Amazon Web Services (AWS)

We are excited to announce the launch of Unified Search to enable AWS users to easily search and discover information in the AWS Management Console. AWS users can now search for services (e.g. IAM), features (e.g. Users), Marketplace products (e.g. Splunk), and AWS Documentation (e.g. troubleshooting guides) without leaving the AWS Management Console. You can access the search bar using a keyboard shortcut (alt-s or option-s), autocomplete by using the right arrow key, and navigate to the top search result by pressing the enter key. Unified Search is available in all public AWS Regions. View the full article

Internet of Things has been a disruptive technological intervention in recent times. It has emerged as a new way of increasing the expansion of the connected devices ecosystem. As the attention towards IoT continues to increase in recent times, it is evident to look for common platforms such as Amazon Web Services that allow the development and deployment of credible IoT solutions. AWS IoT is one of the notable platforms that can help in communication between IoT devices. Therefore, the attention on AWS IoT Device provisioning has increased recently with the large-scale use of AWS cloud for ensuring the functionality of IoT devices. Although AWS IoT provides a completely…

We are pleased to announce the launch of Python support for Amazon CodeGuru, a service for automated code reviews and application performance recommendations. CodeGuru is powered by program analysis and machine learning, and trained on best practices and hard-learned lessons across millions of code reviews and thousands of applications profiled on open-source projects and internally at Amazon. Amazon CodeGuru has two services: Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer – Helps you improve source code quality by detecting hard-to-find defects during application development and recommending how to remediate them. Amazon CodeGuru Profiler – Helps you find the most expensive lines o…

Amazon QuickSight Enterprise Edition now provides a new session capacity-based pricing model with scalable pricing for large-scale deployments. Session capacity pricing allows developers, independent software vendors (ISVs), and enterprises to benefit from lower per-session rates as they roll out embedded analytics and BI to hundreds of thousands of users. In such scenarios, average session consumption per user is often low (<10 sessions/month) but aggregate session usage across users is high. With session capacity pricing, users are simply charged in 30 minute blocks of usage starting with first access. You can get started with session capacity pricing at $250/month f…

Today, we are excited to announce Amazon Lookout for Equipment, a service which provides customers with existing sensors on their industrial equipment, a way to send their sensor data to AWS to build machine learning models for them and return predictions to detect abnormal equipment behavior. This enables predictive maintenance that allows them to take action before machine failures occur and avoid unplanned downtime. View the full article

Today, software development practices are constantly evolving to empower developers with tools to maintain a high bar of code quality. Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer offers this capability by carrying out automated code-reviews for developers, based on the trained machine learning models that can detect complex defects and providing intelligent actionable recommendations to mitigate those defects. A quick overview of CodeGuru is covered in this blog post. Security analysis is a critical part of a code review and CodeGuru Reviewer offers this capability with a new set of security detectors. These security detectors introduced in CodeGuru Reviewer are geared towards identifying…

Amazon CodeGuru is a developer tool powered by machine learning (ML) that provides intelligent recommendations for improving code quality and identifies an application’s most expensive lines of code. To help you find and remediate potential security issues in your code, Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer now includes an expanded set of security detectors. In this post, we discuss the new types of security issues CodeGuru Reviewer can detect. Time to read 9 minutes Services used Amazon CodeGuru The new security detectors are now a feature in CodeGuru Reviewer for Java applications. These detectors focus on finding security iss…

You can now package and deploy AWS Lambda functions as a container image of up to 10 GB. This makes it easy to build Lambda based applications using familiar container tooling, workflows, and dependencies. Just like functions packaged as ZIP archives, functions deployed as container images will benefit from AWS Lambda’s operational simplicity, automatic scaling with sub-second startup times, high availability, and native integrations with 140 AWS services. Customers can start building functions as container images by using either a set of AWS base images for Lambda, or by using one of their preferred community or enterprise images. View the full article

Aurora Serverless v2 scales to hundreds of thousands of transactions in a fraction of a second, delivering up to 90% cost savings compared to provisioning for peak capacity. View the full article

Babelfish for Amazon Aurora is a new translation layer for Amazon Aurora that enables Aurora to understand queries from applications written for Microsoft SQL Server. With Babelfish, applications currently running on SQL Server can now run directly on Aurora PostgreSQL with little to no code changes. Babelfish understands the SQL Server wire-protocol and T-SQL, the Microsoft SQL Server query language, so you don't have to switch database drivers or re-write all of your application queries. View the full article

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) company, launched AWS Proton, the first fully managed deployment service for container and serverless applications. Platform teams can use Proton to connect and coordinate all the different tools needed for infrastructure provisioning, code deployments, monitoring, and updates. View the full article

Today AWS announced the availability of gp3, the next-generation general purpose SSD volumes for Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) that enable customers to provision performance independent of storage capacity and provides up to 20% lower price-point per GB than existing gp2 volumes. With gp3 volumes, customers can scale IOPS (input/output operations per second) and throughput without needing to provision additional block storage capacity, and pay only for the resources they need. View the full article

