This week's roundup of all the cloud news.
Hi folks, it's been a reasonably quiet week in cloud computing , as usual we've read all the cloud computing news from the big three; AWS, Azure and GCP, so you don't have to.
AWS lead the way again this week with lots of new enhancements to existing services, a little from Microsoft and nothing out of the GCP camp.
Here's all the latest.
Amazon Lightsail now offers new OS blueprints
Amazon Lightsail now offers a variety of new OS-only instance blueprints, including Amazon Linux 2, Ubuntu 20, Windows Server 2019, and Debian 10. Lightsail provides a curated selection of blueprints that specify the operating system and software that is preinstalled on your instance bundle when it's created. With this launch, Lightsail now offers a wider variety of OS blueprints to choose from, making it even easier to build applications on your preferred OS with just a few clicks. Read More Here
AWS X-Ray launches anomaly detection based actionable insights
This week , AWS X-Ray launched in preview X-Ray Insights, which uses anomaly detection to create actionable insights about any anomalies in an application. With X-Ray Insights, you can proactively identify issues signaled by increases in the fault rate of an application.
With this feature, you can determine the root cause of the issue, visualize the upstream and downstream services affected by the anomaly, and understand its impact on your end users. You can also view the incident timeline to understand when the issue started and how it progressed.
AWS X-Ray Insights is available in the following AWS regions: US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), Canada (Central), South America (Sao Paulo), EU (London), EU (Frankfurt), EU (Ireland), EU (Milan), EU (Paris), EU (Stockholm), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Africa (Cape Town), Middle East (Bahrain). Read More Here
Amazon Kendra launches confidence scores
Amazon Kendra is a highly accurate and easy to use enterprise search service powered by machine learning. Starting today, AWS customers can use confidence scores in Amazon Kendra to improve the search experience and show the most relevant results for user queries.
Confidence scores allow customers to see the estimated accuracy of a search result. Amazon Kendra assigns confidence scores into four main categories: Very High, High, Medium, and Low for various document results (e.g. Factoid Answer, FAQ). With confidence scores, developers can better distinguish between returned results and set thresholds for when results should be displayed. By combining confidence scores with Amazon Kendra’s ability to intelligently search unstructured data using natural language, you can return more accurate answers and create a search experience that more closely resembles asking a human expert.
Confidence scores for Amazon Kendra is available in all AWS regions where Amazon Kendra is available. Read More Here
AWS CloudFront now supports TLSv1.3 for viewer connections
Amazon CloudFront now supports TLSv1.3 for improved performance and security. Amazon CloudFront is a global content delivery network (CDN) that enables you to securely distribute content to viewers with low latency and high availability. Amazon CloudFront supports HTTPS using Transport Layer Security (TLS) to encrypt and secure communication between your viewer clients and CloudFront. TLSv1.3 is the latest version of TLS.
Better Performance
TLSv1.3 provides better performance with a simpler handshake process that requires fewer roundtrips. TLSv1.3 requires one round-trip (1-RTT) compared to TLSv1.2 that requires two round trips (2-RTT) to negotiate a new secure connection which translates into real-world performance improvements with lower first byte latency. In our own internal tests in the US region as an example, first byte latency for new negotiated connections saw reductions of up to 33% for TLSv1.3 compared to previous versions of TLS.
Security Improvements
TLSv1.3 removes legacy features and older cipher suites that are present in previous versions of TLS. TLSv1.3 also supports only PFS (perfect forward secrecy) cipher suites that generate a one-time key used only for the current network session.
AWS Managed Blockchain now available in London Region
Amazon Managed Blockchain is a fully managed service that allows you to set up and manage a scalable blockchain network with just a few clicks. Amazon Managed Blockchain eliminates the overhead required to create the network, and automatically scales to meet the demands of thousands of applications running millions of transactions. Once your network is up and running, Amazon Managed Blockchain makes it easy to manage and maintain your blockchain network. It manages your certificates and lets you easily invite new members to join the network.
You can use Amazon Managed Blockchain in the following AWS regions: US East (N. Virginia), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Europe (Ireland), and now Europe (London). Read More Here
AWS Cost & Usage Report now offers Monthly Granularity
AWS management (payer) accounts can now set up AWS Cost & Usage reports at a monthly level. The AWS Cost & Usage Report contains the most comprehensive set of billing data available. In addition to the amount and corresponding cost of your AWS service usage it also includes metadata such as cost allocation tags and Cost Categories that you created, pricing and product information from the AWS Price List API, as well as your Savings Plan and Reserved Instance details.
