In Cloud Computing This Week [Oct 8th 2021]

AWS are excited to announce a new recipe in Amazon Personalize that, when given an item, will recommend similar items based on both user-item interaction data and item metadata. The combination of your users’ historical interactions and the information you have about your items increases the relevance of recommendations and ensures similar items capture your users’ attention. To assess the similarity of items we measure how frequently the items are found together in users’ histories. As a benchmark, we found that the new recipe is 10.2% more accurate in identifying similar items than recipes that use interactions data alone. This means your users will be more likely to find the items most related to what they are viewing.

Starting today, Amazon EC2 Mac instances are available in Europe (Stockholm), Europe (London), Europe (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), and Asia Pacific (Sydney) Regions. Built on Apple Mac mini computers, EC2 Mac instances enable customers to run on-demand macOS workloads in the AWS cloud for the first time, extending the flexibility, scalability, and cost benefits of AWS to all Apple developers. With EC2 Mac instances, developers building apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and Safari can now provision and access macOS environments within minutes. EC2 Mac enables developers to dynamically scale capacity as needed, and benefit from AWS’s pay-as-you-go pricing to develop, build, test, sign, and publish their apps.

Starting this week, you can configure your Amazon Lex bots to provide periodic updates to users while their requests are processed. Customer support conversations often require execution of business logic that can take some time to complete. For example, updating an itinerary on an airline reservation system may take a couple of minutes during peak hours. Typically, support agents put the call on hold and provide periodic updates (e.g., “We are still processing your request; thank you for your patience”) until the request is fulfilled. Now, you can easily configure your bot to automatically provide such periodic updates in a conversation. With progress updates capability, bot builders can quickly enhance the ability of virtual contact center agents and smart assistants.

Amazon QuickSight now supports pixel-perfect dashboards with the new free-form layout mode. Free-form layouts provide authors with precise, pixel-level control over the size and placement of visual elements on QuickSight dashboards, including support for overlapping content. In addition, authors can also set additional attributes for QuickSight visuals in free-form layout, including background color, transparency, border color, selection color as well as visibility of the loading animation, visual context menu and on-visual menu. Free-form layout also supports conditional rendering of visual elements, which allows authors to show or hide content based on QuickSight parameter values, enabling context sensitive display of text, visuals and images. The combination of these options allows QuickSight authors to showcase their creativity by creating complex, interactive dashboards that allow end-users to understand key insights from their data.

AWS IoT SiteWise is now available in the Mumbai, Seoul, and Tokyo AWS Regions, extending the footprint to 11 AWS Regions.

AWS have updated the Amazon OpenSearch Service (successor to Amazon Elasticsearch Service) management console to improve your overall experience with configuring and managing your OpenSearch and Elasticsearch clusters on the service. The new console helps you create and update domains, as well helps you get information about your domains, more easily.

The Amazon Chime SDK lets developers add real-time audio, video, screen share, and messaging capabilities to their web or mobile applications. With media capture pipelines, developers can capture the contents of their Amazon Chime SDK meeting and save them to an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket of their choice. Starting today developers can configure APIs to customize the media capture experience for their applications, by easily switching the way they capture audio, video and content streams.

Amazon SageMaker now supports Fast File Mode for accessing data in training jobs. This enables high performance data access by streaming directly from Amazon S3 with no code changes from the existing File Mode. For example, training a K-Means clustering model on a 100GB dataset took 28 minutes with File Mode but only 5 minutes with Fast File Mode (82% decrease).

AWS Lambda functions that are triggered from Amazon MSK topics can now access MSK clusters secured by IAM Access Control. This is in addition to SASL/SCRAM, which is already supported on Lambda. To get started, customers who select MSK as the event source for their Lambda function can configure their function's execution role to allow Lambda to connect to their clusters and read from their topics. This feature requires no additional charge to use, and is available in all AWS Regions where Amazon MSK is supported as an event source for AWS Lambda.

