Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Starting today, the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) G5 instances powered by NVIDIA A10G Tensor Core GPUs are now available in US East (Ohio), Asia Pacific (Jakarta, Seoul, Sydney), Middle East (UAE), and South America (Sao Paulo). G5 instances can be used for a wide range of graphics intensive and machine learning use cases. They deliver up to 3x higher performance for graphics-intensive applications and machine learning inference over Amazon EC2 G4dn instances. For training simple to moderately complex machine learning models, they deliver up to 3.3x higher performance than G4dn instances. View the full article

AWS, or Amazon Web Services, stands at the forefront of the IT and cloud revolution in the industry. Till 2022, as per HG Insights data report, over 1.45 million businesses are buying services from AWS. To ensure exceptional results from cloud infrastructure, these businesses are increasingly hiring AWS professionals for numerous domains. However, salary and career scope rely on various factors: job location, experience, skills, etc. This blog explicitly covers the nuances of the AWS Certified Solutions Architect profile. It will take a deep dive into aspects like AWS solutions architect salary, who an AWS solution architect is, what they do, certifications to upskill a…

It’s now summer in the northern hemisphere, and you can feel it in London where I live. But let’s not get distracted by the nice weather and go through your AWS updates from the previous seven days. Last Week’s Launches Another interesting week with many announcements! Here are some that got more of my attention: AWS Step Functions – You can now use versions and aliases to maintain multiple versions of your workflows, track which version was used for each execution, and create aliases that route traffic between workflow versions. To learn more, refer to this blog post. AWS SAM – You can now simplify the way you define an AppSync GraphQL API in AWS SAM with the new …

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) Optimized Writes now supports m5d, r5d, and m6gd database (DB) instances. With Amazon RDS Optimized Writes, you can improve the write throughput for Amazon RDS for MySQL and MariaDB workloads by up to 2x at no additional cost. This is especially useful for write-intensive database workloads, commonly found in applications, such as digital payments, financial trading, and online gaming. View the full article

Amazon Connect now provides the ability to search for existing tags within an instance, both programmatically via API and within the UI. When tagging resources, you can now search from pre-existing key:value pairs before creating new ones. For example, administrators can create a tag such as “Division:ConsumerCredit”, and users with permissions to tag resources within the same instance will be able to view and apply “Division:ConsumerCredit”, to save time and avoid mistakenly creating new variations of the intended tag such as “Division:CC” or “Div:ConsumerCredit”. To learn more about how to search for tags within an instance, see the Administrative Guide. View the full …

Amazon Pinpoint journeys now offers organizations the ability to estimate local time zone and allows them to contact customers at convenient times. Journeys are customized, multi-step engagement experience to send customer communication across channels such as SMS, email, push notifications, and voice. View the full article

Amazon Redshift, a fully-managed cloud data warehouse, now supports native integration with ThoughtSpot from the Amazon Redshift Console. Thoughtspot simplifies the exploration and analysis of data in a user friendly environment without the need for complex transformations or technical expertise. View the full article

Starting today, you can now use AWS Control Tower with workloads that require FedRAMP High categorization level in the AWS GovCloud (US-East and US-West) Regions. View the full article

The AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) Command Line Interface (CLI) announces the launch of remote invoke command which enables developers to quickly invoke their AWS Lambda functions deployed to the AWS cloud. The AWS SAM CLI is a developer tool that makes it easier to build, test, package, and deploy serverless applications. View the full article

AWS currently offers 12 certification exams validating cloud skills and expertise across a variety of roles, specialties, and skill levels, ranging from Foundational to Associate, Professional, and Specialty certifications. Achieving AWS Certification requires a wide array of both technical knowledge and hands-on skills, and it’s a significant feat even for those professionals who have worked in the cloud field for years. This level of achievement doesn’t happen by accident. In 2018 the idea of earning all 12 AWS Certifications probably wouldn’t have crossed Ian Butler’s mind. But after a combination of his company’s accelerating cloud journey, the COVID-19 lockdown, hi…

Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) has increased the maximum per file system throughput on Amazon EFS Provisioned Throughput mode by 3x. With this launch, you now have a cost-effective way to drive up to 10 GiB/s of read throughput and 3 GiB/s of write throughput for workloads including machine learning, data processing, analytics, and transcoding that demand consistent and high levels of throughput performance. View the full article

Amazon MQ now supports cross-region data replication for ActiveMQ brokers on Amazon MQ. This feature allows you to build regionally resilient messaging applications using continuous asynchronous message replication from a primary broker to a replica broker in a standby AWS region with a few clicks, eliminating the need to use third-party tools or custom code to replicate data between regions. View the full article

AWS Glue now provides data preview for streaming jobs in Glue Studio that helps data engineers accelerate their Streaming ETL job development. View the full article

