Quite a bit of activity from AWS and GCP this week, Azure not so much.
All the details are below.
Here at Hava we were pleased with the response to the new embedded viewer which gives you the ability to embed your diagrams anywhere you can place an iframe. This comes in useful if you need to place diagrams into assets where the viewer doesn't have log in access to your Hava account.
You can read about the embedded viewer and see it in action here: https://www.hava.io/blog/embed-interactive-cloud-diagrams-anywhere
We're also close to making the new reporting module generally available. The initial report is an AWS well-architected compliance management report. You can read more about the new module here: https://docs.hava.io/reporting/compliance-reports.
If you would like the new module switched on ahead of GA, please let us know.
Here's all the latest from the big three.
AWS Lake Formation now supports cross account database sharing
AWS Lake Formation now supports cross account database sharing. You can now create cross account data lakes to access data across your organization and eliminate data silos.
Many organizations use multi-account setup for their Amazon S3 data lakes for a variety of reasons, including to limit blast radius in the case of a security issue, manage budgets by organization unit, or simplify administration overhead. However, this causes the data in these data lakes to be siloed and inaccessible to others. With Lake Formation cross account database sharing, and the seamless sharing it offers, you can now share data in your data lakes across other accounts, multiple organizational units, or your entire organization.
Amazon Inspector has expanded operating system support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Debian 10, and Windows Server 2019
Customers can now assess their EC2 workloads running Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Debian 10, and Windows Server 2019 for CVEs and external network accessibility using Inspector. Amazon Inspector is available in the following 14 regions: US East (Northern Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Northern California), US West (Oregon), EU (Frankfurt), EU (Ireland), EU (London), EU (Stockholm), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), AWS GovCloud (US-West), and AWS GovCloud (US-East).
Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics now supports Force Stop and a new Autoscaling status
Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics now allows you to Force Stop a running application and reset its status to Ready, giving you more control over your applications. In addition, you can check if your application is scaling up or down through the new ‘Autoscaling' application status.
Applications can sometimes become unresponsive and stuck in a transient status such as creating, updating, or stopping. This is often due to misconfigurations that cause the application to become unhealthy. You can choose to Force Stop unresponsive applications on the console or by setting the force flag in the StopApplication API. A Force Stop will cease data processing and move the application to a Ready status without taking additional actions like saving application state. You can go to the Troubleshooting Guide for best practices to help you avoid and mitigate unresponsive applications.
AWS Lambda Extensions: a new way to integrate Lambda with operational tools (in preview)
You can now use AWS Lambda with extensions for your favorite operational tools for monitoring, observability, security, and governance. Today, you can use extensions for the following tools: AppDynamics, Check Point, Datadog, Dynatrace, Epsagon, HashiCorp, Lumigo, New Relic, Thundra, Splunk, AWS AppConfig, and Amazon CloudWatch Lambda Insights.
Lambda makes it easy for developers and operators to focus on their business needs by reducing their operational overhead. To help customers operate their functions, Lambda provides native integrations for logs and metrics through Amazon CloudWatch, tracing through AWS X-Ray, tracking configuration changes through AWS Config, and recording API calls through AWS CloudTrail. Also, AWS Lambda Ready partners provide tools for application management, API integration, deployment, monitoring, and security. However, previously, customers who wanted to use non-AWS offerings told us it was complicated to integrate Lambda with other operational tools.
AWS CodeArtifact now supports AWS CloudFormation
AWS CodeArtifact now supports AWS CloudFormation, enabling customers to create and manage CodeArtifact repositories with CloudFormation.
AWS CodeArtifact is a fully managed artifact repository service that makes it easier for organizations of any size to securely store, publish, and share software packages used in their development process. With support for AWS CloudFormation, customers can automate creation and management of CodeArtifact resources without having to manually provision them through the console or write custom scripts.
Amazon CloudWatch Lambda Insights
Amazon CloudWatch Lambda Insights, now available in preview, enables you to monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize the performance of AWS Lambda functions. With this preview, you have access to automated dashboards summarizing the performance and health of your Lambda functions that provide visibility into issues such as memory leaks or performance changes caused by new function versions.
AWS Glue Streaming ETL jobs support schema detection and evolution
Streaming extract, transform, and load (ETL) jobs in AWS Glue can now automatically detect the schema of incoming records and gracefully handle schema changes on a per-record basis. Previously, you needed to specify the schema of incoming data using the AWS Glue Data Catalog and update ETL scripts to handle schema changes. The AWS Glue job can now do both for you, saving time on reworking code and increasing the flexibility of your ETL jobs.
Amazon ElastiCache on Outposts is now available
Amazon ElastiCache is now available on AWS Outposts. AWS Outposts bring native AWS services, infrastructure, and operating models to virtually any data center, co-location space, or on-premises facility. You can deploy Amazon ElastiCache on Outposts to set up, operate, and use cache on-premises, just as you would in the cloud. Amazon ElastiCache provides cost-efficient and resizable capacity for caching in Outposts, while automating time-consuming administration tasks including infrastructure provisioning, cluster setup, patching, and backups, freeing you to focus on your applications.
AWS Security Hub has a new UI
AWS Security Hub has improved how AWS display details for security standards, which are collections of automated security checks based on industry and regulatory frameworks like the Center for Internet Security's (CIS) AWS Foundational Benchmarks, the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), and AWS's own Foundational Security Best Practices.