Today AWS announced availability, in preview, of io2 Block Express volumes that are designed to deliver up to 4x higher throughput, IOPS, and capacity than io2 volumes, while also delivering sub-millisecond latency and 99.999% durability. io2 Block express refers to io2 volumes running on EBS Block Express architecture. EBS Block Express is the next generation of Amazon EBS storage server architecture purpose-built to deliver the highest levels of performance with sub-millisecond latency. Designed to provide up to 4,000 MB/s throughput , 256,000 IOPS, 64 TiB storage capacity, and 1,000 IOPS/GB per volume, io2 Block Express offers the highest performance block storage in t…

Today, we are launching a tiered pricing structure for provisioned IOPS charges on io2 volumes. With this tiered pricing, we are reducing the price of provisioning peak IOPS (64,000 IOPS) on io2 volume by 15%, or an estimated $608 per month. View the full article

Amazon Elastic Container Registry Public (Amazon ECR Public) is a fully managed registry that makes it easy for a developer to publicly share container software worldwide for anyone to download. Anyone (with or without an AWS account) can use Amazon ECR Public to pull container software for use. Amazon ECR Public Gallery is a website that allows anyone to browse and search for public container images, view developer-provided details, and see pull commands. Developers no longer need to use different private and public registries when building and sharing their public container artifacts. And everyone, including anonymous users and logged-in AWS customers, can now pull arti…

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces the availability of Amazon EC2 R5b instances that can utilize up to 60 Gbps of Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) bandwidth and 260 IOPS (I/O operations per second) for large relational database workloads. These instances offer significantly higher EBS performance across all instance sizes, ranging from 10 Gbps of EBS bandwidth on smaller instance sizes to 60 Gbps of EBS bandwidth on the largest instance size. R5b instances are powered by custom second-generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors (Cascade Lake) with sustained all-core turbo frequency of 3.1 GHz. These new instances are designed for workloads such as relational databases …

Today, we are announcing the availability of a new AWS Wavelength Zone on Verizon’s 5G Ultra Wideband network in Las Vegas. Wavelength Zones are now available in eight cities, including the seven previously announced cities of Boston, San Francisco Bay Area, New York City, Washington DC, Atlanta, Dallas, and Miami. View the full article

Starting today, general purpose Amazon EC2 M5zn instances are available. These new instances are a high frequency, high speed and low-latency networking variant of Amazon EC2 M5 instances, powered by custom 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (Cascade Lake). M5zn instances deliver the highest all-core turbo CPU performance from Intel Xeon Scalable processors in the cloud, with a frequency up to 4.5 GHz. View the full article

Starting today, storage optimized Amazon EC2 D3 and D3en instances are available. These new instances are powered by 2nd generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (Cascade Lake) with a sustained all core frequency up to 3.1 GHz, and offer the highest density local HDD storage in the cloud. View the full article

Starting today, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Mac instances for macOS are generally available. Built on Apple Mac mini computers, EC2 Mac instances enable customers to run on-demand macOS workloads in the AWS cloud for the first time, extending the flexibility, scalability, and cost benefits of AWS to all Apple developers. With EC2 Mac instances, developers creating apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and Safari can now provision and access macOS environments within minutes, dynamically scale capacity as needed, and benefit from AWS’s pay-as-you-go pricing. View the full article

Today, we are excited to announce additional capabilities with Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer. You can now use CodeQuality Detector to identify smells early, balance between speed and technical debt, and coordinate software development and maintenance efficiently. View the full article

The Amazon Chime SDK makes it easier for developers to add add VoIP audio, PSTN audio, video, and content sharing to their applications. Starting today, the Amazon Chime SDK also enables developers to connect communities of users with secure, scalable, and persistent messaging. View the full article

Change Calendar, a capability of Systems Manager, now publishes an event to Amazon EventBridge when it changes state from open to closed and vice versa. You can use the published state change event to automatically start actions such as disabling promotions through your continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipeline, managing access to your fleet, or updating the system configurations. Change Calendar allows you to create blocked days on your calendar in order to prevent changes from being made to your application during important business events such as public marketing promotions, when you expect high demand on your resources. View the full article

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Ground Station announces a new antenna location in Hawaii, USA. This is now the eighth Ground Station location connected to the AWS Global Network. View the full article

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) Cluster Auto Scaling (CAS) now supports specifying a custom instance warm-up time, making scaling more responsive. View the full article

Topic was moved to forum Containerization & Orchestration

AWS Transfer Family customers using Amazon API Gateway to integrate their own identity management systems to authenticate end users can now use AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) to easily apply additional layers of access controls. You can also protect your file transfer endpoints against exploits such as bots and port scanners. View the full article

With AWS IoT Analytics you can now configure notification for data sets that receive late data and refresh the results of the data sets with late data. Late data is data that arrives after an initial result is generated for the data set. You can configure late data notification for a data set by simply setting a time window within which late data is expected to arrive. AWS IoT Analytics sends late data notifications via Amazon CloudWatch Events when it receives late data for the data set. For more information, please visit the late data notification page in the AWS IoT Analytics user guide. View the full article

