In Cloud Computing This Week [Sep 23rd 2022]

Amazon Corretto 19 is now generally available

Amazon Corretto 19 is now generally available. This version supports the latest OpenJDK feature release and is available on Linux, Windows, and macOS. You can download Corretto 19 from our downloads page.

Highlights of OpenJDK 19 include previews of Record Patterns, a new Foreign Function & Memory API, and Virtual Threads. Developers will get improved data navigation using Record Pattern Matching, which offers more sophisticated, composable data queries.

Also in preview in this release is a Foreign Function & Memory API, which will allow you to more easily interoperate with native code outside the JVM, and Virtual Threading, which will improve the developer experience when writing, maintaining and observing high-throughput concurrent applications.

There is a new incubating feature for Structured Concurrency. Plus, you will get updates to the Pattern Matching for switch statements preview feature and to the incubating Vector API. Structured Concurrency will streamline error handling and cancellation, improve reliability, and enhance observability by treating multiple tasks running in different threads as a single unit of work.

For more information about OpenJDK 19, a detailed description of the features can be found on the OpenJDK 19 Project page. Amazon Corretto is a no-cost, multi-platform, production-ready distribution of OpenJDK. Corretto is distributed by Amazon under an open source license.

AWS IoT Device Management Secure Tunneling now supports simultaneous TCP connections

AWS IoT Device Management Secure Tunneling now provides support for multiple simultaneous TCP connections, unlocking new use cases for advanced troubleshooting on remote devices.

Secure Tunneling allows customers to establish bidirectional communication to remote devices using SSH, VNC or RDP. Now with multiple simultaneous TCP connections, customers can establish tunnels to access HTTP-based applications that typically make several connections for assets like images, javascript, and css.

For example, you can now remotely access a web application that is running on a device to gain real-time telemetry or perform administrative tasks in a web-based GUI.
Simultaneous TCP connections using Secure Tunneling is available to customers through the AWS Console and CLI in all AWS Regions where AWS IoT Device Management is available. To use this feature, customers need to install the V3 local proxy.

To learn more about this feature, see the documentation. To learn more about Secure Tunneling or managing connected devices at scale using Amazon IoT Device Management, please visit the Secure Tunneling documentation and Amazon IoT Device Management website respectively.

Amazon Polly adds Cantonese language support

Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech. This week, AWS are excited to announce the general availability of Hiujin, Amazon Polly’s first Cantonese speaking, neural text to speech (NTTS) voice

TTS voices simplify the way you can create, implement, update, and maintain your speech-enabled applications and products. You can use Amazon Polly to enhance the user experience and improve the accessibility of your text content with the power of voice. Common use cases include interactive voice response (IVR) systems, audiobooks, newsreaders, eLearning content, and virtual assistants.

Hiujin is available as a neural voice in all of the 13 AWS regions supporting NTTS. It offers human-like pausing and intonation. In addition, Hiujin provides full support for traditional Chinese characters and limited support for simplified characters.

As English is one of the official languages in Hong Kong and mixing English words with Cantonese is very common, we have optimized the performance on common English-Cantonese mixed sentence to make Hiujin sound more natural. With this launch, the Amazon Polly portfolio now includes 96 voices across 34 languages and language variants.

Announcing local clusters for Amazon EKS on Outposts

This week, AWS were excited to announce the general availability of local clusters for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) on Outposts, which enable you to run highly available Kubernetes clusters in on-premises environments.

Local clusters enable you to run the entire Amazon EKS cluster locally on Outposts, so you can mitigate the risk of application downtime that can result from temporary network disconnects to the cloud, such as those caused by fiber cuts or weather events. Because the entire Kubernetes cluster runs locally on Outposts, applications remain available, and you can perform cluster operations during network disconnects to the cloud.

When connected to the cloud, Amazon EKS manages the availability of the Kubernetes control plane on Outposts, so you can simplify your Kubernetes operations. Local clusters run the same Kubernetes as Amazon EKS in the cloud, and automatically deploy the latest security patches to make it easier for you to maintain an up-to-date, secure cluster. You can use the same tooling you use with Amazon EKS in the cloud for a consistent experience across on-premises and cloud environments.

Local clusters are generally available for use with Outposts racks. You can create local clusters from the following AWS Regions: US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (London), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), South America (São Paulo), Middle East (Bahrain).

AWS CloudTrail Lake now supports import of CloudTrail Logs from Amazon S3

AWS CloudTrail Lake now supports the ability to import CloudTrail event logs from an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket to CloudTrail Lake. You can bring your existing CloudTrail logs into an existing or new CloudTrail Lake event data store.

This lets you consolidate historical CloudTrail event logs with new CloudTrail events collected in CloudTrail Lake into a single event data store in CloudTrail Lake. Once you have created your consolidated event data store in CloudTrail Lake, you can use it to run queries on all your logs, including events brought over from your trails.

The CloudTrail Lake import capability supports copying logs from an Amazon S3 bucket that stores logs from across multiple AWS accounts (from an organization trail) and multiple AWS Regions. You can also copy logs from individual accounts and single-region trails.

The import capability also lets you specify an import date range, so that you only import the subset of logs that are needed for long-term storage and analysis in CloudTrail Lake.
The import feature is available in the following AWS Regions: US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), Canada (Central), Europe (Ireland), Europe (London), Europe (Paris), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Stockholm), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Osaka), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), and South America (Sao Paulo).

