Memcached version 1.6.6. This version brings a number of enhancements, such as improved memory management reducing the memory usage from idle client connections and lowers the risk of memory fragmentation from large number of connections. Additionally, this version introduces the experimental meta protocol and meta commands. 

 

Introducing AWS Glue DataBrew: Visual data preparation tool to clean and normalize data up to 80% faster

AWS Glue DataBrew is a new visual data preparation tool for AWS Glue that helps you clean and normalize data without writing code, reducing the time it takes to prepare data for analytics and machine learning by up to 80% compared to traditional approaches to data preparation. AWS Glue DataBrew features an easy-to-use visual interface that helps data analysts and data scientists of all technical levels understand, combine, clean, and transform data.

 

Now privately connect to AWS Database Migration Service from Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

Starting today, you can privately connect your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) to AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) without requiring an internet gateway, NAT device, VPN connection, or AWS Direct Connect connection.  

 

Amazon S3 Object Ownership is now generally available with AWS CloudFormation support

Amazon S3 Object Ownership is now generally available with the addition of support for AWS CloudFormation. S3 Object Ownership is a new S3 feature that enables bucket owners to automatically assume ownership of objects that are uploaded to their buckets by other AWS Accounts. This helps you to standardize ownership of new objects in your bucket, and to share and manage access to these objects at scale via resource-based policies such as a bucket policy or an access point policy. Whether your S3 bucket receives data from other AWS accounts, or stores output from AWS services like AWS CloudTrail, S3 Object Ownership simplifies the work of creating and maintaining shared data sets on Amazon S3. 


AWS announces 40% price reduction for Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) Cold HDD (sc1) volumes

Today, we are reducing the price of Amazon EBS Cold HDD (sc1) volumes  by 40%, or an estimated $160 for each 16TB sc1 volume.  

 

AWS App Mesh introduces circuit breaker capabilities

Now you can control connection pool configuration in your mesh and leverage outlier detection functionality that simplifies implementing circuit breaker capabilities and helps to build applications resilient to connection errors. AWS App Mesh is a service mesh that provides application-level networking to make it easy for your services to communicate with each other across multiple types of compute infrastructure. AWS App Mesh standardizes how your services communicate, giving you end-to-end visibility and helping to provide high availability for your applications. 

 

AWS Snowball Edge now supports Windows operating systems

AWS Snowball Edge now supports Windows operating systems, including Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016, and Windows Server 2019. Previously, you were able to run instances on Snowball devices using either the Ubuntu or CentOS Linux operating systems. Now, with support for Windows, you can run your Windows-based workloads at the edge on Snowball Edge Compute Optimized and Snowball Edge Storage Optimized devices.  

 

Amazon ECS now supports the use of Amazon FSx for persistent, shared storage for Windows containers

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) now supports the use of Amazon FSx for Windows File Server in Amazon ECS task definitions. With this capability, you can now use persistent, shared storage across ECS containers. Customers can use Amazon FSx for their Windows containers in task definitions compatible with the EC2 launch type. Amazon ECS tasks using Amazon FSx will automatically mount the file systems specified by the customer in the task definition and make them available to the containers in the task across all availability zones in an AWS Region.  


AWS Storage Gateway enhances security by introducing access-based enumeration for File Gateway

AWS Storage Gateway introduces access-based enumeration for File Gateway, enabling you to protect sensitive information by allowing you to prevent users from seeing SMB file shares, folders, and files that they would not be able to open based on their access permissions. 

 

AWS Storage Gateway simplifies in-cloud processing by adding file-level upload notifications for File Gateway

AWS Storage Gateway introduces file-level upload notifications for File Gateway, enabling you to trigger automated workflows in the cloud and easily process on-premises file data stored with AWS as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) objects.  


Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering adds Archive Access Tiers — further optimizes storage costs

Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering now supports automatic data archiving to further reduce storage costs by up to 95% when objects become rarely accessed over long periods of time. The S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class is the first and only cloud storage that automatically optimizes customers’ storage costs. S3 Intelligent-Tiering delivers milliseconds latency and high throughput performance for frequently and infrequently accessed data in the Frequent and Infrequent Access Tiers, and now the lowest storage costs in the cloud when data is rarely accessed in the Deep Archive Access Tier.

 

Quickly create Amazon EFS file systems from the EC2 Launch Instance Wizard

Starting today, you can use Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) Quick Create from the Amazon EC2 Launch Instance Wizard to create new file systems using the recommended settings without having to leave the Amazon EC2 console. You can then immediately add your newly created file system to the EC2 instance you are launching and it will be automatically mounted on your instance after it has launched.  


Amazon Aurora Global Database Expands Manageability Capabilities

Posted On: Nov 9, 2020

Starting today, Amazon Aurora Global Database is expanding its manageability capabilities to more closely match the in-region versions of Aurora. Fast Database Cloning  and AWS CloudFormation  are both supported.  

 

Announcing AWS App Mesh Controller for Kubernetes Version 1.2.0

AWS App Mesh Controller for Kubernetes v1.2.0 is now available with support for outlier detection and configurable connections pools for circuit breaking. The AWS App Mesh Controller for Kubernetes provides a way to configure and manage AWS App Mesh using Kubernetes directly. AWS App Mesh is a service mesh that provides application-level networking to standardize how your services communicate, giving you end-to-end visibility and allowing high availability for your applications.


Amazon CodeGuru Profiler simplifies profiling for AWS Lambda functions

Amazon CodeGuru Profiler helps developers improve application performance and reduce costs by pinpointing an application’s most expensive line of code, and providing recommendations on how to improve code to save money. 


Amazon S3 Replication adds support for metrics and notifications

Amazon S3 Replication now provides detailed metrics and notifications to monitor the status of object replication between buckets. You can monitor replication progress by tracking bytes pending, operations pending, and replication latency between your source and destination buckets using the S3 management console or Amazon CloudWatch. You can also set up S3 Event Notifications to receive replication failure notifications to quickly diagnose and correct configuration issues. S3 Replication metrics and notifications help you closely monitor replication progress. Previously, S3 Replication metrics and notifications were available with S3 Replication Time Control (S3 RTC). Beginning now, they can be enabled for all replication rules.

 

Amazon S3 Replication adds support for replicating delete markers

Amazon S3 Replication is now able to replicate delete markers from one S3 bucket to another. For buckets that use S3 versioning, when a customer issues a delete request without a version ID specified, S3 adds a delete marker on the latest version of the object to protect data from accidental deletions. With S3 Replication, you can easily enable or disable the replication of these delete markers between source and destination buckets for each replication rule. This is critical for customers that have an active-active architecture within the same AWS Region or across different AWS Regions.

 

Now you can export your Amazon DynamoDB table data to your data lake in Amazon S3 to perform analytics at any scale

Now you can export your Amazon DynamoDB table data to your data lake in Amazon S3, and use other AWS services such as Amazon Athena, Amazon SageMaker, and AWS Lake Formation to analyze your data and extract actionable insights. No code-writing is required. 

 

Azure Redis Updates

Microsoft and Redis Labs have partnered closely to create the first native integration between Redis Labs technology and a major cloud platform. The result is a solution jointly engineered by Microsoft and Redis Labs with operations handled by Microsoft. Support is streamlined, with Microsoft handling the first call and pulling in dedicated Redis Labs expertise as needed. The solution consists of two new tiers—Enterprise and Enterprise Flash—and adds many features now in preview that are useful to enterprise customers such as:

  • Zone redundant replication, with improved availability of 99.99 percent.
  • Redis on Flash, enabling ten times larger cache sizes on NVMe flash storage.
  • Redis Enterprise Modules, including:
    • RediSearch
    • RedisBloom
    • RedisTimeSeries
  • The latest version of Open Source Redis 6.0.
  • Private link network isolation and transport layer security (TLS) encrypted connectivity.