Porting Assistant for .NET can now support customers to migrate their legacy .NET framework applications to newly released .NET 5. .NET 5 is a major release with a broad set of features and improvements. With this updated release of Porting Assistant for .NET customers can analyze and port their .NET framework applications to either new release of .NET 5 or .NET Core 3.1. View the full article

AWS Batch now supports natively launching Amazon Linux 2 as your AMI when creating an AWS Batch compute environment through a single parameter. Amazon Linux 2 is the next generation of Amazon Linux, a Linux server operating system from Amazon Web Services (AWS). It provides a secure, stable, and high performance execution environment to develop and run cloud and enterprise applications. With Amazon Linux 2, you get an application environment that offers long term support with access to the latest innovations in the Linux ecosystem. View the full article

We’re excited to announce that you can now measure the accuracy of forecasts for individual items in Amazon Forecast, allowing you to better understand your forecasting model's performance for the items that most impact your business. Improving forecast accuracy for specific items—such as those with higher prices or higher costs—is often more important than optimizing for all items. With this launch, you can now view accuracy for individual items and export forecasts generated during training. This information allows you to better interpret results by easily comparing performance against observed historical demand, aggregating accuracy metrics across custom sets of SKUs o…

PostgreSQL 13 is now available in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment, allowing customers to test PostgreSQL 13 on Amazon RDS. View the full article

Ubertas Consulting Foundations for AWS Well-Architected is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from Ubertas Consulting, an AWS DevOps Competency Partner. Ubertas Consulting Foundations for AWS Well-Architected offers a consulting engagement to build out a robust, best-practice-driven AWS environment. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers implementation, knowledge transfer, and operational guidance in assisting you to launch your application workloads into a secure, resilient AWS environment. View the full article

Centricity Secure Workplace for Government is an AWS Solutions Consulting Offer delivered via a consulting engagement from CloudHesive, an AWS Digital Workplace Competency and an Authority to Operate on AWS (ATO) Partner. Centricity Secure Workplace for Government brings a virtual desktop solution that helps customers meet their security control sets and operational needs. Customers that request this consulting offer will participate in an engagement that delivers identification of customer requirements and controls, solution testing and deployment, and training and ongoing managed services. View the full article

More applications are moving to the cloud in recent times. A new category of applications needs enhanced performance and capability at the edge of the cloud, or even beyond the edge of the network. AWS Snow Family is the new set of offerings that help to run operations in non-data center environments, austere, and locations where there is a lack of network connectivity. Edge computing is the computing that happens near the data source as opposed to relying on the cloud for all operations. Lots of applications that are on the cloud still need quick access and real-time computation. This has resulted in a demand for storage and computing resources to be moved closer to the…

Amazon Transcribe is an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service that makes it easy for you to add speech-to-text capabilities to your applications. Today, we are excited to announce native support for Ogg opus and FLAC encoded audio in Amazon Transcribe for streaming transcription. Previously, you were required to transcode audio streams with these encodings to PCM encoding which added extra costs and scaling challenges for large workloads. View the full article

AWS Storage Gateway now supports IBM Spectrum Protect 8.1.10 on Tape Gateway, enabling you to backup and archive data from IBM Spectrum Protect to AWS without changing your backup workflows. With this announcement, Tape Gateway supports IBM Spectrum Protect 8.1.10 running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) version 7.6 or later, or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) version 12, Service Pack 2 or later, and Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 or Microsoft Windows Server 2016. View the full article

Customers can now deploy compute-intensive applications such as machine learning inferencing, multimedia processing, scientific simulations, HPC, and financial modeling that leverage Advanced Vector Extensions 2 (AVX2) to meet their performance requirements on AWS Lambda. View the full article

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling now lets you attach multiple network interfaces when launching EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling group. Previously, customers had to write custom scripts and run lifecycle hooks to attach multiple network interfaces. You can now define multiple network interfaces in a launch template and your Auto Scaling group will automatically attach them to instances as they launch. View the full article

Managing NuGet packages for .NET development can be a challenge. Tasks such as initial configuration, ongoing maintenance, and scaling inefficiencies are the biggest pain points for developers and organizations. With its addition of NuGet package support, AWS CodeArtifact now provides easy-to-configure and scalable package management for .NET developers. You can use NuGet packages stored in CodeArtifact in Visual Studio, allowing you to use the tools you already know. In this post, we show how you can provision NuGet repositories in 5 minutes. Then we demonstrate how to consume packages from your new NuGet repositories, all while using .NET native tooling. All relevan…

This post demonstrates how to create, publish, and download private npm packages using AWS CodeArtifact, allowing you to share code across your organization without exposing your packages to the public. The ability to control CodeArtifact repository access using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) removes the need to manage additional credentials for a private npm repository when developers already have IAM roles configured. You can use private npm packages for a variety of use cases, such as: Reducing code duplication Configuration such as code linting and styling CLI tools for internal processes This post shows how to easily create a sample proje…

