Amazon Web Services (AWS)

AWS App Mesh Controller for Kubernetes v1.4.0 is now available and includes support for enhanced ingress traffic management capabilities. The AWS App Mesh Controller for Kubernetes provides a way to configure and manage AWS App Mesh using Kubernetes directly. AWS App Mesh is a service mesh that provides application-level networking to standardize how your services communicate, giving you end-to-end visibility and allowing high availability for your applications. View the full article

Amazon Polly is a service that turns text into lifelike speech. Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of the Neural Text-to-Speech (NTTS) version of Vicki, a German Polly voice. Now, Amazon Polly customers can enjoy Vicki either as an NTTS or a Standard German voice. View the full article

Today we announced the general availability of AWS Elemental Link UHD, a High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) encoding device that connects a live ultra-high definition (UHD) video source, like a camera or other video production equipment, to AWS Elemental MediaLive for video processing in the AWS cloud. View the full article

Amazon Translate – a fully managed neural machine translation service that delivers high-quality, affordable, and customizable language translation in 71 languages and variants – is now integrated with Amazon CloudWatch Events and Amazon EventBridge. Starting today, you can use CloudWatch events to monitor the progress and completion of your Batch Translation jobs. View the full article

AWS IoT Analytics now supports custom partitioning on AWS IoT Analytics data stores, enabling customers to partition their data stores based on both timestamp and non-timestamp attributes. You can use this feature to create partitioned data stores so that your queries can run more efficiently as they will scan less data and hence run faster. The option to define a custom partition scheme on an AWS IoT Analytics data store will be made available at the time of creation for both customer managed and service managed data stores. Partitions can be created either on top of channel message attributes or data store attributes resulting from pipeline activities. View the full a…

AWS Backup, now, by default, creates crash-consistent backups of Amazon EBS volumes that are attached to an Amazon EC2 instance. Customers no longer have to stop their instance, or coordinate between multiple Amazon EBS volumes attached to the same Amazon EC2 instance to ensure crash-consistency of their application state. View the full article

AWS Client VPN is now available in AWS GovCloud (US). You can now provide VPN access to your remote workforce to securely access resources in AWS GovCloud (US) regions. View the full article

Today, we are excited to announce increased customer control of AWS Elemental MediaConnect input source selection and failover behavior. View the full article

Today, Amazon Lex increased the default service limits for intents and slot types. With the increased limits, you can expand the bot to support additional conversation flows. You can now create up to 1,000 intents and 250 slot types per locale, an increase from previous limits of 100 each. View the full article

Starting today AWS Transit Gateway supports internet group management protocol (IGMP) multicast in the Africa (Cape Town), EU (Milan), Middle East (Bahrain), and Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) AWS Regions. View the full article

Amazon Managed Blockchain now supports customer-managed customer master keys (CMKs) for Hyperledger Fabric networks. Customers can encrypt new member-specific resources using their own CMK. These CMKs are declared in AWS Key Management Service (KMS) and used by Amazon Managed Blockchain. Each member can use their own CMK and manage it according to their security policy. View the full article

Today, AWS announces the general availability of AWS Proton, the first fully managed delivery service for container and serverless applications. It is designed to provide platform teams the management tools, governance, and visibility needed to provide consistent standards and best practices when managing deployments, while helping to increase developer productivity and innovation. View the full article

Today, AWS Systems Manager Quick Setup announces support for Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS), enabling you to set up Amazon EFS client (amazon-efs-utils) across all the Amazon EC2 instances in your organization with a few clicks. In addition to installing and configuring the Amazon EFS client, Quick Setup also supports periodically updating the client to the latest available version. View the full article

Today, AWS China (Beijing) Region* has added a third Availability Zone (AZ) to support the high demand of our growing customer base. An Availability Zone (AZ) is one or more discrete data centers with redundant power, networking, and connectivity in an AWS Region. AZs give customers the ability to operate production applications and databases that are more highly available, fault tolerant, and scalable than would be possible from a single data center. View the full article

AWS Audit Manager is now available in the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) and Canada (Central) Regions. View the full article

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) on AWS Outposts now supports PostgreSQL 13.2, 13.1, and 12.6 for production deployment. Amazon RDS on Outposts allows you to deploy fully managed database instances in your on-premises environments. AWS Outposts is a fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs, and tools to virtually any datacenter, co-location space, or on-premises facility for a truly consistent hybrid experience. You can deploy Amazon RDS on Outposts to set up, operate, and scale MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server and PostgreSQL relational databases on-premises, just as you would in the cloud. View the full article

