In Cloud Computing This Week [Oct 29th 2021]

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces the general availability of compute optimized Amazon EC2 C6i instances. C6i instances are powered by 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code named Ice Lake) with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.5 GHz, offer up to 15% better compute price performance over C5 instances for a wide variety of workloads, and always-on memory encryption using Intel Total Memory Encryption (TME). Designed for compute-intensive workloads, C6i instances are built on the AWS Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and lightweight hypervisor, which delivers practically all of the compute and memory resources of the host hardware to your instances. These instances are an ideal fit for compute-intensive workloads such as batch processing, distributed analytics, high performance computing (HPC), ad serving, highly scalable multiplayer gaming, and video encoding.

AWS Marketplace announces Purchase Order Management for SaaS contracts
This week, AWS Marketplace announced Purchase Order Management for SaaS contracts, which allows customers to add purchase order numbers to their AWS invoices for SaaS contracts purchased in AWS Marketplace. Previously, customers could only add one purchase order number across all their AWS Marketplace transactions. Now, customers can add purchase order numbers specific to public and private offers for SaaS contracts when transacting in AWS Marketplace. Purchase order numbers entered in AWS Marketplace appear on corresponding invoices, easing software spend allocation to internal budgets.

Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL is a new capability for Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition that enables it to understand queries from applications written for Microsoft SQL Server. With Babelfish, applications currently running on SQL Server can run directly on Aurora PostgreSQL with a fraction of the work required, compared to a traditional migration. Babelfish understands the SQL Server wire-protocol (TDS) and T-SQL, the Microsoft SQL Server query language, so you don't have to switch database drivers or re-write all of your application queries.

Following the announcement of updates to the PostgreSQL database  by the open source community, we have updated Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition to support PostgreSQL 13.4, 12.8, 11.13, and 10.18. These releases contain bug fixes and improvements by the PostgreSQL community. As a reminder, Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL 9.6 will reach end of life  on January 31, 2022.

Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition now supports PostGIS major version 3.1. This new version of PostGIS is available on PostgreSQL versions 13.4, 12.8, 11.13, 10.18, and higher.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) now adds native support for Bottlerocket in EKS managed node groups in all commercial AWS regions. Most EKS customers today deploy their applications on worker nodes backed by operating systems that are designed for a variety of use cases. AWS launched Bottlerocket, a minimal, Linux-based open source operating system that is purpose built and optimized to run containers. When combined, EKS managed node groups and Bottlerocket give customers a simple way to provision and manage compute capacity using the latest best practices for running containers in production. Bottlerocket is now included as a built-in AMI choice for managed node groups, enabling customers to provision container optimized worker nodes with a single click.

Amazon Connect is now available in the Asia Pacific (Seoul) AWS Region, increasing the number of AWS Regions where Amazon Connect is available to ten. You can now claim South Korean toll-free and local telephone numbers. 

The Babelfish for PostgreSQL  open source project is now available. Babelfish for PostgreSQL provides the capability for PostgreSQL to understand queries from applications written for Microsoft SQL Server. With Babelfish, applications currently running on SQL Server can now run directly on PostgreSQL with a fraction of the work required, compared to a traditional migration. Babelfish understands the SQL Server wire-protocol and T-SQL, the Microsoft SQL Server query language, so you don't have to switch database drivers or re-write all of your application queries.

The Amazon Chime SDK is a service that makes it easy for developers to add real-time audio, video, screen sharing, and messaging capabilities to their applications. With the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) audio APIs, developers can build customized telephony applications like voice menus, click-to-call, and call routing using the agility and operational simplicity of a serverless AWS Lambda function. Starting today, developers can record PSTN and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) voice calls and store the recordings in the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket of their choice using the call recording feature. 

This week, AWS announced the availability of AWS Fargate for Amazon ECS Windows containers. This feature simplifies the adoption of modern container technology for Amazon ECS customers by making it even easier to run their Windows containers on AWS.

