In Cloud Computing This Week [Oct 1st 2021]

AWS announces the general availability of AWS Cloud Control API, a set of common application programming interfaces (APIs) that is designed to make it easy for developers to manage their cloud infrastructure in a consistent manner and leverage the latest AWS capabilities faster. Using Cloud Control API, developers can manage the lifecycle of hundreds of AWS resources and over a dozen third-party resources with five consistent APIs instead of using distinct service-specific APIs. With this launch, AWS Partner Network (APN) Partners can now automate how their solutions integrate with existing and future AWS features and services through a one-time integration, instead of spending weeks of custom development work as new resources become available. Terraform by HashiCorp and Pulumi have integrated their solutions as part of this launch.

AWS Step Functions now integrates with the AWS SDK, expanding the number of supported AWS Services from 17 to over 200 and AWS API Actions from 46 to over 9,000.

You can now provision devices using AWS IoT Core Just-in-Time Provisioning and Just-in-Time Registration features without having to send the entire trust chain on devices’ first connection to IoT Core. Until now, customers were required to configure their devices to present both the registered CA certificate and the client certificate signed by the registered CA certificate as part of the TLS handshake on devices’ first connection to IoT Core. Effective today, AWS IoT core makes it optional for customers to present the CA certificate on devices’ first connection to IoT Core when using Just-in-Time Provisioning and Just-in-Time Registration. This enhancement makes it easy for customers to migrate brownfield devices to AWS IoT Core, example, from customers’ self-managed cloud solutions.

This week, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) launches integrated service discovery in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

AWS Data Exchange subscribers can now use auto-export to automatically copy newly published revisions from their 3rd party data subscriptions to an Amazon S3 bucket of their choice in just a few clicks. With auto-export, subscribers no longer have to manually export new revisions or dedicate engineering resources to build ingestion pipelines that export new revisions as soon as they are published. For data subscribers that manage frequent updates to their file-based 3rd party data, auto-export saves significant time and effort.

This week AWS announced the launch of Amazon Monitron iOS app . The iOS app joins the existing Android app, giving customers more options for using Amazon Monitron. iPhone users can now use the Amazon Monitron iOS app to set up their sensors and gateway devices, and receive reports on operating behavior and alerts to potential failures in their equipment.

Amazon SageMaker JumpStart helps you quickly and easily get started with machine learning. SageMaker JumpStart provides a set of solutions for the most common use cases that can be deployed readily with just a few clicks and one-click deployment and fine-tuning of popular open source models. Starting today, you can now access a collection of multimodal financial text analysis tools, including example notebooks, text models, and a solution. 

AQUA (Advanced Query Accelerator) for Amazon Redshift is now generally available in three additional AWS regions: Europe (Stockholm), Asia Pacific (Seoul), and US West (N. California).

AWS Lambda now allows customers to trigger functions from Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) queues that are in a different AWS account. Previously, customers could trigger Lambda functions from SQS queues in the same account only. Starting today, customers can create Lambda functions in multiple AWS accounts without needing to replicate the event source in each account.

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) customers can now use 2048-bit DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) keys to enhance their email security. DKIM is an email security standard designed to make sure that an email that claims to have come from a specific domain was indeed authorized by the owner of that domain. It uses public-key cryptography to sign an email with a private key. Recipient servers can then use a public key published to a domain's DNS to verify that parts of the email have not been modified during the transit.

Amazon Comprehend now supports two new AWS Trusted Advisor checks to help customers optimize the cost and security of Amazon Comprehend endpoints.

AWS Snowcone is now available in solid state drives (SSD) with 14TB storage capacity. AWS Snowcone is the smallest AWS Snow Family device equipped to handle edge computing, edge storage, and data transfers. With this launch, AWS Snowcone is now available in both hard disk drive (HDD) and solid state drive (SSD). Snowcone SSD has the same motherboard (4 vCPU and 4GB RAM) and industrial design as Snowcone, but Snowcone SSD will enable new data transfer and edge computing use cases that require 1) higher throughput performance 2) stronger vibration resistance operation 3) expanded durability and, 4) increased storage capacity (14TB Snowcone SSD vs. 8TB in Snowcone).

You can now monitor the system time accuracy for your Amazon ECS tasks running on AWS Fargate. For time-sensitive workloads running on Fargate, this gives customers the ability to monitor the clock error bound, which is used as a proxy for clock error, to know if the difference between reference time and system time exceeds a threshold. This capability leverages Amazon Time Sync Service  to measure clock accuracy and provide the clock error bound for containers.