Financial Services Security and Compliance Framework is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from Airwalk Reply, an AWS Financial Services Competency Partner. Financial Services Security and Compliance Framework helps customers establish continuous compliance through the use of cloud-native tools, market-leading products, and Airwalk Reply's own Continuous Compliance Framework (CCF). Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers assessment, control framework implementation, customization, and deployment and operational handover. View the full article

Starting today, Amazon EMR Studio is available in US East (Ohio, N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Canada (Central), Europe (Ireland, Frankfurt, London, and Stockholm), and Asia Pacific (Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo) regions. View the full article

AWS Glue Studio now allows you to specify the settings for your streaming extract-transform-and-load (ETL) job in the visual job editor. This feature allows you to optimize your AWS Glue streaming ETL jobs for your use case. You can choose the window size for reading data from the data stream, whether to detect the schema of each record or use the schema from the AWS Glue Data Catalog, and connection settings that fine-tune how the AWS Glue job reads from the stream. View the full article

Starting today, you can launch your RDF/SPARQL or Apache TinkerPop graph application using R5d instances on Amazon Neptune. The R5d instance type is based on the Amazon EC2 Nitro System and includes local NVMe-based SSD block level storage. Neptune R5d instances introduce a lookup cache that leverages the low-latency NVMe SSD storage to improve read query performance and reduce data retrievals from storage. View the full article

Amazon Neptune has simplified the console experience for creating Neptune clusters and Neptune notebooks. The new experience allows you to provision a new cluster and a new notebook instance at the same time. Now, customers only need to take one step to get started with Amazon Neptune. View the full article

AWS has updated its service level agreement (SLA) for AWS Transit Gateway to 99.99%. View the full article

S3 Inventory and S3 Batch Operations add support to identify and copy objects to use S3 Bucket Keys, reducing the costs of Server-Side Encryption (SSE) with AWS Key Management Service (KMS). S3 Bucket Keys reduce the request costs of SSE-KMS by decreasing the request traffic from S3 to KMS. You can configure your bucket to use an S3 Bucket Key for AWS KMS-based encryption on new objects. With this update, you can use S3 Inventory and S3 Batch Operations to configure S3 Bucket Keys while creating encrypted copies of millions or billions of existing objects, reducing the cost of server-side encryption requests with AWS KMS. View the full article

Learn how to leverage the power of machine learning to automatically identify critical issues, security vulnerabilities, and hard-to-find bugs during application development with our new digital course, Improve Code Quality with Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer. In this course, you’ll learn how to use Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer to identify recommendations to improve the quality and security of your code. View the full article

Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra), a scalable, highly available, and fully managed Cassandra-compatible database service, now supports customer managed customer master keys (CMKs) for encryption of data at rest to help you meet your compliance and regulatory requirements. View the full article

Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) is a fully-managed messaging service that supports application-to-person (A2P) workloads, including mobile text messaging (SMS). Now, when you start using Amazon SNS to send SMS, your SMS workloads start in an isolated testing environment, called the SMS sandbox. View the full article

We are delighted to announce the addition of Disaster Recovery for AWS IoT to the AWS Solutions Implementations portfolio. AWS Solutions Implementations help you solve common problems and build faster using the AWS platform. View the full article

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. View the full article

We're excited to announce that Redshift ML is now generally available. Amazon Redshift ML enables you to create, train, and deploy machine learning (ML) models using familiar SQL commands. With Amazon Redshift ML, you can now leverage Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed machine learning service, without moving your data or learning new skills. View the full article

You can now route traffic from your custom root domains (such as example.com) to your Lightsail container services using Lightsail DNS. Lightsail DNS already supported creating CNAME records mapping to your container services. With this launch, Lightsail DNS supports aliasing your custom root domain to your container service’s default domain which was not possible before. Thus, you can create an A/AAAA record in your Lightsail hosted DNS zone pointing the zone apex to a container service. View the full article

AWS Security Hub now supports a bidirectional integration with Atlassian Jira Service Management (JSM). You can now automatically create and update issues in Atlassian JSM from AWS Security Hub findings. Updates to those issues in Atlassian JSM will be synced with the findings in AWS Security Hub. This integration is available via the AWS Service Management Connector for JSM app. After downloading the app, you can decide if you want to send all findings, or only certain findings with specific severity levels to JSM. When you make an update to various fields in an issue, such as state or priority, those changes are automatically sent to AWS Security Hub so that AWS Securi…

