In Cloud Computing This Week [Oct 22nd 2021]

AWS Amplify for JavaScript now supports pause, resume and cancel actions on file uploads to Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) via the Amplify Storage category. Amplify provides a set of use-case oriented UI components, libraries and command-line tools to make it easy for frontend web and mobile developer to build AWS cloud backends for their apps. With this release, developers can create experiences where end-users can reliably upload very large files, including raw video and large productivity documents. Being able to resume uploads is particularly useful for handling scenarios where a user experiences network interruption during an upload.

Amazon RDS Proxy now supports Amazon RDS for MySQL major version 8.0. MySQL 8.0 is the latest Community Edition major version, and offers better performance, reliability, security, and manageability. To learn more about Amazon RDS for MySQL, please visit our details page or view our documentation

Starting this week, you can trigger the interruption of an Amazon EC2 Spot Instance using AWS Fault Injection Simulator (FIS). Spot Instances use spare EC2 Capacity that is available up to 90% discount compared to the On-Demand price. In exchange for the discount, Spot Instances can be interrupted by Amazon EC2 when Amazon EC2 needs the capacity back. When using Spot Instances, you need to be prepared to be interrupted. With FIS, you can test the resiliency of your workload and validate that your application is reacting to the interruption notices that EC2 sends before terminating your instances. You can target individual Spot Instances or a subset of instances in clusters managed by services that tag your instances such as ASG, Fleet and EMR.

The Amazon Chime SDK lets developers add real-time audio, video, and screen share to their web applications. Developers can now use video background blur to obfuscate their users’ surroundings, which can help increase visual privacy.

AWS are pleased to announce that Amazon Transcribe will now support custom language models (CLM) for streaming transcription. Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for you to add speech-to-text capabilities to your applications. CLM allows you to leverage pre-existing data to build a custom speech engine tailored for your transcription use case. No prior machine learning experience required. 

AWS have updated Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MySQL on Outposts to support MySQL minor versions 8.0.23, and 8.0.25. We recommend that customers upgrade to the latest minor versions to fix known security vulnerabilities in prior versions of MySQL, and to benefit from the numerous bug fixes, performance improvements, and new functionality added by the MySQL community.

CloudWatch Synthetics now supports using an AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) key that you provide to encrypt the canary run data that CloudWatch Synthetics stores in your Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket. By default, these artifacts are encrypted at rest using an AWS managed key.

AWS Security Hub now allows you to designate an aggregation Region and link some or all Regions to that aggregation Region. This gives you a centralized view of all your findings across all of your accounts and all of your linked Regions. After you link a Region to the aggregation Region, your findings are continuously synchronized between the Regions. Any update to a finding in a linked Region is replicated to the aggregation Region, and any update to a finding in the aggregation Region is replicated to the linked Region where the finding originated. To learn more about this feature, you can read about in our documentation here .

This week, the AWS Panorama Appliance is generally available. The AWS Panorama Appliance is a new device that enables customers to improve their operations and reduce costs by using existing on-premises cameras and analyzing video streams locally with computer vision.

The Amazon Chime SDK lets developers add real-time audio, video, screen share, and messaging capabilities to their web or mobile applications. Starting today, the Amazon Chime SDK allows developers to execute business logic on in-flight messages before they are delivered to members of a messaging channel with channel flows. Using channel flows you can create flows that remove sensitive data such as government ID numbers, phone numbers, or profanity from messages before they are delivered, which may be helpful for implementing corporate communications policies or other communication guidelines. Channel flows can also be used to perform functions like aggregation of responses to a poll before sending results back to participants.

Amazon QuickSight now supports advanced styling for your Table and Pivot Table. Authors can create beautiful tables, follow a design pattern or apply a standardized corporate identity to their tabular visuals with the newly launched options to customize borders and colors. They can also apply custom borders and styling for their totals and sub-totals letting them create financial reports like income statements etc. See here  for more details.

Amazon WorkSpaces now offers APIs which you can use to keep your WorkSpaces images up-to-date with the latest AWS drivers. Previously, WorkSpaces images were kept up to date by manually launching a WorkSpaces instance, installing driver updates and creating a new image. With this launch, you can use WorkSpaces APIs to know if latest AWS drivers are available for your images, install those updates and create updated images. After the new image is created, you can test it before updating your production bundles or sharing the image with other AWS accounts. Keeping your WorkSpaces up to date with latest AWS drivers lets you leverage the benefits of the latest instance types and other infrastructure components offered by AWS.

AWS Systems Manager now supports bulk editing of work items within OpsCenter.

Fleet Manager, a feature in AWS Systems Manager (SSM) that helps IT Admins streamline and scale their remote server management processes, now enhances the reporting and filtering experience for Managed Instances. This new feature presents filtering options applicable to your data, taking out the guess work. You no longer need to memorize and manually enter values for filtering. It automatically populates applicable filtering criteria such as instance IDs or IP addresses.