This week AWS announced that Amplify Geo for JavaScript is generally available, following our initial Developer Preview release in August. Amplify Geo enables frontend developers to quickly add location-aware features to their web applications. Extending existing Amplify use case categories like Auth, DataStore and Storage, Amplify Geo includes a set of abstracted client libraries built on top of Amazon Location Service, and includes ready-to-use map UI components based on the popular MapLibre open-source library. Amplify Geo also updates the Amplify Command Line Interface (CLI) tool to make it simple for people who aren’t familiar with AWS to achieve common mapping use cases by provisioning all required cloud services

Amazon Redshift RA3.xlplus nodes are now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. Amazon Redshift RA3 instances with managed storage allow you to scale compute and storage independently for fast query performance and lower costs. RA3 is available in three different node types to allow you to balance price and performance depending upon your workload requirements. RA3.xlplus nodes offer one-third compute (4 vCPU) and memory (32 GiB) compared to RA3.4xlarge at one-third of the price. RA3 nodes are built on the AWS Nitro System and feature high bandwidth networking and large high-performance SSDs as local caches.

AWS Lambda functions powered by next-generation AWS Graviton2 processors are now generally available. Graviton2 functions, using an Arm-based processor architecture, are designed to deliver up to 19% better performance at 20% lower cost for a variety of Serverless workloads, such as web and mobile backends, data, and media processing. With lower latency and better performance, functions powered by AWS Graviton2 processors are ideal for powering mission critical Serverless applications.

Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus is now generally available. Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus is a fully managed Prometheus-compatible monitoring service that makes it easy to monitor and alarm on operational metrics at scale. Prometheus is a popular Cloud Native Computing Foundation open-source project for monitoring and alerting that is optimized for container environments.

This week, Amazon Elastic Container Registry Public (Amazon ECR Public) announced the ability to launch containers directly from the ECR Public Gallery  to AWS App Runner to quickly test popular web application container images. AWS App Runner is a fully managed service that makes it easier for developers to quickly deploy web applications and APIs, at scale with no prior infrastructure experience required.

With Amazon Redshift federated query capability, many customers have been able to combine live data from operational databases with the data in Amazon Redshift data warehouse and the data in Amazon S3 data lake environment in order to get unified analytics view across all the data in the enterprise. Now Amazon Redshift federated query support is generally available for Amazon Aurora MySQL and Amazon RDS for MySQL databases in addition to the existing Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL databases.

Amazon Redshift Query Editor V2 makes data in your Amazon Redshift data warehouse and data lake more accessible with a web-based tool for SQL users such as data analysts, data scientists, and database developers. With Query Editor V2, users can explore, analyze, and collaborate on data. It reduces the operational costs of managing query tools by providing a web-based application that allows you to focus on exploring your data without managing your infrastructure.

The AWS Snowcone service is now available for customer orders in the US East (Ohio), US West (San Francisco) and South America (Sao Paulo). With this launch, Snowcone is now available for order in US East (Ohio), US West (San Francisco) and South America (Sao Paulo), AWS Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Canada (Central), Asia Pacific (Sydney), EU (Frankfurt), EU (Ireland), US East (N. Virginia), and US West (Oregon) Regions. AWS Snowcone is the smallest member of the AWS Snow Family of edge computing, edge storage, and data transfer devices. Snowcone is portable, rugged, and secure – small and light enough to fit in a backpack, and able to withstand harsh environments. Customers use Snowcone to deploy applications at the edge, and to collect data, process it locally, and move it to AWS either offline (by shipping the device to AWS) or online (by using AWS DataSync on Snowcone to send the data to AWS over the network).

AWS IoT Events is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region.

AWS IoT SiteWise is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region, extending the footprint to 8 AWS Regions.

AWS App Mesh is now available in the Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet, and Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD. 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 options to tune for high-availability of your applications.

AWS Device Farm’s Desktop Browser Testing feature lets you test your web applications on different versions of Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer browsers. With today’s launch, we are adding support for the Microsoft Edge browser.

You can now view your AWS resources such as Instances, VPCs, Subnets, Security Groups, Volumes across AWS Regions. Previously, finding specific resources, monitoring for their status or taking inventory in the console was manual and time consuming. You had to know which region a particular instance resided in, or had to manually switch across multiple different regions to look for it. Global View provides visibility to all your resources in a single pane of glass across AWS regions. It helps monitor resource counts, notice abnormalities sooner rather than later, and find stray resources.