Micro Focus – AWS Advanced Technology Parnter, they are a global infrastructure software company with 40 years of experience in delivering and supporting enterprise software. We have seen mainframe customers often encounter scalability constraints, and they can’t support their development and test workforce to the scale required to support business requirements. These constraints can lead to delays, reduce product or feature releases, and make them unable to respond to market requirements. Furthermore, limits in capacity and scale often affect the quality of changes deployed, and are linked to unplanned or unexpected downtime in products or services. The conventional …

This post provides a clear path for customers who are evaluating and adopting Graviton2 instance types for performance improvements and cost-optimization. Graviton2 processors are custom designed by AWS using 64-bit Arm Neoverse N1 cores. They power the T4g*, M6g*, R6g*, and C6g* Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance types and offer up to 40% better price performance over the current generation of x86-based instances in a variety of workloads, such as high-performance computing, application servers, media transcoding, in-memory caching, gaming, and more. More and more customers want to make the move to Graviton2 to take advantage of these performance opti…

Real-Time Live Sports Updates Using AWS AppSync is a new AWS Solutions Implementation that helps media and entertainment (M&E) companies deliver sports information to their customers on mobile and web applications in near real-time. Delivering real-time sports updates is a critical workload for many M&E companies. When a fan’s favorite team scores a goal, hits a home run, or makes a touchdown, it is important that this update makes it to fans in as close to real-time as possible. This solution simplifies historically complex and expensive infrastructure and helps support thousands of fans tracking a game or match in a web or mobile application. View the full arti…

Community events are definitely one of the notable things everyone looks forward to, especially in the cloud community. Among the many prominent events, AWS Re:Invent has always been making headlines in the domain of cloud computing since its inception in 2012. Just like other notable events of other cloud providers such as Microsoft Ignite and Google Cloud Next, AWS Re:Invent 2020 will have to take on a different approach. Well, 2020 has not been the year of things going as per plans for almost everyone and there were many speculations about AWS Re:Invent being canceled this year. However, canceling an event that had more than 60,000 people in attendance from all over …

Amazon S3 Replication is now able to replicate delete markers from one S3 bucket to another. For buckets that use S3 versioning, when a customer issues a delete request without a version ID specified, S3 adds a delete marker on the latest version of the object to protect data from accidental deletions. With S3 Replication, you can easily enable or disable the replication of these delete markers between source and destination buckets for each replication rule. This is critical for customers that have an active-active architecture within the same AWS Region or across different AWS Regions. View the full article

Managing applications deployments on Raspberry Pi can be cumbersome, especially in headless mode and at scale when placing the devices outdoors and out of reach such as in home automation projects, in the yard (for motion detection) or on the roof (as a humidity and temperature sensor). In these use cases, you have to remotely connect via secure shell to administer the device. It can be complicated to keep physically connecting when you need a monitor, keyboard, and mouse. Alternatively, you can connect via SSH in your home local network, provided your client workstation is also on the same private network. In this post, we discuss using Raspberry Pi as a headless ser…

Just as higher level languages like BASIC and C abstracted away the details of assembly language and made developers more productive, the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) provides a programming model above the native template languages, a model that makes developers more productive when creating IaC. When you instantiate CDK objects in your Typescript (or Python, Java, etc.) application, those objects “compile” into a YAML template that the CDK deploys as an AWS CloudFormation stack. AWS Solutions Constructs take this simplification a step further by providing a library of common service patterns built on top of the CDK. These multi-service patterns allow…

The AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) is an open-source software development framework to model and provision your cloud application resources using familiar programming languages. The post CDK Pipelines: Continuous delivery for AWS CDK applications showed how you can use CDK Pipelines to deploy a TypeScript-based AWS Lambda function. In that post, you learned how to add additional build commands to the pipeline to compile the TypeScript code to JavaScript, which is needed to create the Lambda deployment package. In this post, we dive deeper into how you can perform these build commands as part of your AWS CDK build process by using the native AWS CDK bundling funct…

In this post, we show how you can rapidly configure and deploy a website using Hugo (an AWS Cloud9 integrated development environment (IDE) for content editing), AWS CodeCommit for source code control, and AWS Amplify to implement a source code-controlled, automated deployment process. When hosting a website on AWS, you can choose from several options. One popular option is to use Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to host a static website. If you prefer full access to the infrastructure hosting your website, you can use the NGINX Quick Start to quickly deploy web server infrastructure using AWS CloudFormation. Static website generators such as Hugo and MkDocs …

When using Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) to send text messages (SMS) to your customers, you now have the option of selecting the origination number to use. Origination numbers are the phone numbers that Amazon SNS will use to send your SMS message, such as short codes and long codes. View the full article

Not aware of what Amazon S3 Intelligent Tiering can do for you? Here we have enlisted the practical use cases of S3 Intelligent Tiering. Let’s dive deep and have a look! Amazon S3 is one of the most popular AWS services among AWS users. This service offers multiple storage options (classes) to cater to every type of budget and access frequency. In 2018, Amazon introduced the S3 Intelligent Tier class, a standard designed to reduce your storage costs while retaining high performance. This solution stores data in two access tiers: the frequent access (FA) tier and the infrequent access (IA) tier. Any data that hasn’t been accessed in 30 days is automatically moved to the I…