Today, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) announces the general availability of support for FIDO2 security keys in the AWS GovCloud (US-East and US-West) Regions. The FIDO2 specifications rely on public key cryptography, enabling cryptographically secure and phishing-resistant multi-factor (MFA) authentication. View the full article

Sensitive data detection feature in AWS Glue can now detect over 250 sensitive entity types from 50 countries out-of-the-box. View the full article

Online proctoring is a testing environment that allows you to take an exam from any private space, such as your home or office. In this post, I’ll share five tips that can help you be successful and confident taking an AWS Certification exam via online proctoring. To maintain our high bar for earning an AWS Certification, our exams are taken in a proctored, timed environment. However, that doesn’t mean you have to go in-person to a testing center to take your exam. With online proctoring, you use your own computer for the exam, and converse with a proctor—in English, Japanese, Spanish (Latin America), or Mandarin, —who remotely monitors your exam via a screen-sharing ap…

Today, AWS announces expanded AWS CloudFormation support for AWS Security Hub, which allows you to use CloudFormation to deploy Security Hub and manage its standards and controls. Using the updated AWS::SecurityHub::Hub resource, you can now enable Security Hub, decide if it should be provisioned with default standards (the AWS Foundational Security Best Practices and CIS Foundations Benchmark version 1.2), and opt into its Consolidated Control Findings capability. You can also use the new AWS::SecurityHub::Standard resource to enable specific security standards such as NIST 800-53 or PCI DSS and manage individual controls in them. This expanded integration is available i…

Amazon MemoryDB for Redis is now in scope for FedRAMP Moderate in the US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (N. California), and US West (Oregon) Regions. You can now use MemoryDB to build applications for workloads that are subject to FedRAMP Moderate compliance. View the full article

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MariaDB now supports MariaDB minor versions 10.6.14, 10.5.21, and 10.4.30. 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 bug fixes, performance improvements, and new functionality added by the MariaDB community. View the full article

AWS Transfer Family now delivers logs in a structured JSON format across all resources – including servers, connectors, and workflows – and all protocols – including SFTP, FTPS, FTP, and AS2. The new format allows you to easily parse and query your logs using CloudWatch Log Insights, which automatically discovers JSON formatted fields. You’ll also benefit from improved monitoring with support for CloudWatch Contributor Insights, which requires a structured log format to track top users, total number of unique users, and their ongoing usage. View the full article

AWS Step Functions announces the availability of Versions and Aliases, improving resiliency for deployments of serverless workflows. AWS Step Functions is a visual workflow service capable of orchestrating over 11,000+ API actions from over 250 AWS services to automate business processes and data processing workloads. View the full article

Starting today, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) R6i instances are available in AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad). Amazon EC2 R6i instances are powered by 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code named Ice Lake) with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.5 GHz. They offer up to 50 Gbps of network bandwidth and up to 40 Gbps of bandwidth to the Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS). These instances are built on AWS Nitro System, a collection of AWS designed hardware and software innovations that enables the delivery of efficient, flexible, and secure cloud services with isolated multi-tenancy, private networking, and fast local storage. View the full article

AWS Lambda now supports Ruby 3.2 as a managed runtime and a container base image in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. Developers creating serverless applications in Lambda with Ruby 3.2 can take advantage of new features such as endless methods, a new Data class, improved pattern matching, and performance improvements. For more information on Lambda’s support for Ruby 3.2, see our blog post at Ruby 3.2 runtime now available in AWS Lambda. View the full article

AWS Lambda now supports Java 17 as a managed runtime and a container base image in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. Developers creating serverless applications in Lambda with Java 17 can take advantage of new language features including Java records, sealed classes and multi-line strings. The Lambda Java 17 runtime also has numerous performance improvements. For more information on Lambda’s support for Java 17, see our blog post at Java 17 runtime now available in AWS Lambda. View the full article

AWS Lambda now supports Python 3.10 as a managed runtime and a container base image in the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. Developers creating serverless applications in Lambda with Python 3.10 can take advantage of numerous Python language enhancements to make code more readable and maintainable. These include pattern matching for data structures, parenthesized context managers to simplify managing resources such as file handles or database connections, and better error handling. For more information on Lambda’s support for Python 3.10, see our blog post at Python 3.10 runtime now available in AWS Lambda. View the full article

Serverless application developers can now build AppSync powered applications in AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM) with the new AWS::Serverless::GraphQLApi resource abstraction. AWS AppSync is a managed service that makes it easier to build scalable APIs that connect applications to data with a GraphQL endpoint. Before today, SAM customers had to work through a learning curve while building their AppSync applications in a SAM template: SAM customers wanting to use AppSync could only use AppSync’s CloudFormation resources in their SAM template. IAM permissions had to be managed individually by the user, requiring IAM expertise to successfully and safely inte…