Amazon EMR is the industry-leading cloud big data platform for processing vast amounts of data using open source tools such as Apache Spark, Apache Hive, Apache HBase, Apache Flink, Apache Hudi, and Presto. Today, we are excited to announce that Amazon EMR now supports auto-terminating idle EMR clusters, a new feature that automatically terminates your EMR cluster if it has been idle, to reduce the cost without the need to manually monitor cluster activity. You can specify the idle timeout value when enabling auto-termination for both existing and new clusters and EMR will automatically terminate the cluster when it has been idle for specified time.

Amazon Connect Voice ID is a Machine Learning (ML) powered voice authentication feature for Amazon Connect that makes voice interactions in contact centers more secure and efficient. Historically, contact centers have used a time-consuming knowledge-based authentication process where callers have to answer multiple questions based on personal details, such as social security number or date of birth. Amazon Connect Voice ID analyzes caller's unique voice characteristics using machine learning to verify identity in real-time without changing the natural flow of conversation. This helps improve agent productivity and contact center operating costs. Amazon Connect Voice ID also detects fraudsters in real-time from a custom watch-list for a contact center instance, improving security of contact center operations.

AWS Backup now makes it easier to delete recovery points that customers no longer need. Customers can use the new asynchronous delete operation from the console, CLI or APIs, to clean up existing recovery points in bulk and manage their backups more cost-effectively.

Elastic Load Balancing now supports forwarding traffic directly from Network Load Balancer (NLB) to Application Load Balancer (ALB). With this feature, you can now use AWS PrivateLink and expose static IP addresses for applications built on ALB.

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for Oracle now supports version 21.1 of Oracle Application Express  (APEX) for 12.1, 12.2 and 19c versions of Oracle Database. Using APEX, developers can build applications entirely within their web browser. To learn more about the latest features of APEX 21.1, please refer to Oracle’s blog post .

Following the launch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Microsoft SQL Server for Amazon EC2, you can now easily deploy RHEL SQL Server Always On availability groups using AWS Launch Wizard.

The AWS Solutions team recently updated AWS WAF Security Automations, a solution that automatically deploys a set of AWS WAF (web application firewall) rules that filter common web-based attacks. Users can select from preconfigured protective features that define the rules included in an AWS WAF web access control list (web ACL). Once deployed, AWS WAF protects your Amazon CloudFront distributions or Application Load Balancers by inspecting web requests.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for Oracle now supports four new customer modifiable sqlnet.ora client parameters for the Oracle Native Network Encryption (NNE) option. Amazon RDS for Oracle already supports server parameters which define encryption properties for incoming sessions. These client parameters apply to outgoing connections such as those used by database links.

This week, AWS announced the general availability of Amazon Genomics CLI, an open-source tool for genomics and life science customers to process genomics data at petabyte scale on AWS.

Object replication in public preview for Premium Block Blob Storage 

Object replication allows you to replicate your premium block blob data at the blob level from one storage account to another anywhere in the Azure.

General availability: Azure Data Factory managed virtual network

Azure Data Factory managed virtual network provides you with a more secure and manageable data integration solution.

Azure Site Recovery update rollup 58 is now generally available - September 2021

The latest Azure Site Recovery update provides fixes and download links for Site Recovery components.

Azure Automation Hybrid Worker Extension for Azure and Arc-enabled servers now in public preview

Onboard Azure Automation User Hybrid Runbook Worker based on VM extension platform for Azure Virtual machines and Arc-enabled servers. The extension-based platform leverages Azure Active Directory authentication.

Az module support in Azure Automation is now available

Azure Automation now supports Az-module by default for all new Automation Accounts.

Azure Purview is now generally available

The Azure Purview Data Map and Data Catalog are generally available.

Azure IoT middleware for FreeRTOS in general availability

Announcing the release of a solution to simplify the connection of devices running FreeRTOS to Azure IoT services.

Norway East Availability Zones now generally available

Azure Availability Zones are now generally available in the Norway East region. These three new zones provide customers with options for additional resiliency and tolerance to infrastructure impact.

Azure Site Recovery: Upgrade to TLS 1.2 or later by November 15, 2021 - for improved security

Azure Site Recovery: Upgrade to TLS 1.2 or later by November 15, 2021 for improved security of replication data.