We are excited to announce that Amazon Kendra is adding support for 34 languages for keyword-based search over documents and FAQs. Amazon Kendra is an intelligent search service powered by machine learning. Customers with content in one or more of the supported languages can now use Amazon Kendra to index and search their content with native language support.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports decoupling a database running in an Elastic Beanstalk environment. Previously, a database instance created by Elastic Beanstalk was tied to the lifecycle of the environment. With this launch, the lifecycle of your database instance will not be tied to your application’s environment lifecycle, and you can decouple a database managed by Elastic Beanstalk from a Beanstalk environment. The environment’s health is not affected by the decoupling operation and you can keep the database operational as an external database, available for multiple environments to connect to it. You also have the option to terminate an Elastic Beanstalk environment while leaving the database operational.

We are announcing the support of using Apache Spark SQL to update Apache Hive metadata tables when using Amazon EMR integration with Apache Ranger .

AWS Network Firewall now offers new configuration options for rule ordering and default drop, making it easier to write and process rules to monitor your virtual private cloud (VPC) traffic.

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.

AWS Application Migration Service (AWS MGN) is now available in four additional AWS Regions: Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), and Europe (London). 

AWS Backup Audit Manager  now allows you to generate reports to track the compliance of your defined data protection policies in AWS Backup. You can create a report plan in AWS Backup Audit Manager to deliver compliance reports in your designated Amazon S3 bucket. You can use these reports to identify violations of your data protection policies, perform remediation, and demonstrate compliance of your data protection policies to meet regulatory requirements.

You can now access D-Wave’s Advantage 4.1 quantum annealing system on Amazon Braket, the AWS quantum computing service. According to D-Wave, the new Advantage quantum processing unit (QPU) has more than 5,000 active qubits with 15-way connectivity to enable researchers and developers to explore larger and more complex optimization problems.

Amazon OpenSearch Service (successor to Amazon Elasticsearch Service) now supports cross-cluster replication, enabling you to automate copying and synchronizing of indices from one domain to another at low latency in same or different AWS accounts or Regions. With cross-cluster replication, you can achieve high availability for your mission critical applications with sequential data consistency. 

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) Performance Insights is now available in the Middle East (Bahrain), Africa (Cape Town), Europe (Milan), Asia Pacific (Osaka) regions. Amazon RDS Performance Insights is a database performance tuning and monitoring feature of RDS and Aurora that helps you quickly assess the load on your database and determine when and where to take action.

This week, Amazon Location Service is adding distance-based filtering of device position updates.

Using Amazon EC2 Capacity Reservation Fleet, you can easily migrate your reserved Amazon EC2 capacity to new generation instance types. Capacity Reservations  allow you to reserve capacity for your immediate use in a specific instance type and Availability Zone and can be cancelled by you at any time. With Capacity Reservation Fleet, you can reserve capacity across a prioritized list of instance types. When your reservations for lower priority instance types are unused, it will automatically convert them to capacity reservations for higher priority instance types.

AWS Transfer Family now supports Amazon S3 Access Points, a feature of Amazon S3 that allows you to easily manage granular access to shared data sets. Now, you can use S3 Access Point aliases anywhere an S3 bucket name is used today for shared datasets that are utilized by hundreds of SFTP, FTP, and FTPS users and groups.

AWS Glue DataBrew, a visual data preparation tool that makes it easy for data analysts and data scientists to clean and normalize data for analytics and machine learning, is now available in the AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region. See where DataBrew is available by using the AWS Region Table.

We are announcing the general availability of VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts, a jointly-engineered solution that delivers VMware Cloud on AWS as a fully managed experience to virtually any datacenter, co-location space, or on-premises facility with AWS Outposts. It runs VMware’s enterprise-class Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) software on dedicated AWS Nitro System-based EC2 bare metal Outposts instances. VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts is built for VMware workloads that require low-latency access to on-premises systems, local data processing, or data residency.