AWS IoT SiteWise now allows customers to use the same asset model under different asset model hierarchies. With this feature, customers can simplify the asset modeling experience by reducing the number of models required to build a virtual representation of their industrial operations. Previously, for the same type of machine deployed in different production sites, users had to create one asset model for each production site model. Now, users can create one asset model and reuse it in all of your production site models. 

Starting this week, you can use two new Amazon CloudWatch metrics to monitor your AWS Global Accelerator resources. You can now monitor the total number of healthy endpoints and the total number of unhealthy endpoints served by your accelerator, including EC2 instances, Application Load Balancers, Network Load Balancers and Elastic IP addresses. With the two new metrics, you can create CloudWatch alarms to more quickly and easily detect issues with your Global Accelerator endpoints.

Amazon EC2 R5b instances, which provide the fastest block storage performance on EC2, are now available in AWS Europe (Ireland and London) Regions. R5b instances are powered by the AWS Nitro System and provide 3x higher EBS-Optimized  performance compared to R5 instances. These instances offer up to 60 Gbps of EBS bandwidth and 260,000 I/O operations per second (IOPS), enabling customers to lift and shift memory intensive applications to AWS.

If you are working with Nielsen for audience measurement, you can now use AWS Elemental MediaLive to encode Nielsen's proprietary watermarks in your MediaLive channel.

Starting this week, you can request EC2 capacity based on your workload’s instance requirements. Attribute-based instance type selection, a new feature for Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, EC2 Fleet, and Spot Fleet, makes it easy to create and maintain instance fleets without researching and selecting EC2 instance types. This is useful for running instance type flexible workloads and frameworks such as containers, big data, and CI/CD, or for simple cases where you want your instance fleets to automatically use the latest generation instance types. Instead of creating and maintaining a list of acceptable instance types, you can now simply define your instance requirements once, and let attribute-based instance type selection handle the rest.

This week, AWS introduced Amazon EC2 Spot placement score to help you find the optimal location for your Spot workloads. Spot Instances availability varies depending on the instance type, time of day, Region, and Availability Zone. Until now there was no way to find an optimal Region or Availability Zone to fulfill your Spot capacity needs without trying to launch Spot Instances there first. Now, Spot placement score can recommend a Region or Availability Zone based on your Spot capacity requirements. Spot placement score is useful for instance type flexible workloads that can be launched in any Region or Availability Zone.

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 supports iOS and Android push notifications via Amazon Pinpoint for messages sent through Amazon Chime SDK messaging channels. With push notifications, a developer using Amazon Chime SDK messaging for chat can help ensure their users are notified about new messages even when they are not actively using their app. Users can switch applications or lock their mobile device and receive a notification when a new message or call comes in, allowing them to tap the notification and return to the original app to continue the conversation or join the call.

The AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) announces a public preview of AWS SAM Accelerate. The AWS SAM CLI is a developer tool that makes it easier to build, locally test, package, and deploy serverless applications. SAM Accelerate is a new capability of SAM CLI that makes it faster and easier for developers to test code changes made locally to their serverless applications against a cloud-based environment, reducing the time from local iteration to production-readiness.

Amazon Textract now supports Tag Image File Format (TIFF) documents in addition to the PNG, JPEG, and PDF formats. Customers can now process TIFF documents either synchronously or asynchronously using any of the following Amazon Textract APIs - DetectDocumentText , StartDocumentAnalysis , StartDocumentTextDetection , AnalyzeDocument , and AnalyzeExpense . Amazon Textract is a machine learning service that automatically extracts printed and handwritten text and data from any document.

You can now define a cutoff behavior for your maintenance tasks using AWS Systems Manager Maintenance Windows, which allows you to stop or continue ongoing tasks when the cutoff time is reached. This provides DevOps and IT engineers with more control on the cutoff behavior to ensure disruptive tasks are not run outside the desired period. For instance, while registering an Automation task with a maintenance window, you can now set up the cutoff behavior to cancel ongoing tasks. This would ensure that no new task invocations are started when the cutoff time is reached.

This week AWS announced the general availability of AWS Local Zones in Las Vegas, New York City, and Portland. Customers can now use these new Local Zones to deliver applications that require single-digit millisecond latency to end-users or for on-premises installations in these three metro areas.