You can now manage access to Contact Trace Records (CTRs), Call Recordings, and Chat Transcripts in the Contact Search page of your Amazon Connect instance using agent hierarchies. Agent hierarchy is an Amazon Connect feature that allows administrators to group users together. Now they can use these groups to control access to results in the contact search experience. For example, administrators can grant supervisors the permission to view the contacts handled by only the agents in their hierarchy, and no others. This feature provides you with the flexibility to help meet your enterprise security and compliance standards. View the full article

Customers can now connect PingFederate to AWS Single Sign-On (SSO) once, manage access to AWS centrally in AWS SSO, and enable end users to sign in using PingFederate to access all their assigned AWS accounts. The integration helps customers simplify AWS access management across multiple accounts while maintaining familiar Ping Identity experiences for administrators who manage identities, and for end users as they sign in. AWS SSO and PingFederate use standards-based automation to provision users and groups into AWS SSO, saving administration time and increasing security. View the full article

A common problem in software development is accidentally or unintentionally merging code with bugs, defects, or security vulnerabilities into your main branch. Finding and mitigating these faulty lines of code deployed to the production environment can cause severe outages in running applications and can cost unnecessary time and effort to fix. Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer tackles this issue using automated code reviews, which allows developers to fix the issue based on automated CodeGuru recommendations before the code moves to production. This post demonstrates how to use CodeGuru for automated code reviews and uses an AWS CodeCommit approval process to set up a code ap…

A common problem in software development is accidentally or unintentionally merging code with bugs, defects, or security vulnerabilities into your main branch. Finding and mitigating these faulty lines of code deployed to the production environment can cause severe outages in running applications and can cost unnecessary time and effort to fix. Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer tackles this issue using automated code reviews, which allows developers to fix the issue based on automated CodeGuru recommendations before the code moves to production. This post demonstrates how to use CodeGuru for automated code reviews and uses an AWS CodeCommit approval process to set up a code ap…

Gitlab CI is a tool utilized by many enterprises to automate their Continuous integration, continuous delivery and deployment (CI/CD) process. A Gitlab CI/CD pipeline consists of two major components: A .gitlab-ci.yml file describing a pipeline’s jobs, and a Gitlab Runner, an application that executes the pipeline jobs. Setting up the Gitlab Runner is a time-consuming process. It involves provisioning the necessary infrastructure, installing the necessary software to run pipeline workloads, and configuring the runner. For enterprises running hundreds of pipelines across multiple environments, it is essential to automate the Gitlab Runner deployment process so as to be d…

Gitlab CI is a tool utilized by many enterprises to automate their Continuous integration, continuous delivery and deployment (CI/CD) process. A Gitlab CI/CD pipeline consists of two major components: A .gitlab-ci.yml file describing a pipeline’s jobs, and a Gitlab Runner, an application that executes the pipeline jobs. Setting up the Gitlab Runner is a time-consuming process. It involves provisioning the necessary infrastructure, installing the necessary software to run pipeline workloads, and configuring the runner. For enterprises running hundreds of pipelines across multiple environments, it is essential to automate the Gitlab Runner deployment process so as to be d…

This post was written in collaboration with Kapil Thangavelu, CTO at Stacklet Amazon DevOps Guru is a machine learning (ML) powered service that helps developers and operators automatically detect anomalies and improve application availability. DevOps Guru utilizes machine learning models, informed by years of Amazon.com and AWS operational excellence to identify anomalous application behavior (e.g., increased latency, error rates, resource constraints) and surface critical issues that could cause potential outages or service disruptions. DevOps Guru’s anomaly detectors can also proactively detect anomalous behavior even before it occurs, helping you address issues be…

This post was written in collaboration with Kapil Thangavelu, CTO at Stacklet Amazon DevOps Guru is a machine learning (ML) powered service that helps developers and operators automatically detect anomalies and improve application availability. DevOps Guru utilizes machine learning models, informed by years of Amazon.com and AWS operational excellence to identify anomalous application behavior (e.g., increased latency, error rates, resource constraints) and surface critical issues that could cause potential outages or service disruptions. DevOps Guru’s anomaly detectors can also proactively detect anomalous behavior even before it occurs, helping you address issues be…