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a large assortment of cloud infrastructure on the go. With AWS, you only get to pay for what you are using, and you can scale quickly in response to business changes. In the AWS platform, you will access a concoction of Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) options. While AWS provides and manages your computing resources, you should find a way to minimize your cloud computing-related expenses. This article arms you with the best AWS cost optimization tips to help reduce your upfront and operational costs. As businesses increasingly rely on cloud storage and computation, AWS cost…

Amazon CloudFront announces that you can now manage public keys used for signed URLs and signed cookies through Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM) based user permission, without requiring the AWS root account. With the IAM user permissions based public key management, you get more flexibility and API access to manage your public keys. View the full article

Amazon Kendra is a highly accurate and easy to use intelligent search service powered by machine learning. Starting today, AWS customers can leverage Kendra’s intelligent search capabilities across a broader range of content repositories by using Kendra’s custom data source feature. View the full article

Looking for a detailed, step-by-step guide on how to provision and deploy SSL/TLS certificates using ACM? You’ve reached the destination! AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) is a service that enables you to establish your website’s identity and secure network communications. This is because ACM allows you to provision, manage, and deploy Transport Layer Security (TLS)/ Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) for public and private data on the cloud. With ACM, you eliminate the hassle of having to purchase/upload and renew SSL/TLS certificates manually. The manager quickly and efficiently requests a certificate, deploy it on AWS resources, and handles the renewal of certificates. While it…

Want to learn how to create a Lifecycle Policy for an S3 Bucket and optimize your AWS costs? Here we bring a step by step, detailed guide on how to create a lifecycle policy for an S3 bucket. Let’s dive deep and learn! Amazon S3 Bucket is a powerful storage tool for cloud computing. Different S3 storage classes allow you to store different types of data according to your access needs. AWS lifecycle policy actions include transitioning objects between classes, deleting or archiving them. You can create a lifecycle policy for all your S3 objects in a single bucket. These objects should use a shared tag or prefix. More so, you can have as many as 1000 policies for each S3 …

You now can manage access to Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra), a scalable, highly available, and fully managed Cassandra-compatible database service, by using temporary security credentials for the Python, Go, and Node.js Cassandra drivers. View the full article

Amazon QuickSight now supports filter controls that you can place beside visuals on dashboards, allowing readers to quickly slice and dice data in the context of its visual representation. You can create these filter controls from existing or new filters with a single click, and configure them to support different operations, such as filtering specific dates, relative dates, or date ranges, setting upper and lower thresholds for numeric values, adding drop-downs with single-select or multi-select options, and more. On-sheet filter controls can be used in dashboards within Amazon QuickSight, or in dashboards embedded within apps. See blog here for more details. View the …

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Access Analyzer now supports archive rules that allow you to retroactively mark existing findings as intended. Archive rules automatically archive new findings for public and cross-account access that meet the criteria you define. Now, you can apply the rules retroactively to mark existing findings as intended. For example, you can create a rule to archive all findings for a specific S3 bucket that you regularly grant read access to. This lets you focus on remediating findings that help you reduce broad access. View the full article

AWS Lake Formation now supports cross account database sharing. You can now create cross account data lakes to access data across your organization and eliminate data silos. View the full article

AWS Transfer Family now offers Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) 140-2 compliant endpoints in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions to protect sensitive information. These endpoints terminate Transport Layer Security (TLS) sessions using a FIPS 140-2 compliant cryptographic software module, making it easier for you to use Transfer Family for regulated workloads. View the full article

The AWS Snowball service is now available in the AWS Europe (Milan) Region. AWS Snowball, a part of the AWS Snow Family, is an edge computing, data migration, and edge storage device that comes in two options. Snowball Edge Storage Optimized devices provide 80 TB of Amazon S3 object storage and optional compute with 40 vCPUs. They are well suited for local storage and large-scale data transfer. Snowball Edge Compute Optimized devices provide 52 vCPUs, 7.68 TB of NVMe SSD storage, 42 TB of HDD storage, 256 GB of RAM, and an optional GPU for use cases like advanced machine learning and full motion video analysis in disconnected environments. You can use these devices for da…

You can now take all AWS Certification exams from home or any private space with online proctoring when you schedule with either test delivery provider, Pearson VUE or PSI. Online proctoring is available anywhere AWS Certification offers testing. For candidates in mainland China and South Korea, online proctored exams are available only via PSI. View the full article

Today, AWS Marketplace announced that Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) can now use the self-service AWS Marketplace Management Portal to authorize their preferred consulting partners to resell their software to AWS Marketplace buyers. This launch enables ISVs and consulting partners to work together more efficiently to create a Consulting Partner Private Offer (CPPO), which allows customers to purchase software solutions in AWS Marketplace directly from consulting partners. ISVs and consulting partners can simplify their operations and accelerate deliver to their customers. View the full article

