In Cloud Computing This Week [Oct 15th 2021]

Amazon EMR 6.4 release version now supports Apache Spark 3.1.2 and provides runtime improvements with Amazon EMR Runtime for Apache Spark. Amazon EMR 6.4 provides Presto runtime improvements for PrestoDB 0.254, and runtime improvements for Apache Hive 3.1.2 when you use AWS Glue Data Catalog for your metastore.

AWS customers can now use Amazon Kendra to build intelligent search applications in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region.

AWS RoboMaker, a service that allows customers to simulate robotics applications at cloud scale, now supports expanded configuration for any robot and simulation software. Previously Robot Operating System (ROS) and Gazebo are the only supported robot and simulation software configuration in RoboMaker. This new feature enables customers to use and configure any robot and simulation software of their choice while running simulations in RoboMaker.

Starting this week, Amazon MemoryDB for Redis is generally available in 11 additional AWS Regions: US East (Ohio), US West (N. California, Oregon), Canada (Central), Europe (London, Stockholm), and Asia Pacific (Hong Kong, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo).

You can now manage AWS Step Functions workflows in the AWS Batch console, where you can automate Batch jobs to help build long-running business-critical workflows that require machine learning, data analysis, or overnight batch processing.

AWS RoboMaker, a service that allows customers to simulate robotics applications at cloud scale, now supports GPU based simulation jobs for compute-intensive simulation workloads such as high fidelity simulation, vision processing, and machine learning (ML). Previously, AWS RoboMaker simulation jobs ran only on central processing unit (CPU) instances; now you can choose between a CPU based or GPU based simulation job.

This week, Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling announced the ability to describe Auto Scaling groups using tags. Tag-based filtering makes it easier for you to view and manage your Auto Scaling groups based on the tags that you are interested in. Each tag is a simple label consisting of a customer-defined key and an optional value.

Network Load Balancer (NLB) now supports version 1.3 of the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol, enabling you to optimize the performance of your backend application servers while helping to keep your workloads secure. TLS 1.3 on NLB works by offloading encryption and decryption of TLS traffic from your application servers to the load balancer, and provides encryption all the way to your targets. TLS 1.3 is optimized for performance and security by using one round trip (1-RTT) TLS handshakes and only supporting ciphers that provide perfect forward secrecy. As with other versions of TLS, NLB preserves the source IP of the clients to the back-end applications while terminating TLS on the load balancer.

Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler reduces the time it takes to aggregate and prepare data for machine learning (ML) from weeks to minutes. With SageMaker Data Wrangler, you can simplify the process of data preparation and feature engineering, and complete each step of the data preparation workflow, including data selection, cleansing, exploration, and visualization from a single visual interface.

Amazon SageMaker Projects, the first purpose-built service that manages continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) resources for machine learning (ML) projects, now has CI/CD templates for building Docker images used in training, processing, and inference.

You can now build and run stream processing applications using Apache Flink version 1.13 in Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics. Apache Flink v1.13 provides enhancements to the Table/SQL API, improved interoperability between the Table and DataStream APIs, stateful operations using the Python Datastream API, features to analyze application performance, an exactly-once JDBC sink, and more. With this launch, you also get an Apache Kafka connector that works with AWS IAM authentication when you’re using Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka(Amazon MSK) as your application’s data source.

This week AWS are announcing the availability of a new Amazon CloudWatch dimension for metrics in the AWS Outposts namespace. CloudWatch dimensions are unique identifiers for metrics that allow customers to search and filter results.

AWS Elemental MediaTailor now supports prefetch ad requests for personalized ad insertion. Prefetching manages the request of ads in advance of ad breaks, increasing the time an ad decision server (ADS) has to respond.

Amazon Virtual Public Cloud (VPC) is introducing three new features to make it faster, easier and more cost efficient to store and run analytics on your Amazon VPC Flow Logs. First, VPC Flow Logs can now be delivered to Amazon S3 in the Apache Parquet file format. Second, they can be stored in S3 with Hive-compatible prefixes. And third, your VPC Flow Logs can be delivered as hourly partitioned files. All of these features are available when you choose S3 as the destination for your VPC Flow Logs.