Amazon DevOps Guru is an ML powered service that makes it easy to improve an application’s operational performance and availability. By analyzing application metrics, logs, events and traces, DevOps Guru identifies behaviors that deviate from normal operating patterns and creates insights that you can use to improve your application. At re:Invent 2021, we announced a new tagging feature in DevOps Guru. This feature allows you to organize resources into logical applications, using AWS resources tags so that you can have more control over how applications are defined. Well-defined applications enable DevOps Guru to group related anomalies together to better identify probl…

Amazon DevOps Guru is an ML powered service that makes it easy to improve an application’s operational performance and availability. By analyzing application metrics, logs, events and traces, DevOps Guru identifies behaviors that deviate from normal operating patterns and creates insights that you can use to improve your application. At re:Invent 2021, we announced a new tagging feature in DevOps Guru. This feature allows you to organize resources into logical applications, using AWS resources tags so that you can have more control over how applications are defined. Well-defined applications enable DevOps Guru to group related anomalies together to better identify probl…

Observability in a container-centric environment presents new challenges for operators due to the increasing number of abstractions and supporting infrastructure. In many cases, organizations can have hundreds of clusters and thousands of services/tasks/pods running concurrently. This post will demonstrate new features in Amazon DevOps Guru to help simplify and expand the capabilities of the operator. The features include grouping anomalies by metric and container cluster to improve context and simplify access and support for additional Amazon CloudWatch Container Insight metrics. An example of these capabilities in action would be that Amazon DevOps Guru can now identify…

Observability in a container-centric environment presents new challenges for operators due to the increasing number of abstractions and supporting infrastructure. In many cases, organizations can have hundreds of clusters and thousands of services/tasks/pods running concurrently. This post will demonstrate new features in Amazon DevOps Guru to help simplify and expand the capabilities of the operator. The features include grouping anomalies by metric and container cluster to improve context and simplify access and support for additional Amazon CloudWatch Container Insight metrics. An example of these capabilities in action would be that Amazon DevOps Guru can now identify…

AWS re:Invent is a learning conference hosted by Amazon Web Services for the global cloud computing community. We are super excited to join you at the 10th annual re:Invent to share the latest from AWS leaders and discover more ways to learn and build. Let’s celebrate this milestone, which will be offered in person in Las Vegas (November 29-December 3) and in virtual (November 29–December 10) formats. The health and safety of our customers, and partners remains our top priority and you can learn more about it in health measures page. For details about the virtual format, check out the virtual section. If you haven’t already registered, don’t forget to register and save yo…

AWS re:Invent is a learning conference hosted by Amazon Web Services for the global cloud computing community. We are super excited to join you at the 10th annual re:Invent to share the latest from AWS leaders and discover more ways to learn and build. Let’s celebrate this milestone, which will be offered in person in Las Vegas (November 29-December 3) and in virtual (November 29–December 10) formats. The health and safety of our customers, and partners remains our top priority and you can learn more about it in health measures page. For details about the virtual format, check out the virtual section. If you haven’t already registered, don’t forget to register and save yo…

Amazon DevOps Guru is a fully managed service that uses machine learning (ML) to continuously analyze and consolidate operational data streams from multiple sources, such as Amazon CloudWatch metrics, AWS Config, AWS CloudFormation, AWS X-Ray, and provide you with a single console dashboard. This dashboard helps customers improve operational performance and avoid expensive downtime by generating actionable insights that flag operational anomalies, identify the likely root cause, and recommend corrective actions. As customers scale their AWS resources across multiple accounts and deploy DevOps Guru across applications and use cases on these accounts, they get a siloed vi…

Amazon DevOps Guru is a fully managed service that uses machine learning (ML) to continuously analyze and consolidate operational data streams from multiple sources, such as Amazon CloudWatch metrics, AWS Config, AWS CloudFormation, AWS X-Ray, and provide you with a single console dashboard. This dashboard helps customers improve operational performance and avoid expensive downtime by generating actionable insights that flag operational anomalies, identify the likely root cause, and recommend corrective actions. As customers scale their AWS resources across multiple accounts and deploy DevOps Guru across applications and use cases on these accounts, they get a siloed vi…

Applying various transformations to images at scale is an easily parallelized and scaled task. As a Computer Vision research team at Amazon, we occasionally find that the amount of image data we are dealing with can’t be effectively computed on a single machine, but also isn’t large enough to justify running a large and potentially costly AWS Elastic Map Reduce (EMR) job. This is when we can utilize AWS Batch as our main computing environment, as well as Cloud Development Kit (CDK) to provision the necessary infrastructure in order to solve our task. In Computer Vision, we often need to represent images in a more concise and uniform way. Working with standard image file…