New minor versions of Microsoft SQL Server are now available on Amazon RDS for SQL Server, offering performance and security fixes. Amazon RDS for SQL Server supports the new minor versions for SQL Server 2014, 2016, 2017, and 2019 on the Express, Web, Standard, and Enterprise Editions. View the full article

AWS Amplify announces the UI Builder Figma plugin, empowering design and development teams to seamlessly collaborate within a Figma file. Use this plugin with the Amplify UI kit to easily theme your components, upgrade to new UI kit versions, and generate and preview React code from your designs directly in Figma. View the full article

Amazon Connect has reduced prices for Toll Free (TFN) rates for Australia and New Zealand in the Asia Pacific (Sydney) region. This includes reductions of Australia TFN inbound minutes by 54% from $0.0540/min to $0.025/min and New Zealand TFN inbound minutes by 52% from $0.2205/min to $0.1069/min. View the full article

Today, AWS Purchase Order Management announces the general availability of ‘Attribute-based & Resource-based access control’ for purchase orders (POs) created in the AWS Console. This launch allows you to tag purchase orders (POs) that are created on AWS Console and control access at a resource level with IAM policies. The AWS console also offers the ability to manage resource tags. View the full article

Today, AWS announces the general availability of bandwidth reduction filtering for the AVC and HEVC encoders in AWS Elemental MediaConvert. The bandwidth reduction filter is a perceptual input preprocessing filter which removes temporal noise from video sources while minimizing impact on visual quality. The filter uses human vision system models to reduce imperceptible signals and temporal noise, which often originate from camera sensors. View the full article

AWS Lambda now supports starting from a specific timestamp when using Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) or Self-Managed Kafka as an event source. Previously, Kafka event source mappings could only have starting positions of trim horizon or latest. Now with starting from a timestamp, you can start processing messages at a precise point in time. This is useful for situations like Disaster Recovery, where you need a new consumer to quickly start processing where you previously left off. View the full article

We brought you a Let’s Architect! blog post about open-source on AWS that covered some technologies with development led by AWS/Amazon, as well as well-known solutions available on managed AWS services. Today, we’re following the same approach to share more insights about the process itself for developing open-source. That’s why the first topic we discuss in this post is a re:Invent talk from Heitor Lessa, Principal Solutions Architect at AWS, explaining some interesting approaches for developing and scaling successful open-source projects. This edition of Let’s Architect! also touches on observability with Open Telemetry, Apache Kafka on AWS, and Infrastructure as Code…

Starting today, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) M6gd instances are available in Europe (Paris) region. These instances are powered by AWS Graviton2 processors and are built on the AWS Nitro System, a collection of AWS designed hardware and software innovations that enables the delivery of efficient, flexible, and secure cloud services with isolated multi-tenancy, private networking, and fast local storage. These instances offer up to 25 Gbps of network bandwidth and up to 19 Gbps of bandwidth to the Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS). View the full article

Amazon Redshift offers comprehensive encryption capabilities to protect your data at rest. Now, Amazon Redshift further enhances the experience of encrypting the warehouse with RA3 node types by reducing the overall encryption time and improving the availability of the warehouse during the encryption process. View the full article

Today, AWS Application Discovery Service introduces a public API to estimate the cost of running your existing on-premises servers in AWS. View the full article

Today, we are excited to announce that Amazon EMR now publishes events for insufficient instance capacity. This launch makes it simpler for customers to troubleshoot EC2 instance capacity issues by providing them an easy way to view which instance types have insufficient capacity. Additionally, customers can use these events to create rules to be notified when there is insufficient instance capacity, as well as react to changes in their EMR cluster. These new events are automatically enabled for both current and earlier Amazon EMR on EC2 releases and no further action is needed. View the full article

Starting today, customers can create proforma pricing rules to control the application of free tier offers for specific AWS services in AWS Billing Conductor (ABC). Using service-scoped free tier pricing rules, customers can model a proforma chargeback workflow that only shares their always free tier benefits with a targeted set of accounts, those within a specific billing group. For example, a customer can choose to isolate their always free tier offer for AWS Step Functions (4,000 state transitions per month) to a “sandbox” billing group meant for experimentation, simplifying customers’ free tier chargeback model for specific accounts throughout the month. View the full…

AWS Transfer Family has earned the official Drummond Group AS2 Cloud Certification Seal. Drummond Group is an independent provider of testing and certification services for various industry standards and protocols. This certification verifies that AWS Transfer Family’s Applicability Statement 2 (AS2) capabilities are compatible and interoperable with fourteen third-party AS2 vendors commonly used for business-to-business (B2B) communication. View the full article