Amazon SageMaker Automatic Model Tuning is now available through SageMaker Search

Amazon SageMaker Automatic Model Tuning allows you to find the most accurate version of your machine learning model by finding the optimal set of hyperparameter configurations for your dataset. SageMaker Automatic Model Tuning is now integrated with the SageMaker Search API, which lets you quickly find and evaluate the most relevant model tuning jobs from potentially hundreds or thousands of them.

Starting this week, you can quickly organize, track and evaluate your model tuning jobs through SageMaker Search. You now have the flexibility to search your tuning jobs based on multiple attributes, including the hyperparameter job name, current status, last-modified time and the tags you have added to your tuning jobs.

You can also compare and sort your tuning jobs based on these attributes. This integration helps you to keep track of the tuning jobs created and quickly find the ones you are looking for, thus accelerating the discovery of the best model.

Amazon SNS now supports message signatures based on SHA256 hashing

Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) now supports message signature based on SHA256 hashing, which provides security improvements over SHA1. To choose the hashing algorithm, either SHA256 or SHA1, you can use the SetTopicAttributes API action. Amazon SNS signs the messages delivered from your topic, so that the subscribed HTTP endpoints can verify the authenticity of the messages.

Amazon SNS is a fully managed messaging service for both application-to-application (A2A) and application-to-person (A2P) communication. The A2A pub/sub functionality provides topics for high-throughput, push-based, many-to-many messaging between distributed systems, micro-services, and event-driven serverless applications. The A2P functionality enables you to send messages to users at scale via SMS, mobile push, and email.

Amazon SNS supports both SHA256 and SHA1 in all public AWS Regions and AWS GovCloud (US).

Amazon EMR on EKS now supports Spark SQL through the StartJobRun API

AWS are excited to announce that Amazon EMR on EKS release 6.7.0 and onwards includes the ability to run Apache Spark SQL scripts through the StartJobRun API.

Spark SQL is a Spark module for structured data processing. Unlike the Spark DataFrame API, Spark SQL interfaces provide Spark with more information about the structure of both the data and computation being performed.

Internally, Spark SQL uses this extra information to perform additional optimizations. With this release, you can run Spark SQL queries and Spark SQL-based ETL pipelines directly through Amazon EMR on EKS’ StartJobRun API.

Amazon EMR on EKS users rely on the StartJobRun API to kick-off Spark jobs. Previously, to run Spark SQL scripts, users had to embed their SQL scripts in interfaces such as PySpark, which required user modifications to existing Spark SQL scripts.

As part of this release, a new Spark SQL job driver is added to the Amazon EMR on EKS’ base image that users use to run their Spark jobs. Users will now be able to supply SQL entry-point files to run Spark SQL queries on Amazon EMR on EKS using the StartJobRun API directly, without any modifications to existing Spark SQL scripts. This feature is available in all regions where Amazon EMR on EKS is available.

Easily install and update the CloudWatch Agent with Quick Setup

This week, AWS Systems Manager Quick Setup announced support for installing and periodically updating the CloudWatch Agent. With this new launch, you can now easily deploy and keep up to date the CloudWatch Agent in instances across accounts and Regions at scale with a few clicks.

To get started, choose Quick Setup from the Systems Manager left navigation menu and select the “Distributor” QuickSetup.

Systems Manager Quick Setup support for AWS Organizations is available in US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), Europe (London), Europe (Paris), and South America (São Paulo) AWS Regions

AWS Elemental MediaConnect adds support for SRT caller mode

AWS Elemental MediaConnect now supports Secure Reliable Transport (SRT) caller mode for both sources and outputs in MediaConnect flows. SRT caller mode provides greater flexibility when configuring video transport workflows using MediaConnect.

SRT, an open source protocol backed by the 575+ member SRT Alliance, helps deliver video reliably across the internet.

SRT has two primary connection modes: caller and listener. SRT listener mode is already supported by MediaConnect for both sources and outputs, and with the addition of SRT caller, you can now use SRT in any source to output connection combination (i.e. listener to caller, caller to listener, caller to caller, and listener to listener).

SRT caller in MediaConnect also supports both passphrase and streamID variables for encryption and advanced workflows.

SRT caller is supported in all AWS Regions where MediaConnect is available. MediaConnect supports a growing number of reliable transport protocols including Zixi, RIST, and Fujitsu QoS.

Amazon Redshift announces enhanced system logs with consistent durability

Amazon Redshift customers use the system table/views (STL/SVL) to get insight into query executions for their performance and auditing needs. These system table/views are powered by system logs and generated by Amazon Redshift cluster.

Amazon Redshift enhances the system log durability and now allows the users to fetch up to seven days of system log data irrespective of instance type, cluster size and workload on the cluster. The system logs are now also persisted across the pause and resume of your cluster.

Non-USD accounts can now view more cost information with the Commitment Analysis Dashboard

Customers with non-USD billing accounts now have additional information (including local currency cost data) available to them within the committed use discount dashboard and have been granted access to the Commitments Analysis Dashboard.

View all on-demand spend applicable for committed use discounts (CUDs)

You can now view all CUD-eligible usage without any active commitments within the Commitment Analysis Dashboard for further cost optimization opportunities.