Applying various transformations to images at scale is an easily parallelized and scaled task. As a Computer Vision research team at Amazon, we occasionally find that the amount of image data we are dealing with can’t be effectively computed on a single machine, but also isn’t large enough to justify running a large and potentially costly AWS Elastic Map Reduce (EMR) job. This is when we can utilize AWS Batch as our main computing environment, as well as Cloud Development Kit (CDK) to provision the necessary infrastructure in order to solve our task. In Computer Vision, we often need to represent images in a more concise and uniform way. Working with standard image file…

Critical business applications are monitored in order to prevent anomalies from negatively impacting their operational performance and availability. Amazon DevOps Guru is a Machine Learning (ML) powered solution that aids operations by detecting anomalous behavior and providing insights and recommendations for how to address the root cause before it impacts the customer. This post demonstrates how Amazon DevOps Guru can detect an anomaly following a critical AWS Lambda function deployment and its remediation recommendations to fix such behavior. Solution Overview Amazon DevOps Guru lets you monitor resources at the region or AWS CloudFormation level. This post will d…

Critical business applications are monitored in order to prevent anomalies from negatively impacting their operational performance and availability. Amazon DevOps Guru is a Machine Learning (ML) powered solution that aids operations by detecting anomalous behavior and providing insights and recommendations for how to address the root cause before it impacts the customer. This post demonstrates how Amazon DevOps Guru can detect an anomaly following a critical AWS Lambda function deployment and its remediation recommendations to fix such behavior. Solution Overview Amazon DevOps Guru lets you monitor resources at the region or AWS CloudFormation level. This post will d…

AWS Cloud Map now provides the ability to configure the negative caching for DNS queries. AWS Cloud Map is a cloud resource discovery service that allows customers to define custom names for their application resources, such as Amazon Elastic Container Services (ECS) tasks, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, Amazon DynamoDB tables, or any other cloud resource. They can then use these custom names to discover the network location and metadata of these cloud resources from their applications using AWS SDK and authenticated API queries. View the full article

Amazon Kendra is an intelligent search service powered by machine learning, enabling organizations to provide relevant information to customers and employees, when they need it. View the full article

In this post, we discuss how you can use AWS Fault Injection Simulator (AWS FIS), a fully managed fault injection service used for practicing chaos engineering. AWS FIS supports a range of AWS services, including Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), a managed service that helps you run Kubernetes on AWS without needing to install and operate your own Kubernetes control plane or worker nodes. In this post, we aim to show how you can simplify the process of setting up and running controlled fault injection experiments on Amazon EKS using pre-built templates as well as custom faults to find hidden weaknesses in your Amazon EKS workloads. What is chaos engineerin…

AWS CodeBuild is a fully managed build service that offers curated Docker images. These managed images provide build environments for programming languages and runtimes such as Android, Go, Java, Node.js, PHP, Python, Ruby, Docker, and .Net Core. However, there are a lot of existing CPP-based applications, and developers may have difficulties integrating these applications with the AWS CPP SDK. CodeBuild doesn’t provide Docker images to build CPP code. This requires building a custom Docker image to use with CodeBuild. This post demonstrates how you can create a custom build environment to build CPP applications using aws-sdk-cpp. We provide an example Docker file to bu…

Integrating AWS CloudFormation template scanning into CI/CD pipelines is a great way to catch security infringements before application deployment. However, implementing and enforcing this in a multi team, multi account environment can present some challenges, especially when the scanning tools used require external API access. This blog will discuss those challenges and offer a solution using Trend Micro Cloud One Conformity (formerly Cloud Conformity) as the worked example. Accompanying this blog is the end to end sample solution and detailed install steps which can be found on GitHub here. We will explore explore the following topics in detail: When to detect …

We are delighted to announce the addition of Tag Tamer to the AWS Solutions Implementations portfolio. AWS Solutions Implementations help you solve common problems and build faster using the AWS platform. View the full article

During the software development lifecycle, organizations have adopted peer code reviews as a common practice to keep improving code quality and prevent bugs from reaching applications in production. Developers traditionally perform those code reviews manually, which causes bottlenecks and blocks releases while waiting for the peer review. Besides impacting the teams’ agility, it’s a challenge to maintain a high bar for code reviews during the development workflow. This is especially challenging for less experienced developers, who have more difficulties identifying defects, such as thread concurrency and resource leaks. With Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer, developers have …