Amazon QuickSight now supports larger SPICE datasets on the Enterprise Edition. Earlier each SPICE dataset could hold up to 250 million rows and 500GB of data. Now, all new SPICE datasets can accommodate up to 500 million rows (or 500GB) of data in the Enterprise Edition and 25 million rows (or 25GB) for Standard Edition. This raises the limit for your datasets, letting you accelerate dashboards with more data. See here  for details.

Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer is a developer tool that leverages automated reasoning and machine learning to detect potential code defects that are difficult to find and offers suggestions for improvements. Today, we are building on our set of detectors for the AWS SDKs with the addition of detectors for the AWS Java SDK v2. These new detectors help to ensure customers are following the Java SDK v2’s best practices, such as using client builders over client constructors, waiters over custom polling, or auto-pagination over manual pagination. The detectors can also find bugs customers create while using the new SDK’s AWS service clients, such as identifying data loss in the Amazon Kinesis v2 client. After detecting an issue or bug, CodeGuru Reviewer provides recommendations for how the developer can remediate it.

You can now launch Apache ActiveMQ 5.16.3 brokers on Amazon MQ. This version update to ActiveMQ contains several fixes and improvements compared to the previously supported version, ActiveMQ 5.16.2.

This week AWS are announcing support for jumbo frames via the virtual ethernet framework in the AWS FPGA Developer kit. With this support, developers using  Amazon EC2 F1 instances can use jumbo frames to get the maximum allowed networking bandwidth for the instance delivering up to double the networking performance. 

AWS Console Mobile Application users can now use Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) on both the iOS and Android applications. The Console Mobile Application provides a secure and easy-to-use on-the-go solution for monitoring ECS clusters, services, configurations, tasks and container workloads. Customers can also stop ECS tasks and launch desired number of tasks for an ECS service.

AWS CloudFormation customers can now view operational data and quickly take action to resolve issues involving CloudFormation stack resources through Application Manager, a capability of AWS Systems Manager. Using this feature, customers can obtain an application view of resources provisioned via a CloudFormation stack. With the operational metrics, logs, alerts, and cost information obtained from the Application Manager Dashboard, developers can manage their stack resources efficiently throughout their lifecycle.

Cloud Development Kit for Kubernetes (CDK8s ) is now Generally Available and ready for production usage with any conformant Kubernetes cluster. To ensure continued community involvement, cdk8s is also now an official CNCF Sandbox project  and has moved from the AWS Labs GitHub organization to a dedicated home on GitHub, cdk8s-team .

Automated Account Configuration helps you automate operational processes in an efficient, error-free, standardized and consistent way, to ensure that your AWS accounts are set up properly and with the necessary resources to meet your business and production needs. You can use the solutions implementation to configure and deploy the following business critical services:

• AWS Backup to centrally managed the backups of AWS services including Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon RDS, and Amazon EFS.
• AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager  to automate the patching of managed instances such as EC2 instances.

During September, 2021, 5 new versions of the AWS Cloud Development Kit  (CDK) for JavaScript, TypeScript, Java, Python, .NET and Go were released (v1.121.0 through v.125.0). With these releases, the CDK CLI now has support for hotswap deployments  for faster inner-loop development iterations on the application code in your CDK project. Hotswap initially supports AWS Lambda handler code, but support is planned  for additional resource types and a “watch” mode which continually watches for changes and deploys any updates. Additionally, users can preserve successfully provisioned resources by disabling automatic stack rollbacks , further reducing deployment and iteration time. These releases also resolve 21 issues and introduce 40 new features that span over 30 different modules across the library. Many of these changes were contributed by the developer community.