AWS Backup Audit Manager  now supports AWS CloudFormation, allowing you to audit and report on the compliance of your data protection policies using AWS CloudFormation templates. You can now deploy AWS Backup Audit Manager's pre-built, customizable controls using AWS CloudFormation templates and evaluate whether all your backups are in compliance with your policies. You can also generate audit reports that help you monitor your operational posture and demonstrate compliance of your backups with regulatory requirements.

AWS Firewall Manager now enables you to configure logging for your AWS Network Firewalls provisioned using a Firewall Manager policy. When you set up a Firewall Manager policy for Network Firewall, you can now enable logging for all the accounts that are in scope of the policy and have the logs centralized under your Firewall Manager administrator account. This makes it easy to enable logging for AWS Network Firewall across multiple accounts and VPCs through a single Firewall Manager policy. 

AWS License Manager announces Delegated Administrator support for Managed entitlements. This feature allows license administrators to manage and distribute licenses across their AWS accounts from a delegated account outside of the management account. Using delegated administrator, you can grant licenses from AWS Marketplace and Independent Software Vendors across your organization and benefit from the administrative capabilities previously afforded to the management account only.

AWS IoT Events is now available in the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region, extending the footprint to 13 AWS regions.

Amazon CodeGuru is a developer tool powered by machine learning that provides intelligent recommendations for improving code quality and identifying an application’s most expensive lines of code.

The AWS Solutions team recently updated Amazon Workspaces Cost Optimizer, a solution that analyzes all of your Amazon WorkSpaces usage data and automatically converts the WorkSpace to the most cost-effective billing option (hourly or monthly), depending on your individual usage. This solution also helps you monitor your WorkSpace usage and optimize costs. 

Amazon EC2 now supports Hibernation for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS operating system. Hibernation allows you to pause your EC2 Instances and resume them at a later time, rather than fully terminating and restarting them. Resuming your instance lets your applications continue from where they left off so that you don’t have to restart your OS and application from scratch. Hibernation is useful for cases where rebuilding application state is time-consuming (e.g., developer desktops) or an application’s start-up steps can be prepared in advance of a scale-out.

Starting this week, Amazon Textract now extends support for AWS PrivateLink to both AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. Customers can now access Amazon Textract from their Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) in AWS GovCloud (US) without using public IPs and without requiring the traffic to traverse across the Internet.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for PostgreSQL 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 CodeGuru is a developer tool powered by machine learning that provides intelligent recommendations for improving code quality and identifying an application’s most expensive lines of code.

1.11.2-asm.17 is now available.

Anthos Service Mesh 1.11 includes the features of Istio 1.11 subject to the list of Anthos Service Mesh supported features.

Managed Anthos Service Mesh isn't rolling out to the rapid release channel at this time. You can periodically check this page for the announcement of the rollout of Managed Anthos Service Mesh to the rapid channel. See Select a Managed Anthos Service Mesh release channel for more information.

asmcliis generally available for new installations and upgrades of Anthos Service Mesh. You can use asmcli to:

• Install the Anthos Service Mesh in-cluster control plane

• Configure managed Anthos Service Mesh

• Add Compute Engine virtual machines to Anthos Service Mesh

• Set up a multi-cluster mesh on non-private GKE clusters

• Set up a multi-cluster mesh outside Google Cloud

The in-cluster control plane is supported on the on the following platforms using asmcli:

• GKE clusters in a single project
• GKE clusters in multiple projects
• Anthos clusters on VMware
• Anthos on bare metal
• Anthos clusters on AWS
• Amazon EKS

Note: Upgrades from Anthos Service Mesh 1.7 on EKS to Anthos Service Mesh 1.11 aren't supported. You will need to set up a new EKS cluster to install Anthos Service Mesh 1.11.

asmcli requires clusters to be registered with a fleet. asmcli can automatically register a cluster as long as it meets the requirements specified in fleet requirements. asmcli does not support automatic fleet registration for GKE 1.22 clusters, which must be registered manually before installation.

Using install_asm and istioctl install is deprecated and support for these tools for installations and upgrades of Anthos Service Mesh will be removed when Anthos Service Mesh 1.12 is released. Please update your scripts and tools to use asmcli. For more information see Transitioning to asmcli.