In the first post of this series, we introduced a continuous compliance workflow in which an enterprise security and compliance team can release guardrails in a continuous integration, continuous deployment (CI/CD) fashion in your organization. In this post, we focus on the technical implementation of the continuous compliance workflow. We demonstrate how to use AWS Developer Tools to create a CI/CD pipeline that releases guardrails for Terraform application workloads. We use the Terraform-Compliance framework to define the guardrails. Terraform-Compliance is a lightweight, security and compliance-focused test framework for Terraform to enable the negative testing cap…

In a microservices world, it’s common to share as little as possible between services. This enables teams to work independently of each other, helps to reduce wait times and decreases coupling between services. However, it’s also a common scenario that libraries for cross-cutting-concerns (such as security or logging) are developed one time and offered to other teams for consumption. Although it’s vital to offer an opt-out of those libraries (namely, use your own code to address the cross-cutting-concern, such as when there is no version for a given language), shared libraries also provide the benefit of better governance and time savings. To avoid these pitfalls when…

AWS CloudFormation StackSets can extend the functionality of CloudFormation Stacks by enabling you to create, update, or delete one or more stack across multiple accounts. As a developer working in a large enterprise or for a group that supports multiple AWS accounts, you may often find yourself challenged with updating AWS CloudFormation StackSets. If you’re building a CI/CD pipeline to automate the process of updating CloudFormation stacks, you can do so natively. AWS CodePipeline can initiate a workflow that builds and tests a stack, and then pushes it to production. The workflow can either create or manipulate an existing stack; however, working with AWS CloudFormatio…

AWS customers with Git repositories in Azure DevOps can automatically backup their repositories in the AWS Cloud using an AWS CodeCommit repository as a replica. By configuring an Azure DevOps pipeline, the source and replica repositories can be automatically kept in sync. When updates are pushed to the source repository, the pipeline will be triggered to clone the repository and push it to the replica repository in AWS. In this post, we show you how to automatically sync a source repository in Azure DevOps to a replica repository in AWS CodeCommit using an Azure DevOps pipeline. Solution overview The following diagram shows a high-level architecture of the pipeline.…

DevSecOps software factory implementation can significantly vary depending on the application, infrastructure, architecture, and the services and tools used. In a previous post, I provided an end-to-end DevSecOps pipeline for a three-tier web application deployed with AWS Elastic Beanstalk. The pipeline used cloud-native services along with a few open-source security tools. This solution is similar, but instead uses a containers-based approach with additional security analysis stages. It defines a software factory using Kubernetes along with necessary AWS Cloud-native services and open-source third-party tools. Code is provided in the GitHub repo to build this DevSecOps s…

Starting today, Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB) is available in the Europe (London) region. Amazon QLDB is a fully managed ledger database that provides a transparent, immutable, and cryptographically verifiable transaction log. You can use QLDB to track all application data changes, and maintain a complete and verifiable history of changes to your data over time. View the full article

AWS Network Firewall is now available in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. View the full article

Amazon Textract is a machine learning service that automatically extracts text, handwriting and data from scanned documents that goes beyond simple optical character recognition (OCR) to identify, understand, and extract data from forms and tables. We continuously improve the underlying machine learning models based on customer feedback to provide even better accuracy. Today, we are pleased to announce an accuracy enhancement update to our forms extraction feature. Starting today, Textract more accurately detects the checkboxes and key-value pairs within documents and images. The accuracy is especially improved for invoices and receipts, but customers will see improvement…

AWS Control Tower announces enhancements to accessibility and improvements in both the console and overall performance of the service. View the full article

AWS Managed Services (AMS) now offers self-service reporting on key operational metrics. AWS Managed Services provides operational reports on your Managed Environment for both traditional and next generation workloads. You can access the rich set of operational reports in your managed accounts through AWS Managed Services console. You can also access the operational reporting data through a secure S3 bucket that AMS provides for your analytics and business intelligence needs. View the full article

AWS Step Function is stated as the serverless orchestration service. It allows the individuals to blend AWS Lambda functions with other associated AWS services for building business-oriented applications. With the graphical console of step functions, you get the potential to see the workflow of your business, specified by the event-driven steps. AWS Step functions are based upon the state machines & tasks. A state machine is defined as a workflow, whereas a task is a state within a workflow. The task represents a single work unit that is performed by other AWS services. Every step within a running workflow is known as a state. Hence, there is more to AWS Step Functi…