Introducing Distributed Load Testing v1.1
Distributed Load Testing on AWS helps you easily simulate thousands of users connecting to your application so that you can better understand your application performance under load. The solution launches and configures containers on AWS Fargate to generate a specified number of transactions per second without having to provision servers.
This update adds support for JMeter test scripts. JMeter is a popular open source application for testing functional behavior and performance, and this update allows customers to use JMeter scripts to test the robustness of their applications. This update also introduces AWS Step Functions to reduce solution complexity.
Now launch Amazon SageMaker Studio in your AWS VPC
Amazon SageMaker Studio is the first fully integrated development environment (IDE) for machine learning (ML). With a single click, data scientists and developers can quickly spin up SageMaker Studio Notebooks for exploring datasets and building models. Starting today, you can choose to launch SageMaker Studio in your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) for fine-grained control on network access and internet connectivity of SageMaker Studio Notebooks. You can choose to completely disable public internet access for notebooks to add an additional layer of security.
AWS launch redesigned AWS Architecture Center
The redesigned AWS Architecture Center helps you find the information you need to design and operate reliable, secure, efficient, and cost-effective cloud applications, right from the start. The Architecture Center aggregates best practices, reference architecture deployments, reference architecture diagrams, and more, making it easier for you to discover what’s most important. The new Architecture Center also provides new ways for you to share feedback by voting on proposed guidance, requesting content, and more.
Amazon EKS now supports configurable Kubernetes service IP address range
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) now supports a configurable Kubernetes service IP address range. This enables customers with clusters running in a peered or direct connected network environment to ensure that their pods can communicate with external applications on networks outside the cluster.
HTTP/gRPC server streaming for Google Cloud Run
This week GCP announced the availability of server-side HTTP streaming for your serverless applications running on Cloud Run (fully managed). With this enhanced networking capability, your Cloud Run services can serve larger responses or stream partial responses to clients during the span of a single request, enabling quicker server response times for your applications.
GCP Cloud Functions announces major enhancements
Google Cloud Functions is a scalable pay-as-you-go Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS) platform that runs your code with zero server management. With its simple and easy-to-use developer experience, GCP were excited to extend Cloud Functions so that you can now use it to build end-to-end solutions for several key use cases.
Enhancements include:
Google introduce Dataflow Flex Templates
As data analysis grows within an organization, business teams need the ability to run batch and streaming jobs and leverage the code written by engineers. But re-running existing code often requires setting up a development environment and making slight code changes, which is challenging for people without a programming background.
With this challenge in mind, we recently introduced Dataflow Flex Templates, which make it even easier to turn any Dataflow pipeline into a reusable template that anyone can run
Microsoft introduce Azure Advisor Score
Advisor Score enables you to get the most out of your Azure investment using a centralized dashboard to monitor and work towards optimizing the cost, security, reliability, operational excellence, and performance of your Azure resources.
Advisor Score will help you:
Azure Red Hat Openshift price drops
In collaboration with Red Hat, Azure are dropping the price of Red Hat OpenShift licenses on Azure Red Hat OpenShift worker nodes by up to 77 percent. They’re also adding the choice of a three-year term for Reserved Instances (RIs) on top of the existing one year RI and pay as you go options, with a reduction in the minimum number of virtual machines required. The new pricing is effective immediately. Finally, as part of the ongoing improvements, Microsoft are increasing the SLA to be 99.95 percent.
With these new price reductions, Azure Red Hat OpenShift provides even more value with a fully managed, highly-available enterprise Kubernetes offering that manages the upgrades, patches, and integration for the components that are required to make a platform. This allows your teams to focus on building business value, not operating technology platforms.
UPComing Events:
Google Cloud Virtual Events
To support the unique needs of GCP customers in Europe, Middle East, and Africa, on 29 September GCP are kicking off a brand-new Next OnAir event exclusively for EMEA.
Google Cloud Next OnAir EMEA offers a full roster of curated content, including more than 30 new sessions specially tailored to the region. Join Google experts and local customers to learn how organizations are already transforming in the cloud, and connect and collaborate with industry experts to solve your toughest challenges.
Each week Google will be highlighting a different focus:
13 Oct: Infrastructure and security—Explore discussions on workload migration, management, and modernisation, and learn how to protect your business from online threats.
20 Oct: Data analytics, data management, databases, and Cloud AI—Learn about how to migrate and do more with your data on a serverless, fully-managed platform and with artificial intelligence.
27 Oct: Application modernization and business application platform—Explore how to develop and modernise applications with open source and other software, and how APIs give you better visibility and control.
Register today, for free, on the Next OnAir EMEA website. You’ll get full access to all 30+ sessions being presented throughout the five-week event alongside the more than 250 sessions created for the global Google Cloud Next ’20: OnAir program.
Azure Virtual Events
Microsoft have a full schedule of Virtual Events
A full list including session times and details are here : https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/community/events/
AWS Events:
AWS events are pretty fluid at the moment, with most in-person events being cancelled or postponed. There are a number that have been taken online and full details can be found here: https://aws.amazon.com/events/
Thanks for reading again this week, we hope you found something useful.
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