As a native offering, this solution offers unique benefits beyond running Redis Enterprise as a marketplace offering, including:

  • Access to set-up and configuration through the Azure Portal.
  • Seamless integration into your favorite Azure security and monitoring tools.
  • Integrated billing and the ability to use Azure spend commitment.
 

New Enhanced DNS features in Azure Firewall

Custom DNS, DNS proxy, and FQDN filtering in network rules (for non-HTTP/S and non-MSSQL protocols) in Azure Firewall are now generally available. In this blog, we also share an example use-case on using DNS proxy with Private Link. Azure Firewall is a cloud-native firewall as a service (FWaaS) offering that allows you to centrally govern and log all your traffic flows using a DevOps approach. See our Azure Infrastructure topology diagrams.

 
 
GCP Updates Nov 9 -13
  • Database Migration Service now available in preview—Database Migration Service (DMS) makes migrations to Cloud SQL simple and reliable. DMS supports migrations of self-hosted MySQL databases—either on-premises or in the cloud, as well as managed databases from other clouds—to Cloud SQL for MySQL. Support for PostgreSQL is currently available for limited customers in preview, with SQL Server coming soon. Learn more about the DMS Update.
  • Troubleshoot deployments or production issues more quickly with new logs tailing—GCP added support for a new API to tail logs with low latency. Using gcloud, it allows you the convenience of tail -f with the powerful query language and centralized logging solution of Cloud Logging. Learn more about the logs tailing update here. 
  • Regionalized log storage now available in 5 new regions in preview—You can now select where your logs are stored from one of five regions in addition to global—asia-east1, europe-west1, us-central1, us-east1, and us-west1. When you create a logs bucket, you can set the region in which you want to store your logs data. Get started with this guide.
 

UPComing Events:   

 

Updated digital course: AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials

AWS Training and Certification is excited to announce the launch of the updated AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials digital course. If you’re new to the cloud—whether you’re in a technical or nontechnical role—this course will help you understand the fundamental concepts of the AWS Cloud. As a result, you can build your skills and confidence while contributing to your organization’s cloud initiatives.  

Read more about the course here »
 

New self-paced courses for security and IoT on edX and Coursera

AWS Training and Certification has launched two new self-paced digital courses, Introduction to AWS Identity and Access Management and AWS IoT: Developing and Deploying an Internet of Things, on edX and Coursera. Designed for application developers, the IoT course helps you utilize AWS IoT services to build, test, and distribute applications to simulated devices. You’ll also learn how to use analytics tools to collect, process, and analyze data from IoT devices.

 

New digital course: Advanced Testing Practices using AWS DevOps Tools

This new digital course, Advanced Testing Practices using AWS DevOps Tools, teaches you how to improve application reliability and security by integrating and automating testing into your AWS DevOps pipelines. This advanced course is designed for DevOps engineers and developers who have significant experience with DevOps methodology and practices.

Read more about the course here »
 

Coursera is offering on month of no-cost access to 6 GCP certification courses until November 19th.

These include:

  • Google Cloud Networking Professional Certificate
  • Google Cloud Security Professional Certificate
  • Google Cloud SRE and DevOps Engineer
  • GCP Associate Cloud Engineer
  • GCP Cloud Architect
  • GCP Professional Data Engineer

Read more : https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/training-certifications/google-cloud-certification-training-on-coursera

Azure Virtual Events

Microsoft have a full schedule of Virtual Events

A  full list including session times and details are here : https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/community/events/

AWS Events:

AWS events are pretty fluid at the moment, with most in-person events being cancelled or postponed. There are a number that have been taken online and full details can be found here: https://aws.amazon.com/events/

Thanks for reading again this week, we hope you found something useful. 

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