Amazon Connect now allows you to enable Amazon Connect Customer Profiles in Canada (Central) region, equipping contact center agents with the most up to date information about the incoming contact to provide faster and more personalized customer service. Customer Profiles automatically brings together customer information from multiple applications such as Salesforce, Amazon S3 and ServiceNow into a unified customer profile, delivered to agents at the beginning of the customer interaction. View the full article

AWS CloudFormation is a dedicated service offered by Amazon for helping the users set up and model the AWS resources. It allows you to spend less time and focus upon managing the AWS resources, and direct your focus towards the applications that run within AWS. You can create a template that gives a description of the resources within AWS that you want, such as Amazon RDS DB instances or Amazon EC2 instances. CloudFormation intends to take optimal care of configuration and provisioning of those AWS resources for the users. There is no more necessity of creating or configuring these resources individually, as AWS CloudFormation takes proper care of that. In this article, …

Preparing for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Exam? Here we’ve a list of AWS Solutions Architect Associate Exam Questions and Answers for you to prepare well for the AWS Solution Architect Associate exam. AWS certification training plays an important role in the journey of AWS certification preparation as it validates your skills in depth. Also, the practice questions play an important role in getting you ready for the real time examination. AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate Exam AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate exam is for those who are performing the role of solutions architect with at least one year of experience in designing scal…

Amazon Elasticsearch Service is the powerhouse to help you deploy, operate & scale respective Elasticsearch clusters within the AWS cloud. Amazon Elasticsearch offers you direct access to the Elasticsearch APIs and automatically replaces the failed nodes. If you intend to use AWS Elasticsearch for your operations, then it is better for you to know about some of the crucial factors associated with it. Important Points about AWS Elasticsearch In this article, you will know about some of the crucial elements or factors that will help you decide whether to invest in Amazon Elasticsearch Service. Let’s dive in! Supported Versions of Elasticsearch Amazon Elasticsearc…

Customer experience is a key differentiator for retailers, and improving this experience comes through speed and reliability. An e-commerce website is one of the first applications customers use to interact with your brand. For a long time, testing an application has been the only way to battle-test an application before going live. Testing is very effective at identifying issues in an application, through processes like unit testing, regression testing, and performance testing. But this isn’t enough when you deploy a complex system such as an e-commerce website. Planning for unplanned events, circumstances, new deployment dependencies, and more is rarely covered by tes…

AWS Elasticsearch service intends to help you deploy, scale & operate Elasticsearch over the AWS cloud. If you already have a clean and crisp knowledge of the concepts of Elasticsearch, then you are definitely willing to get started with it. But, it is important for you to know the right approach steps to ensure that you get the job done efficiently. This is the AWS Elasticsearch tutorial to help you understand the process of creating and configuring an Elasticsearch domain by using the dedicated Amazon service. With these steps, you will get a clear idea of how to get the domain online quickly. So, follow this tutorial till the end! Recommended: Read out our previo…

WhizLabs had the honor of hosting a webinar with Brian H. Hough who is a Cloud and Blockchain Developer and AWS Community Builder. He has won the Global Hackathon five times and is currently the CTO of Airblock Technologies. With his extensive experience in the industry, he set out to explain AWS databases with the help of AWS Databases use cases to young freshers and professionals. His agenda of the webinar followed: Overview of AWS Databases Brief History of Serverless Databases Walkthrough of 9 Types of AWS Databases Getting Started With Your Own App Brian says that he is really passionate about data and databases, and he sees “data as the energy flowing throug…

Elasticsearch is counted as the most popular and preferable open-source analytics and search engine. It is preferred for a set of use cases that includes clickstream analytics, real-time application monitoring, and log analytics. Setting up and configuring the AWS Elasticsearch domain is quite easy and convenient. You will need just a few minutes over the AWS Management Console for creating your domain. There is more to it that you must know about Amazon Elasticsearch, and this article intends to help you with a detailed definition of AWS Elasticsearch. Introduction to AWS Elasticsearch Elasticsearch is an analytics and search engine that is open source and RESTful, bui…

Many organizations host ideation events to innovate and prototype new ideas faster. These events usually run for a short duration and involve collaboration between members of participating teams. By the end of the event, a successful demonstration of a working prototype is expected and the winner or the next steps are determined. Therefore, it’s important to build a working proof of concept quickly, and to do that teams need to be able to share the code and get peer reviewed in real time. In this post, you see how AWS Cloud9 can help teams collaborate, pair program, and track each other’s inputs in real time for a successful hackathon experience. AWS Cloud9 is a clou…