Amazon Connect Tasks is now HIPAA  (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) eligible. Connect Tasks empowers contact center managers to prioritize, assign, track, and automate customer service tasks across the disparate applications used by agents. HIPAA eligibility means you can prioritize and automate tasks with Protected Health Information (PHI), and even provide agents with this information they need to resolve your customers’ inquiries or service requests. You can prioritize or automate tasks from customer relationship management (CRM) applications such as Salesforce or Zendesk, electronic health records (EHR) systems such as Epic or Cerner, or with your homegrown and business-specific applications. Amazon Connect has been HIPAA eligible since 2017.

You can now launch the T3 database instance type when using Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MySQL and Amazon RDS for MariaDB in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

Amazon Fraud Detector is excited to announce the Transaction Fraud Insights model, a low-latency fraud detection machine learning (ML) model specifically designed to detect online card-not-present transaction fraud. Like other Amazon Fraud Detector models, Transaction Fraud Insights leverages more than 20 years of fraud detection expertise from Amazon and AWS. The new Transaction Fraud Insights model type detects up to 30% more fraudulent transactions and maintains its performance up to six times longer than Amazon Fraud Detector’s previous model type, Online Fraud Insights.

We are excited to announce that we are lowering the price of Amazon Fraud Detector machine learning (ML) based fraud predictions. 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. Using ML under the hood and based on over 20 years of fraud detection expertise from Amazon, Fraud Detector automatically identifies potentially fraudulent activity in milliseconds—with no ML expertise required.

Amazon WorkMail now offers an expanded capability around its Mobile Device Access Rules (MDARs). The new Mobile Device Access Override API (MDOA) allows customers to adjust existing MDARs, either manually through the CLI, or in an automated fashion when using a third-party Mobile Device Management (MDM) tool. Customers use trusted third-party MDM tools to perform security posture assessments before granting devices access to corporate resources. The new API simplifies the creation and management of exceptions to default MDARs, either because there is a need to permit an out-of-posture device to connect to WorkMail, or because a user has reported a specific device to be stolen or lost. In that case, the individual device can be blocked to reduce the risk of data leakage.

NoSQL Workbench for DynamoDB , a client-side tool that helps you design, visualize, and query nonrelational data models by using a point-and-click interface, now helps you import and automatically populate sample data to help build and visualize your data models. Now, you can import sample data from .csv files into new and existing data models. You also can export your query results in .csv format from the NoSQL Workbench operation builder.

AWS Instance Scheduler is a solution that helps you control your AWS resource cost by configuring start and stop schedules for their Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2 On-Demand Instances) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instances.

AWS Marketplace sellers, including Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and consulting partners, can now view agreements, cancel offers, and extend offer expiration dates for Professional Services from the AWS Marketplace Management Portal (AMMP). Professional Services in AWS Marketplace enables ISVs and consulting partners to create new Professional Services listings in AWS Marketplace and extend Private Offers  to AWS customers. 

We are excited to announce event dataset storage for Amazon Fraud Detector. The new capability enables customers to easily send and store their production fraud data directly within Amazon Fraud Detector. Customers can use their event datasets to train machine learning (ML) models with higher predictive performance since the models can apply historical context to new events by automatically calculating values such as account age and purchase frequency. Customers can also move faster by retraining models without needing to upload a new training dataset to S3, and they can close the feedback loop from offline fraud investigations by updating their fraud labels for stored events.

Using Private Service Connect to publish services that are hosted on the backends of an internal HTTP(S) load balancer is now Generally Available.

Accessing published services using a Private Service Connect endpoint is now available from on-premises hosts that are connected to a VPC network using Cloud VPN. This feature is available in Preview.

Connectivity from on-premises hosts to a Private Service Connect endpoint that is used to access published services might not establish for some existing Cloud VPN connections. As a workaround, recreate the VPN gateway and the VPN tunnels.

Connectivity from on-premises hosts to a Private Service Connect endpoint that is used to access published services does not establish if the service is published with explicit project approval. As a workaround, ask the service producer to publish the service with automatic project approval.