Amazon CloudFront announces its first edge locations in two new countries: Mexico and New Zealand. In Mexico, our two new edge locations in Querétaro will provide viewers as much as a 30% reduction in p90 latency measures. These new edge locations are priced within CloudFront’s North America geographic region. In New Zealand, our two new edge locations in Auckland will provide viewers as much as a 50% reduction in p90 latency measures. These new edge locations are priced within CloudFront’s Australia geographic region. For more information about CloudFront’s global infrastructure, see Amazon CloudFront Infrastructure. View the full article

Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports Multi-AZ support for Amazon RDS for SQL Server in the AWS US West (Northern California) Region. This new high availability option leverages the SQL Server Database Mirroring (DBM) or Always On Availability Groups (AGs) technology. View the full article

Amazon Connect has reduced telephony costs for North America instances calling Canada by 63% and receiving calls from United Kingdom and Germany up to 60%. View the full article

Starting today, Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL supports the pglogical extension. pglogical is an open source PostgreSQL extension that helps customers replicate data between independent Aurora PostgreSQL databases while maintaining consistent read-write access and a mix of private and common data in each database. Amazon Aurora pglogical uses logical replication to copy data changes between independent Aurora PostgreSQL databases, optionally resolving conflicts based on standard algorithms. Customers can enable pglogical from within their Aurora PostgreSQL instances, and pay only for the additional clusters and cross-region traffic needed, with no upfront costs or software purc…

AWS Glue Studio is a new visual interface for AWS Glue that makes it easy for extract-transform-and-load (ETL) developers to author, run, and monitor AWS Glue ETL jobs. You can now use a simple visual interface to compose jobs that move and transform data and run them on AWS Glue. You can then use AWS Glue Studio’s job run dashboard to monitor ETL execution and ensure that your jobs are operating as intended. View the full article

AWS Backup now supports application-consistent backups of Microsoft workloads running on EC2, via Microsoft’s Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS). Customers can create, manage, and restore consistent backups of their Microsoft Windows Server instances and Microsoft applications (including SQL Server, Active Directory and Exchange Server) directly from the AWS Backup console. View the full article

If you are an AWS user, then you must be aware of some of the essential AWS cost optimization practices. The main objective of Amazon Web Services primarily aims at resource effectiveness by providing the ideal infrastructure solutions within budget constraints. You can hear many headlines stating that businesses are incurring huge expenses in cloud computing. However, the striking highlight regarding trends in cloud computing expenditures refers to a higher percentage of the expenses being wasted on unused services. On the other hand, some businesses can overestimate resource requirements and invest in provisioning more resources than their requirements. So, you can fin…

We have been receiving many requests for training resources on AWS IoT Core, especially with the rising demand for IoT. Previously we have launched the AWS IoT Core Hands-on training course and today, we’re proud to announce the launch of the much-awaited AWS IoT Core Device Provisioning training course. The new training course for AWS IoT Core Device Provisioning is also a great alternative for candidates aspiring for the AWS Machine Learning Specialty certification. The demand for the Internet of Things continues to increase every day and AWS IoT Core provides a unified platform for the management of all IoT devices of an enterprise. Therefore, expertise in AWS IoT…

GitHub Actions is a feature on GitHub’s popular development platform that helps you automate your software development workflows in the same place you store code and collaborate on pull requests and issues. You can write individual tasks called actions, and combine them to create a custom workflow. Workflows are custom automated processes that you can set up in your repository to build, test, package, release, or deploy any code project on GitHub. A cross-account deployment strategy is a CI/CD pattern or model in AWS. In this pattern, you have a designated AWS account called tools, where all CI/CD pipelines reside. Deployment is carried out by these pipelines across oth…

This is a guest post from Pushly. In their own words, “Pushly provides a scalable, easy-to-use platform designed to deliver targeted and timely content via web push notifications across all modern desktop browsers and Android devices.” Introduction As a software engineer at Pushly, I’m part of a team of developers responsible for building our SaaS platform. Our customers are content publishers spanning the news, ecommerce, and food industries, with the primary goal of increasing page views and paid subscriptions, ultimately resulting in increased revenue. Pushly’s platform is designed to integrate seamlessly into a publisher’s workflow and enables advanced features…

Researchers at Academic Medical Centers (AMCs) use programs such as Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) and Research Electronic Data Capture (REDCap) to interact with healthcare data. Our internal team at AWS has provided solutions such as OHDSI-on-AWS and REDCap environments on AWS to help clinicians analyze healthcare data in the AWS Cloud. Occasionally, these solutions break due to a change in some portion of the solution (e.g. updated services). The Automated Solutions Testing Pipeline enables our team to take a proactive approach to discovering these breaks and their cause in order to expedite the repair process. OHDSI-on-AWS provides these A…

As a developer working in a large enterprise or for a group that supports multiple products, you may often find yourself accessing Git repositories from different organizations. Currently, to securely access multiple Git repositories in other popular tools, you need SSH keys, GPG keys, a Git credential helper, and a significant amount of setup by the developer hoping to commit to the repository. In addition, administrators must be aware of the various ways to remove all the permissions granted to the developer. AWS CodeCommit is a managed source control service. Combined with AWS Single Sign-On (AWS SSO) and git-remote-codecommit, you can quickly and easily switch betwe…