Amazon SageMaker Autopilot automatically builds, trains, and tunes the best machine learning models based on your data, while allowing you to maintain full control and visibility. Starting today, SageMaker Autopilot supports time series data. You can now use SageMaker Autopilot to build machine learning models for regression and classification problems for time series data or any sequence data, enabling scenarios such as supervised anomaly detection, risk assessment or fault prediction based on a sequence of datapoints. For example, you can now build models to identify and classify anomalous network traffic recorded over time, or identifying faulty devices based on emitted metrics.

Amazon Route 53 Resolver is the recursive DNS service that runs by default in your Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs). Paired with Route 53 Resolver Endpoints and Resolver Rules , you can create seamless DNS query resolution across your entire hybrid cloud, with precise control over the resolution of DNS namespaces between your on-premises data center and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC).

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) Custom is a managed database service for legacy, custom, and packaged applications that require access to the underlying OS and DB environment. Amazon RDS Custom is now available for the Oracle database engine. Amazon RDS Custom for Oracle automates setup, operation, and scaling of databases in the cloud while granting access to the database and underlying operating system to configure settings, install patches, and enable native features to meet the dependent application's requirements.

This week AWS announced the general availability of Amazon EC2 DL1 instances powered by Gaudi accelerators from Habana Labs, an Intel company. EC2 DL1 instances deliver up to 40% better price performance than current generation GPU-based EC2 instances for training deep learning models and are optimized for workloads such as image classification, object detection and natural language processing.

Amazon QuickSight announced the availability of Incremental Refresh, a feature in Amazon QuickSight that supports incrementally loading new data to SPICE data sets without needing to refresh the full set of data. SPICE  is QuickSight's Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine.

Amazon Pinpoint now includes the ability to perform an extended review of your company’s Ten-Digit Long Code (10DLC) registration details. This extended review process is called “vetting.” By vetting your company’s 10DLC registration, you can gain higher throughput rates for the messages that you send using 10DLC numbers.

Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is a fast, scalable, highly available, and fully managed document database service that supports MongoDB workloads. As a document database, Amazon DocumentDB makes it easy to store, query, and index JSON data at scale.

Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is a database service that is purpose-built for JSON data management at scale, fully managed and integrated with AWS, and enterprise-ready with high durability.

Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is a database service that is purpose-built for JSON data management at scale, fully managed and integrated with AWS, and enterprise-ready with high durability.

Amazon CloudFront now provides a CloudFront-Viewer-Address header that includes IP address and connection port information for requesting clients. The connection port field indicates the TCP source port used by the requesting client. Previously, IP address and client connection port information were available only in CloudFront access logs, making it harder to resolve issues or perform real-time decision-making based on these data. Now you can configure your CloudFront origin request policies to forward the CloudFront-Viewer-Address header to your origin servers. The header can also be used in CloudFront Functions when included in an origin request policy. The CloudFront-Viewer-Address header uses the following syntax: CloudFront-Viewer-Address: 127.0.0.1:4430

Following the release of updates in MySQL version 8.0, we have updated Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MySQL and Amazon RDS for MySQL on Outposts to support MySQL minor version 8.0.26 . We recommend that you upgrade to the latest minor version 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.

AWS Migration Hub now helps you easily build a migration and modernization strategy for your applications running on-premises or in AWS. The new Strategy Recommendations feature is the ideal starting point to begin your transformation journey delivering prescriptive guidance on the optimal strategy and tools to help you migrate and modernize at scale. Strategy Recommendations automates the manual process of analyzing each running application, its process dependencies and technical complexity to reduce the time and effort spent on planning application migration and modernization, and accelerate your business transformation on AWS.

Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is a database service that is purpose-built for JSON data management at scale, fully managed and integrated with AWS, and enterprise-ready with high durability.

M82 release

• • Released CUDA11.3 container images.
  • The ai-platform Cloud SDK is available across all deep learning environment products; it was previously available only in TensorFlow images.

• • Theia IDE (experimental) images were refreshed. PyTorch has been removed from Theia IDE images.