In Cloud Computing This Week [Sept 3rd 2021]

This week, AWS announced the launch of Amazon Monitron Gateway (Ethernet) , a new gateway device that allows customers to use their ethernet network to connect Monitron to the internet. The ethernet gateway joins the Wi-Fi gateway that was launched in December 2020, giving customers even more options for Amazon Monitron internet connectivity. Amazon Monitron is an end-to-end  system that uses machine learning (ML) to detect abnormal conditions in industrial equipment, enabling you to implement predictive maintenance and reduce unplanned downtime. It includes sensors to capture vibration and temperature data from equipment, a gateway device to securely transfer data to AWS, the Amazon Monitron service that analyzes the data for abnormal equipment conditions using machine learning, and a companion mobile app to set up the devices and receive reports on operating behavior and alerts to potential failures in your equipment.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MariaDB now supports MariaDB minor versions 10.5.12 , 10.4.21 , 10.3.31 , and 10.2.40 . We recommend that you upgrade to the latest minor versions to fix known security vulnerabilities in prior versions of MariaDB, and to benefit from the numerous bug fixes, performance improvements, and new functionality added by the MariaDB community.

AWS CloudEndure Migration Factory Solution coordinates and automates manual processes for larger scaled migrations involving a substantial number of servers. This solutions implementation helps enterprises improve migration velocity and prevents long cutover windows by providing an orchestration and automation platform for rehosting servers to AWS at scale.

Amazon SageMaker is now available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region. Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed service that provides every developer and data scientist with the ability to build, train, and deploy machine learning (ML) models quickly. SageMaker removes the heavy lifting from each step of the machine learning process to make it easier to develop high quality models.

Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) now supports Intelligent-Tiering, a new capability that makes it easier for you to optimize costs for shared file storage, even when access patterns change. EFS Intelligent-Tiering is designed to help you achieve the right price and performance blend for your application file data by placing your file data in a storage class based on file access patterns.

The Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering storage class automates storage cost savings for a wider range of workloads by eliminating the minimum storage duration, and removing the low per-object monitoring and automation charges for objects smaller than 128 KB. S3 Intelligent-Tiering is the only cloud storage class that delivers automatic storage cost savings when data access patterns change, without performance impact or operational overhead. Previously, S3 Intelligent-Tiering was optimized for long-lived objects stored for a minimum of 30 days and objects larger than 128 KB. With these changes, S3 Intelligent-Tiering is the ideal storage class for data with unknown, changing, or unpredictable access patterns, independent of object size or retention period. You can use S3 Intelligent-Tiering as the default storage class for data lakes, analytics, and new applications.

Amazon EBS direct APIs now supports creating 64 TB EBS Snapshots directly from any block storage data, including on-premises data. With this new capability, customers can use EBS Snapshots for disaster recovery of their largest on-premises workloads and achieve business continuity in AWS at lower costs.

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) expands functionality by adding support for migrating multiple databases in one task using MongoDB and Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) as a source. Using AWS DMS, you can now group multiple databases of a MongoDB cluster and migrate them using one DMS task to any AWS DMS supported targets  including Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) with minimal downtime.

AWS Transfer Family now supports managed workflows that makes it easy for you to create, execute, and monitor post upload processing for file transfers over SFTP, FTPS, and FTP for Amazon S3 and Amazon EFS. Using this feature, you can save time with low code automation to coordinate all the necessary tasks such as copying and tagging. You can also configure custom logic to scan for errors in the data including Personal Identifiable Information (PII), viruses, malware, or incorrect file formats or types. With managed workflows, quickly detect anomalies and meet your compliance requirements with ease.

Amazon S3 Multi-Region Access Points accelerate performance by up to 60% when accessing data sets that are replicated across multiple AWS Regions. Based on AWS Global Accelerator, S3 Multi-Region Access Points consider factors like network congestion and the location of the requesting application to dynamically route your requests over the AWS network to the lowest latency copy of your data. This automatic routing allows you to take advantage of the global infrastructure of AWS while maintaining a simple application architecture.