Amazon SageMaker Pipelines, the first purpose-built continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) service for machine learning (ML), now supports a new callback step that allows customers to integrate any task or job outside Amazon SageMaker as a step in the model building pipeline. When a callback step is invoked, the current execution of a SageMaker model building pipeline will pause and wait for an external task or job to return a task token that was generated by SageMaker at the start of call back step execution. You can use the call back step to include processing jobs external to SageMaker such a Spark job running on an Amazon EMR cluster or an extract-tran…

Founded in 2019, BigHat Biosciences’ mission is to improve human health by reimagining antibody discovery and engineering to create better antibodies faster. Their integrated computational + experimental approach speeds up antibody design and discovery by combining high-speed molecular characterization with machine learning technologies to guide the search for better antibodies. They apply these design capabilities to develop new generations of safer and more effective treatments for patients suffering from today’s most challenging diseases. Their platform, from wet lab robots to cloud-based data and logistics plane, is woven together with rapidly changing BigHat-propriet…

This series of posts discusses making informed decisions when choosing to implement open-source tools on AWS services, adopt managed AWS services to satisfy the same needs, or use a combination of both. We look at key considerations for evaluating open-source software and AWS services using the perspectives of a startup company and a mature company as examples. You can use these two different points of view to compare to your own organization. To make this investigation easier we will use Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) capabilities as the target of our investigation. In two related posts, we follow two AWS customers, Iponweb and BigHat Bio…

With .NET providing first-class support for ARM architecture, running .NET applications on an AWS Graviton processor provides you with more choices to help optimize performance and cost. We have already written about .NET 5 with Graviton benchmarks; in this post, we explore how C#/.NET developers can take advantages of Graviton processors and obtain this performance at scale with Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS). In addition, we take advantage of infrastructure as code (IaC) by using the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) to define the infrastructure . The AWS CDK is an open-source development framework to define cloud applications in code. It includes c…

2020 was the year that ARM chips made the headlines by moving from largely mobile form factors into the cloud thanks to AWS Graviton2, allowing you to have up to 40% better price performance over comparable current generation x86 Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instances. We speak to customers daily about Graviton2. One recurring question we hear is “Graviton2 is great, but how can my team develop for ARM natively without the complexity of cross-compilation or having to buy custom hardware on premises?” This post seeks to answer that question by setting up the Visual Studio Code-based Code Server IDE, running…

Amazon SageMaker Pipelines, the first purpose built continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) service for machine learning (ML), now allows customers to rollback the latest customer approved version of ML models deployed to SageMaker hosted endpoints to a previous customer approved version of the model. Customers can now change the status of the deployed model package version in the model registry from "Approved" to "Rejected". This will trigger the model deployment CI/CD pipeline to roll back the current version of the model deployed to the SageMaker endpoint to the latest previous version of the model that was approved for deployment. View the full artic…

We recently updated Amazon WorkSpaces Cost Optimizer, a reference implementation that monitors Amazon WorkSpaces usage patterns and automatically updates the billing mode to the most cost-efficient option (hourly or monthly) depending on usage. The Amazon WorkSpaces Cost Optimizer solution saves customers time and money by autonomously managing Amazon WorkSpaces billing so customers can focus on their core business. View the full article

Today, AWS announces Amazon Location Service, a fully managed service that helps developers easily and securely add maps, points of interest, geocoding, routing, tracking, and geofencing to their applications without compromising on data security, user privacy, or cost. With Amazon Location Service, you retain control of your location data, protecting your privacy and reducing enterprise security risks. Amazon Location Service provides a consistent API across high-quality LBS data providers (Esri and HERE), all managed through one AWS console. View the full article

Security and compliance standards are of paramount importance for organizations in many industries. There is a growing need to seamlessly integrate these standards in an application release cycle. From a DevOps standpoint, an application can be subject to these standards during two phases: Pre-deployment – Standards are enforced in an application deployment pipeline prior to the deployment of the workload. This follows a shift-left testing approach of catching defects early in the release cycle and preventing security vulnerabilities and compliance issues from being deployed into your AWS account. Example of service/tool providing this capability are Amazon CodeGuru …

AWS Glue DataBrew now supports nest and unnest transformations to help users pack or unpack data into columns to manipulate their datasets. With these transformations, users can now easily extract data from nested json string fields or combine data without writing any code. View the full article