AWS Elemental MediaConvert now supports rich text rendering of IMSC 1.1 text profile  subtitles and the TTML  subtitle format. Both of these formats allow detailed formatting that includes text size, position, justification, color, styling, and shadowing. For many viewers, on screen subtitles are an important part of the viewing experience and this feature gives subtitle authors more creative control of how text is rendered on screen. Additionally, IMSC and TTML allow greater text localization options including right-to-left text, rubies, and vertical text.

PostgreSQL 14 RC 1 is now available in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment, allowing you to test the release candidate version of PostgreSQL 14 on Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS).

AWS are announcing the public preview of AWS Data Exchange for Amazon Redshift, a new feature that enables customers to find and subscribe to third-party data in AWS Data Exchange that they can query in an Amazon Redshift data warehouse in minutes. Data providers can list and offer products containing Amazon Redshift data sets in the AWS Data Exchange catalog, granting subscribers direct, read-only access to the data stored in Amazon Redshift. This feature empowers customers to quickly query, analyze, and build applications with these third-party data sets.

On October 19th, Amazon announced quarterly security and critical updates for Amazon Corretto Long-Term Supported (LTS) versions. Corretto 11.0.13 and 8.312 are now available for download. Amazon Corretto 17 updates will be available shortly after the release is tagged in the OpenJDK 17 repository. Amazon Corretto is a no-cost, multi-platform, production-ready distribution of OpenJDK.

Amazon CloudFront is now supported by the AWS Pricing Calculator. Estimate the cost of CloudFront workloads, which primarily includes costs associated with data transfer and requests. Apart from providing tips to estimate the number of requests based on your data transfer volume, the calculator gives you a granular view of costs across different usage tiers and CloudFront regions.

Amazon AppFlow, a fully managed integration service that helps customers securely transfer data between AWS services and cloud applications, is now available in the AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region. With AppFlow, you can run data flows at enterprise scale between Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications like Salesforce, SAP, Zendesk, Slack, and ServiceNow, and AWS services like Amazon S3 and Amazon Redshift, in just a few clicks. See where Amazon AppFlow is available by using the AWS Region Table.

Porting Assistant for .NET now supports assessment and porting of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Open Web Interface for .NET (OWIN), and ASP.NET System.Web.Mvc namespaces to .NET Core 3.1 or .NET 5. Following the GA release of Core WCF project in February 2021, Porting Assistant can now assess and provide recommendations to port WCF applications to Core WCF. It also supports assessment and porting of OWIN and System.Web.Mvc namespace configurations to .NET Core 3.1 or .NET 5. Developers can use the existing Porting Assistant for .NET tool  or Porting Assistant for .NET Visual Studio IDE extension  to get started. 

Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra), a scalable, highly available, and fully managed Apache Cassandra–compatible database service, now supports automatic data expiration by using Time to Live (TTL) settings. With TTL, you set expiration times on attributes or rows in your tables, and Keyspaces automatically deletes those expired attributes or rows.

FreeRTOS adds symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) support in the kernel, enabling developers designing FreeRTOS-based applications to utilize the SMP capabilities of multi-core microcontrollers. Multi-core microcontrollers, in which two or more identical processor cores share the same memory, allow the operating system to distribute tasks between cores to balance processor load as desired by the application. This allows applications to optimize the resource utilization of multi-core microcontrollers.

Amazon WorkSpaces now offers new bundles powered by Windows Server 2019, providing a Windows 10 desktop experience along with a 64-bit Microsoft Office 2019 Professional Plus bundle option in the AWS GovCloud (US-West) Region. The feature brings a refreshed Windows 10 desktop experience, and enables customers to run applications that require recent Windows versions.

You can now collect MySQL logs from the Ops Agent, starting with version 2.5.0. For more information, see Collecting logs from third-party applications: MySQL.

You can now collect Redis logs from the Ops Agent, starting with version 2.5.0. For more information, see Collecting logs from third-party applications: Redis.

You can now collect Cassandra logs from the Ops Agent, starting with version 2.5.0. For more information, see Collecting logs from third-party applications: Cassandra.

Dialogflow CX change history is now available from the API.

Dialogflow CX now provides a continuous testing and deployment preview feature.

For GKE Autopilot clusters, CMEK for boot disks and CMEK for application-layer encryption is now generally available.

For GKE Autopilot clusters, Google Groups for RBAC is now generally available.

A security issue was discovered in the Kubernetes ingress-nginx controller, CVE-2021-25742. Ingress-nginx custom snippets allows retrieval of ingress-nginx service account tokens and secrets across all namespaces. For more information, see the GCP-2021-024 security bulletin.