With the proliferation of containerized solutions to simplify creating, deploying, and running applications, coupled with the use of automation CI/CD pipelines that continuously rebuild, test, and deploy such applications when new changes are committed, it’s important that your CI/CD pipelines run as quickly as possible, enabling you to get early feedback and allowing for faster releases. AWS CodeBuild supports local caching, which makes it possible to persist intermediate build artifacts, like a Docker layer cache, locally on the build host and reuse them in subsequent runs. The CodeBuild local cache is maintained on the host at best effort, so it’s possible several of…

In this post, we walk you through migrating Subversion (SVN) repositories to AWS CodeCommit. But before diving into the migration, we do a brief review of SVN and Git based systems such as CodeCommit. About SVN SVN is an open-source version control system. Founded in 2000 by CollabNet, Inc., it was originally designed to be a better Concurrent Versions System (CVS), and is being developed as a project of the Apache Software Foundation. SVN is the third implementation of a revision control system: Revision Control System (RCS), then CVS, and finally SVN. SVN is the leader in centralized version control. Systems such as CVS and SVN have a single remote server of versio…

This is the second post in a two-part series in which you migrate and containerize a modernized enterprise application. In Part 1, we walked you through a step-by-step approach to re-architect a legacy ASP.NET MVC application and ported it to .NET Core Framework. In this post, you will deploy the previously re-architected application to Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and run it as a task with AWS Fargate. Overview of solution In the first post, you ported the legacy MVC ASP.NET application to ASP.NET Core, you will now modernize the same application as a Docker container and host it in the ECS cluster. The following diagram illustrates this architectur…

It seems to me like everyone is talking about service meshes these days - definitely a hot topic in the world of containers and microservices. A service mesh promises reducing latency, increasing observability, and simplifying security within microservice architectures. AWS announced a preview for App Mesh in November 2018 and the general availability in March 2019. Therefore, it is about time to take a closer look at App Mesh. As always, my review focuses on the technical details and educates about pitfalls. There is a lot more to know about the service than written on the official marketing page or demonstrated by technical evangelists. /images/2020/08/mesh.jpg Do yo…

Our reader Tom wrote in to tell me, that the latency for read requests to DynamoDB increased significantly after enabling a VPC endpoint a few weeks ago. Someone else reported a similar problem in the AWS discussion forums as well. Therefore, I started to investigate to write this article. After many hours of benchmarking, I came to the conclusion that using a VPC endpoint to connect to DynamoDB increase latency by 30% compared to connections through a internet gateway or NAT gateway. Shortly, after publishing the article, Petar send me a message via Twitter to tell me that something must be wrong with my benchmark. Unfortunatly, that was correct. I made a mistake when me…

Development teams use agile development processes based on Git services extensively. AWS provides AWS CodeCommit, a managed, Git protocol-based, secure, and highly available code service. The capabilities of CodeCommit combined with other developer tools, like AWS CodeBuild and AWS CodePipeline, make it easy to manage collaborative, scalable development process with fine-grained permissions and on-demand resources. You can manage user roles with different AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies in the code repository of CodeCommit. You can build your collaborative development process with pull requests and approval rules. The process described in this post …

AWS Elastic Beanstalk handles provisioning resources, maintenance, health checks, automatic scaling, and other common tasks necessary to keep your application running, which allows you to focus on your application code. You can now run your applications on Elastic Beanstalk using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Spot Instances in both single instance and load balanced environments, For more information see Spot instances support. Spot Instances let you take advantage of unused Amazon EC2 capacity in the AWS Cloud. Spot Instances are available at up to a 90% discount compared to On-Demand prices, which are also available for other deployment services like Amazo…

The trend of building AWS Serverless applications using AWS Lambda is increasing at an ever-rapid pace. Common use cases for AWS Lambda include data processing, real-time file processing, and extract, transform, and load (ETL) for data processing, web backends, internet of things (IoT) backends, and mobile backends. Lambda natively supports languages such as Java, Go, PowerShell, Node.js, C#, Python, and Ruby. It also provides a Runtime API that allows you to use any additional programming languages to author your functions. .NET framework occupies a significant footprint in the technology landscape of enterprises. Nowadays, enterprise customers are modernizing .NET fra…

The AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) is an open-source software development framework to model and provision your cloud application resources using familiar programming languages. You can automate release pipelines for your infrastructure defined by the AWS CDK by using tools such as AWS CodePipeline. As the architecture for your application becomes more complex, so too can your release pipelines. When you first create an AWS CDK application, you define a top-level AWS CDK app. Within the app, you typically define one or more stacks, which are the unit of deployment, analogous to AWS CloudFormation stacks. Each stack instance in your AWS CDK app is explicitly or impl…