NICE DCV is a high-performance remote display protocol that helps users to securely access remote desktop or application sessions, including 3D graphics applications hosted on servers with high-performance GPUs.

NICE DCV is a high-performance remote display protocol that helps customers securely access remote desktop or application sessions, including 3D graphics applications hosted on servers with high-performance GPUs.

AWS Lambda now supports AWS PrivateLink in previously unsupported Availability Zones in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), South America (São Paulo), Canada (Central), and EU (London) regions. With this launch, AWS Lambda now supports AWS PrivateLink in all Availability Zones in all commercial regions, AWS GovCloud (US-East), and AWS GovCloud (US-West). 

Amazon Polly, a service that turns text into speech, extends its offering to the AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region. Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Ayanda, Polly’s first South African English Neural Text-to-Speech (NTTS) voice, as well as full support for the entire portfolio of Amazon Polly's Neural and Standard voices in the AWS Africa (Cape Town) Region. With this launch, the service now supports 31 languages including 7 different varieties of English. Neural TTS voices are available in 12 AWS Regions.

AWS Security Hub Automated Response & Remediation solution is a reference implementation that includes a library of automated security response and remediation actions to common security findings. The solution makes it easier for customers to resolve common security findings and improve their security posture in AWS.

AWS Firewall Manager now enables security administrators to specify which web requests to log and which requests to exclude from logs when using AWS WAF to inspect web traffic. If you use Firewall Manager security policies to centralize AWS WAF logging, you can now log only the information you want to analyze. By reducing the amount of log data stored, you can reduce your log delivery and storage costs.

Now you can easily setup monitoring, alarms and dashboards for your Microsoft SQL Server Failover Cluster Instances (FCI) running on AWS and for applications using FSx managed storage with CloudWatch Application Insights. CloudWatch Application Insights is a capability that helps customers monitor and troubleshoot their enterprise applications running on AWS resources. The new feature adds automatic discovery of the database and managed storage, the FCI configuration and the underlying resources along with setting up the metrics, telemetry and logs for monitoring its health and wellness. 

Channel Assembly with AWS Elemental MediaTailor now lets you schedule programs based on a wall-clock time. Using "linear mode" you have fine-grained control of when individual sources will be played and which sources are to follow on a channel output. Looping mode is also available where timing on individual programs is loosely defined to ensure that there is content always playing on a channel output.

This week, AWS  were excited to announce that Amazon SageMaker Studio now supports Amazon EC2 M5d, R5, and P3dn instances. Customers can launch SageMaker Studio Notebooks with these instances types in the regions where they are available.

When you deploy SAP applications with AWS Launch Wizard it now saves the CloudFormation templates and application configuration code in your S3 buckets and creates an AWS Service Catalog product when deployment is complete. This allows you to leverage Launch Wizard-generated infrastructure as code to repeat deployments with identical configuration, or customize them to meet organizational requirements. This provides a number of benefits:

• Choice: Use the deployment tools (e.g. ServiceNow, Jira, CloudFormation) and processes of your choice.
• Versioning: Adopt new Launch Wizard features and capabilities at your own pace.
• Simplification: This launch allows you to reduce number of inputs needed for repeat deployments of the same product/pattern. For example, when deploying multiple HANA systems of same version in the same VPC and subnet, you can default these settings in AWS ServiceCatalog/AWS CloudFormation and let the end user only interact with other inputs that change from deployment to deployment.

This week, AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT) adds support for Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) metrics running on Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) in Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights (preview), enabling customers to easily collect container metrics and analyze them along with other metrics in Amazon CloudWatch. You can also collect AWS Lambda application metrics and send them to Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus (preview).

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for Oracle now supports the July 2021 Patch Set Update (PSU) for Oracle Database 12.1 and Release Updates (RU) for Oracle Database 12.2 and 19c.

This week, AWS were excited to announce the release of version 1.10 of AWS Copilot with support for publish/subscribe architectures that customers can use to decouple microservices and consume events asynchronously. Customers can now use AWS Copilot to build event-driven architectures or to decouple services in order to increase performance, reliability, and scalability.