With this release, you will be able to set up a Cost & Usage report that includes a daily update of cost and usage data to a monthly summary. This monthly file will include all of the columns in an hourly or daily Cost & Usage report but will result in a smaller overall file size. Most Monthly Cost & Usage reports will be a single file that can be opened using tools like Excel. The exact file size varies depending on the volume of AWS service usage and whether you decide to include resource IDs in your reports.
AWS IoT Events costs reduce by 86%+
This week AWS reduced the price of AWS IoT Events. AWS IoT Events is a fully managed service that makes it easy to detect and respond to changes indicated by IoT sensors and applications. For example, you can use AWS IoT Events to detect malfunctioning machinery, a stuck conveyor belt, or a slowdown in production output. When an event is detected, AWS IoT Events automatically triggers actions or alerts so that you can resolve issues quickly, reduce maintenance costs, and increase operational efficiency.
With AWS IoT Events, you pay for each message evaluated to determine the state of your equipment or processes. AWS are reducing the current price per message evaluation at the lowest usage tier in AWS IoT Events by 86%, and introducing additional usage tiers that provide higher discounts for workloads over 100 million message evaluations per month. The price of each message evaluation includes triggering of up to 2 actions to other AWS services. Each additional set of 2 actions will be metered and charged as an additional message evaluation. Read More Here
Amplify CLI now supports tagging resources at a project level
With this Amplify CLI release, you can now assign tags to Amplify-generated AWS resources (such as AppSync, S3 etc.). Tags are key-value pairs that allow you to categorize your resources in different ways, such as by cost center or owner, which simplifies cost allocation in your organization.
You can easily filter & manage tagged resources with AWS Resource Groups or set permission constraints with IAM based on specific tags. Read More Here
AWS CloudFront announces real-time logs
Amazon CloudFront now supports real-time log delivery of CloudFront access logs. Amazon CloudFront is a global content delivery network (CDN) that enables you to distribute content to viewers with low latency and high availability. The real-time logs contain detailed information about viewer requests that CloudFront receives. These logs are delivered to your Kinesis Data Streams in real time making it easy for you to monitor the performance of your content delivery and respond quickly to operational events.
AWS Bottlerocket Generally Available
This week Amazon Web Services announced the General Availability of Bottlerocket, a new open source Linux-based Operating System (OS) purpose-built to run containers. Bottlerocket includes only the software needed to run containers and comes with a transactional update mechanism. These properties enable customers to use container orchestrators to manage OS updates with minimal disruptions, enabling improved security and lower operational costs for containerized applications. AWS-provided Bottlerocket images are available for Amazon EKS (GA) and Amazon ECS (Preview). Bottlerocket is developed as an open source project on GitHub. Read More Here
Azure Connector for AWS Cost Management + Billing is GA
In 2019, Microsoft announced the preview of the connector for Azure Cost Management + Billing, which allows customers to analyze their Azure and AWS spend from a single pane of glass in the Azure Portal. Azure are excited to announce that this feature is now generally available. This new connector simplifies handling different cost models and numerous billing cycles so you can visualize and always stay up-to-date with your spend across clouds. Read how to set it up here
Azure Spring Cloud now Generally Available
Azure Spring Cloud—a fully managed service for Spring Boot apps—is now generally available. With Azure Spring Cloud, you can focus on building the apps that run your business without the hassle of managing infrastructure. Simply deploy your JARs or code and Azure Spring Cloud will automatically wire your apps with the Spring service runtime. Once deployed you can easily monitor application performance, fix errors, and rapidly improve applications.
Azure Spring Cloud is jointly built, operated, and supported by Microsoft and VMware. You can use Azure Spring Cloud for your most demanding applications and be assured that Microsoft and VMware are standing behind the service to ensure your success.
Azure Spring Cloud is now available in 10 regions—West US2, Central US, South Central US, East US, East US2, UK South, North Europe, West Europe, Southeast Asia, and Australia East—across four continents. Azure expect to add 10 more regions in the coming months. You can start using Azure Spring Cloud in production today.
UPComing Events: 
Google Cloud Next OnAir
Google's 9 Week Digital Event kicks off on July 14th with diverse topics being covered each week. The remaining include:
| Business Application Platform | September 8th |
Full Information and Session times here: https://cloud.withgoogle.com/next/sf
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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