The Anthos Service Mesh integration with Certificate Authority Service (CA Service) is generally available. You can use CA Service as the certificate authority for signing mutual TLS certificates. See Configure Anthos Service Mesh to use CA Service for details.

Anthos Service Mesh uses a proxy that is based on OSS Envoy. The Anthos Service Mesh 1.11 proxy is based on Envoy v1.19.1.

Public preview: Standard network features for Azure NetApp Files

Standard network features for Azure NetApp Files volumes is now in public preview in select regions. This includes support for increased IP limits, Network Security Groups, User-defined routes, and additional connectivity patterns like connectivity over Active/Active VPN gateway and ExpressRoute FastPath

General availability: Azure Sphere version 21.10 expected on Oct. 20, 2021

Participate in the retail evaluation now to ensure full compatibility. The OS evaluation period for 21.10 provides 14 days for backward compatibility testing.

Azure Functions Python 3.9 support is now generally available

Python developers can now take advantage of the version enhancements in Python 3.9 using Azure Functions.

Windows 11 is now generally available on Azure Virtual Desktop

Deploy Windows 11 desktops and applications on Azure Virtual Desktop and utilize new capabilities while optimizing for cost.

South Africa North Availability Zones now generally available

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

Korea Central Availability Zones now generally available

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

Azure Applied AI Services | Latest public preview enhancements to Azure Form Recognizer

Azure Form Recognizer now offers a pre-built version of the service in preview for document extraction as well as the following capabilities in preview: signature detection, hotel receipts processing, and deeper extraction of content from US driver's licenses. In addition, the service is now easier to use with Form Recognizer Studio and new REST APIs.

Azure Security Center: Public preview updates for September 2021

Public preview enhancements and updates released for Azure Security Center in September 2021.

General availability: Azure NetApp Files waitlist removal

Azure NetApp Files, one of the fastest growing bare-metal Azure services is now available to Azure customers directly from the Azure portal, CLI, API or with SDK – without having to go through waitlist approval process. 

Public preview of Azure NetApp Files Backup capability

Azure NetApp Files backup expands the data protection capabilities of Azure NetApp Files by providing fully managed backup solution for long-term recovery, archive, and compliance.

Azure NetApp Files Datastores for Azure VMware Solution is coming soon

Azure VMware Solution NFS datastores on Azure NetApp Files is currently in private preview and is coming soon. The solution provides more choice to optimize and scale storage for Azure VMware Solution environments.

HCX Enterprise Edition is now generally available for Azure VMware Solution

VMware HCX is the primary migration solution for organizations moving VMware workloads natively to a cloud service like Azure VMware Solution. The HCX Enterprise Edition, now generally available with Azure VMware Solution, is a premium HCX service that includes Replication Assisted vMotion and Mobility Optimized.

Azure VMware Solution now available in Brazil South and East US 2 regions

Azure VMware Solution has now expanded availability to Brazil South and East US 2, this update is in addition to the existing availability across multiple Azure regions in US, Europe, Australia, Japan, UK, Canada, and Southeast Asia.

Azure Stream Analytics: 2 new regions are now generally available

Azure Stream Analytics is a fully managed, real-time analytics service designed to help you analyze and process fast moving streams of data that can be used to get insights, build reports, or trigger alerts and actions. The service is now available in 2 new China regions.

General availability: Azure DevOps September 2021 updates

With September updates, we added support for wild cards and conditional expressions in YAML pipeline files. In addition, we included multiple improvements to Delivery Plans.

Azure Maps Geolocation Service is now generally available

Develop customized geolocation-based content and services with Azure Maps Geolocation.

General availability: Announcing the release of Swiss German dialect speech recognition support

Microsoft speech service just released the de-CH locale that recognizes Swiss dialects as well as standard German as part of our speech to text offering. This enables the creation of smart speech solutions tailored to Switzerland’s market needs.