Amazon Managed Grafana is now generally available. Amazon Managed Grafana is a fully managed, secure data visualization service that enables customers to query, correlate, and visualize operational metrics, logs, and traces for their applications across multiple data sources. Developed in collaboration with Grafana Labs, Amazon Managed Grafana manages the provisioning, setup, scaling, and maintenance of Grafana servers, eliminating the need for customers to do this themselves.

You can now configure routes in your subnet route tables to forward traffic between two subnets in a VPC, via virtual appliances such as network firewalls, intrusion detection and protection systems, etc.

This week AWS announced Dynamic Partitioning in Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose. With Dynamic Partitioning, you can continuously partition streaming data in Kinesis Data Firehose using keys within data like “customer_id” or “transaction_id” and deliver data grouped by these keys into corresponding Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) prefixes, making it easier for you to run high performance, cost-efficient analytics on streaming data in Amazon S3 using Amazon Athena, Amazon EMR, and Amazon Redshift Spectrum.

Application Manager, a capability of AWS Systems Manager, now supports additional features that help customers to easily manage their applications end-to-end, without switching consoles. With this release, IT professionals can edit application and resource tags, and invoke appropriate runbooks based on the application type, all within the Application Manager console.

This week, AWS IoT announced the general availability of several new enhancements for AWS IoT Device Management. These new features will enable customers to better monitor characteristics of their fleet over time, diagnose connectivity issues, and perform aggregation queries to group devices across different values.

Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (MWAA) is now available in six new AWS Regions: South America (Sao Paulo), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Canada (Central), EU (London), and EU (Paris).

Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition now supports PostgreSQL major version 13 in GovCloud regions. PostgreSQL 13  includes improved functionality and performance from enhancements such as de-duplication of B-tree index entries, improved performance for queries that use partitioned tables, incremental sorting to accelerate data sorts, parallel processing of indexes with the VACUUM command, more ways to monitor activity within a PostgreSQL database, new security capabilities, and more. This release also adds support for bool_plperl, which simplifies writing Perl procedures.

AWS Backint Agent now supports three new features: Amazon S3 Intelligent Tiering, the ability to send log and data backups to separate folders, and compatibility with Ansible.

AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) expands functionality by adding support for Redis, Amazon ElastiCache for Redis, and Amazon MemoryDB for Redis as targets. Redis is a fast, open-source, in-memory key-value data store for use as a cache, database, message broker, and queue. Amazon ElastiCache for Redis is a fully managed caching service that combines the speed, simplicity, and versatility of open-source Redis with manageability, security, and scalability from Amazon to power the most demanding real-time applications. Amazon MemoryDB for Redis is a Redis-compatible, durable, in-memory database service that delivers ultra-fast performance for modern, microservices applications. Using AWS DMS, you can now migrate data live from any AWS DMS supported sources  to Redis data stores with minimal downtime.

Now on EC2 Image Builder, customers can use events to trigger an image build schedule in their event-driven architectures. Integrate your image build schedule with your events from AWS services, our SaaS partners, and custom events, via Amazon EventBridge. You can also create rules for event patterns, such as listening for a specific variable, and configure those rules to initiate image builds using EC2 Image Builder.

AWS CloudFormation users can now choose to preserve the state of successfully deployed resources in the event of CloudFormation stack operation errors. Using this feature, you can retry the operation using an updated CloudFormation template and quickly iterate through feedback loops, shortening development cycles.

Cloud Composer 1.16.16 release started on August 30, 2021. Get ready for upcoming changes and features as we roll out the new release to all regions. This release is in progress at the moment. Listed changes and features might not be available in some regions yet.

Airflow 2.1.2 is available in Cloud Composer images.

(Airflow 2) Cloud Composer now supports the stable Airflow REST API. The stable Airflow REST API is enabled by default.

In the Cloud Console, a database's Query page now supports multiple query tabs so you no longer have to clear one query to create and run another. Additionally, you can enter multiple query and DML statements in a single query tab. When you do so, the Results and Explanation subtabs let you choose which statement's results or query plan you want to view. See A tour of the query editor for details.

Added support for changing the leader region location of a Cloud Spanner database.

Added support for the JSON data type. For more information, see Working with JSON data.