Starting today, Amazon Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) T4g instances are available in Asia Pacific (Jakarta, Melbourne, Osaka), Europe (Zurich) and Middle East (Bahrain) regions. These instances are powered by Arm-based AWS Graviton2 processors and deliver up to 40% better price performance over T3 instances. The T4g instances provide a baseline level of CPU performance with the ability to burst CPU usage at any time for as long as required. T4g instances offer a balance of compute, memory, and network resources for a broad spectrum of general purpose workloads, such as large scale micro-services, caching servers, search engine indexing, e-commerce platforms, and virtual deskt…

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner is being updated to reflect changes in trends, the industry landscape, and the work practices of cloud professionals. If you are preparing for this exam, you have the option to take the current exam (CLF-C01) on or before September 18, 2023, or the updated AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam (CLF-C02) starting September 19, 2023. Passing this certification validates foundational understanding of the commonly used AWS services, support options, and concepts around the value proposition of AWS. You do not need prior cloud experience to prepare for and take this exam. AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner is designed to be an entry point to le…

AWS announces the general availability of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Hpc7g instances. Amazon EC2 Hpc7g instances are powered by AWS Graviton processors, which are custom Arm-based processors designed by AWS. Arm-based architectures are known for their higher core counts with better performance per watt and their energy efficiency owing to simple instructions (RISC) that generate less heat, offering better heat dissipation. View the full article

You can now target allocation of Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts to specific AWS Outpost hosts. With targeted Dedicated Host allocations, you can control the deployment location of your workloads on specific Outposts racks. This allows you to allocate Dedicated Hosts on physical servers closely located on the same Outposts rack to achieve low latency goals. You can also use this feature to spread workloads on hardware across multiple Outposts racks for additional resiliency. View the full article

I joined Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a Solutions Architect in September 2022. I’d had a keen interest in learning cloud—especially AWS—for the last couple of years and had the opportunity to start learning when I worked on AWS for one of my clients. As a result, I quickly skilled up and pursued a handful of AWS Certifications in quick succession in 2021: AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner, AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate, and AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate, and AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional. After joining AWS, I continued my learning journey and earned AWS Certified Developer – Associate and AWS Certified DevOps Engineer – P…

At AWS re:Invent 2022, Adam Selipsky, CEO of AWS, explained high performance computing (HPC) workloads typically can either be compute-intensive, compute- and networking-intensive, or data- and memory-intensive in his keynote. Compute workloads include weather forecasting, computational fluid dynamics, and financial options pricing. To help with this, you have Amazon EC2 Hpc6a instances, which deliver up to 65 percent better price performance over comparable compute optimized x86-based instances. Other HPC workloads require modeling the performance of complex structures—things like wind turbines, concrete buildings, and industrial equipment. Without enough data and…

Today, AWS announces the general availability of the new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) C7gn instances, powered by the latest-generation AWS Graviton processors. Amazon EC2 C7gn instances feature the new 5th generation AWS Nitro Cards and deliver the highest network bandwidth, the best packet-processing performance, and the best price performance for network-intensive workloads. C7gn instances offer up to 200 Gbps network bandwidth and up to 3x higher packet-processing performance per vCPU versus comparable current generation x86-based network optimized instances. Amazon EC2 C7gn instances are built on the AWS Nitro System. The Nitro System is a collection of A…

The C7gn instances that we previewed last year are now available and you can start using them today. The instances are designed for your most demanding network-intensive workloads (firewalls, virtual routers, load balancers, and so forth), data analytics, and tightly-coupled cluster computing jobs. They are powered by AWS Graviton3E processors and support up to 200 Gbps of network bandwidth. Here are the specs: Instance Name vCPUs Memory Network Bandwidth EBS Bandwidth c7gn.medium 1 2 GiB up to 25 Gbps up to 10 Gbps c7gn.large 2 4 GiB up to 30 Gbps up to 10 Gbps c7g…

Amazon Corretto nightly builds are now available at downloads.corretto.aws for Linux, Windows and Mac platforms. Developers can now test the latest OpenJDK community code and bug fixes without waiting for the next quarterly release. View the full article

Companies continue to adopt software as a service (SaaS) applications at a rapid clip, with recent research showing that the average SaaS portfolio now has at least 200 applications. While organizations purchase these purpose-built tools to make their employees more productive, they now must contend with growing security complexities, context switching, and data silos. If your company faces these issues, or you want to avoid them in the future, join us on Tuesday, June 27, for a free-to-attend online event AWS Applications Innovation Day. AWS will stream the event simultaneously across multiple platforms, including LinkedIn Live, Twitter, YouTube, and Twitch. You can al…

AWS Config now supports 21 more resource types for services, including AWS Amplify, AWS App Mesh, AWS App Runner, Amazon AppStream 2.0, Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra), AWS CodeArtifact, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon CloudWatch Evidently, Amazon Forecast, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, Amazon Pinpoint, AWS Signer, Amazon SageMaker, and AWS Transfer Family. View the full article