Episode 70 - March / April Tech Round-up

AWS TechChat

In this Episode of AWS TechChat, Shane and Pete embark on a different style of the show and share with you a lot of updates - over 30 updates and we tackle it like speed dating. We start the show with some updates, there are now an additional 2 AWS regions, Milan in Italy and Cape Town in South Africa. This brings the region count to 24 Regions and 76 Availability Zones. Amazon Guard Duty has a price reduction for the customers who are consuming it on the upper end of the scale, VPC flow log scanning is now 40% cheaper when your logs are more than 10,000GB. Lots of Database engine updates: • Database engine version updates across almost all engines. Microsoft SSAS (SQL Server Analysis Studio) is now available on Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for SQL Server now. • If you are currently running SSAS on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), you can now save costs by running SSAS directly on the same Amazon RDS DB instance as your SQL Server database. SSAS is currently available on Amazon RDS for SQL Server 2016 and SQL Server 2017 in the single-AZ configuration on both the Standard and Enterprise edition. • NoSQL Workbench for Amazon DynamoDB is now is now generally available. NoSQL Workbench is a client-side application, available for Windows and macOS that helps developers build scalable, high-performance data models, and simplifies query development and testing. • Apache Kafka is an option for AWS Database Migration Service and Amazon Managed Apache Cassandra Service is now available in public preview. Microsoft SQL Server on RDS now supports Read Replicas. Storage updates: • More nitro based Amazon EC2 systems receive IO performance updates. • Amazon FSx for Windows File Server is now has a Magnetic HDD option which brings storage down to 1.3cents per GB. • Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) announces 400% increase in read operations for General Purpose mode file systems. On Development front: • AWS Lambda@Edge now supports Node 12.x and Python 3.8. • Amplify CLI add support for additional AWS Lambda runtimes (Java, Go, .NET and Python) and Lambda cron jobs. • AWS Lambda now supports .NET Core 3.1. • Receive notifications for AWS CodeBuild, AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodeDeploy, and AWS CodePipeline in Slack, no need to use Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) and AWS Glue. • Amazon MSK adds support for Apache Kafka version 2.4.1 • Updates to AWS Deep Learning Containers for PyTorch 1.4.0 and MXNet 1.6.0 Containers updates: • AWS Fargate launches platform version 1.4 which brings a raft of improvements. • Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) updates service level agreement to 99.95%. • Amazon EKS now supports service-linked roles. • Amazon EKS adds envelope encryption for secrets with AWS Key Management Service (KMS). • Amazon EKS now supports Kubernetes version 1.15 • Amazon ECS supports in preview updating placement strategy and constraints for existing Amazon ECS Services without recreating the service. Connect your managed call centre in the cloud: • Introducing Voicemail for Amazon Connect. • Amazon Connect adds custom terminating keypress for DTMF. Other updates: • New versions of Elastic Search available for Amazon Elastic Search. • AWS DeepComposer is now shipping from Amazon.com Speakers: Shane Baldacchino - Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS Peter Stanski - Head of Solution Architecture, AWS AWS Events: AWS Summit Online https://aws.amazon.com/events/summits/online/ AWSome Day Online Conference https://aws.amazon.com/events/awsome-day/awsome-day-online/ AWS Innovate AIML Edition on-demand https://aws.amazon.com/events/aws-innovate/machine-learning/ AWS Events and Webinars https://aws.amazon.com/events/