The world of AWS changes fast. This review summarizes the most important news from July 2020. The roundup does not include version updates, region expansion news, and minor changes. Instead, we focus on the most important news. But not only that! Our monthly review does include our opinion and evaluation as well. /images/2020/08/month-in-review.jpg Performance boost for EFS In theory, sharing a file system with multiple virtual machines, containers, or function invocations is a great thing. EFS is the go-to service in those scenarios (at least if your workload runs on a UNIX-based OS). However, I have struggled with high latencies when accessing files from EFS from tim…

This post walks you through associating the GitHub Enterprise repository with Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer. This repository support is available for both self-hosted and cloud-hosted GitHub Enterprise options. In this post, we focus on associating CodeGuru with the repository on a self-hosted GitHub Enterprise Server. CodeGuru Reviewer offers automated code reviews to catch difficult-to-find defects in the early stage of development. It is backed by machine learning models trained from millions of code reviews conducted within AWS and open-source projects. When the code repository is associated with CodeGuru, the creation of pull requests triggers CodeGuru to scan the code …

How are you doing with your AWS DevOps Engineer Professional exam preparation? I’ve recently passed the AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional exam and so I’m here with my AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional exam review. DevOps is a radically expanding field with favorable career opportunities for cloud professionals. I have got the experience of qualifying the AWS DevOps Engineer Professional certification exam recently. Working as a cloud associate in the Whizlabs AWS Experts team, I was aspiring to take my career a notch higher. So, the AWS DevOps Engineer Professional certification exam struck me as the most feasible and readily available option for develo…

This post discusses the types of concurrency bugs Amazon CodeGuru detects and how developers can fix them. CodeGuru automatically analyzes pull requests (created in supported repositories like CodeCommit, GitHub, GitHub Enterprise, and Bitbucket) and generates recommendations about how to improve your code quality. For more information, see Automating code reviews and application profiling with Amazon CodeGuru. Why use a tool to automatically detect concurrency bugs? Concurrency bugs are difficult to catch during unit and system testing. This is because triggering concurrency bugs is timing dependent: threads need to execute instructions in parallel in a particular o…

This post was contributed by James Bland, Sr. Partner Solutions Architect, AWS, Jay Yeras, Head of Cloud and Cloud Native Solution Architecture, Snyk, and Venkat Subramanian, Group Product Manager, Bitbucket One of our goals at Atlassian is to make the software delivery and development process easier. This post explains how you can set up a software delivery pipeline using Bitbucket Pipelines and Snyk, a tool that finds and fixes vulnerabilities in open-source dependencies and container images, to deploy secured applications on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). By presenting important development information directly on pull requests inside the product…

Getting started with AWS is a challenge. Unlimited possibilities, competing solutions, and distractions. Even the first step to create an AWS account requires careful planning. AWS marketers promote the AWS Landing Zone solution. Consulting partners add their offerings to the table. But wait, you could just sign up for an AWS account yourself! Let’s calm down, understand the concepts and requirements, and work out a solution. I promise you don’t need a landing zone. What you need is at least 10x less complex. /images/2020/07/modern-aws-baseline.jpg If you get started with AWS, you create an AWS account and spin up resources like EC2 instances, RDS databases, ELB load ba…

Recently, we have been receiving many queries for a training course for building a data lake on AWS. Today, we announce the launch of our new online course to learn about building data lakes on AWS. With data lake solutions on AWS, one can gain the benefits of Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for ensuring durable, secure, scalable, and cost-effective storage. Data lakes empower organizations for efficient storage of its structured and unstructured data in a single, centralized repository. Many enterprise customers want a data storage and analytics solution with better agility and flexibility than conventional data management apparatus. The AWS cloud helps in providing…

AWS CodeStar Connections is a new feature that allows services like AWS CodePipeline to access third-party code source provider. For example, you can now seamlessly connect your Atlassian Bitbucket Cloud source repository to AWS CodePipeline. This allows you to automate the build, test, and deploy phases of your release process each time a code change occurs. This new feature is available in the following Regions: US East (Ohio) US East (N. Virginia) US West (N. California) US West (Oregon) Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Asia Pacific (Seoul) Asia Pacific (Singapore) Asia Pacific (Sydney) Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Canada (Central) EU (Frankfurt) EU (Ireland) …

Looking for some of the best machine learning tools on AWS? Here your search ends! Let’s get familiar with some basic details and dive deep into the list of top AWS machine learning tools. Machine learning may be a new term for many, although having been popular across different sectors. Back in 1952, Arthur Samuel first coined the term “Machine Learning,” thus establishing the foundation for one of the radical technological interventions. In present times, machine learning technology is a vital tool for obtaining predictions and valuable insights regarding business operations. AWS has been one of the frontrunners in the field of machine learning alongside its other cou…

Amazon Web Services (AWS), a prominent name in the world of cloud computing, offers certifications for aspiring candidates to prove their worth. AWS has a wide range of products and services that can address the various cloud infrastructure requirements of enterprises. Most important of all, AWS is presently the market leader among public cloud service providers, thus AWS career is a considerable option for aspirants. Therefore, an AWS career could be easily one of the most reasonable alternatives for an aspiring cloud professional. However, aspiring candidates generally encounter many issues regarding the choice of a specific job role in the AWS landscape. So, if you ar…

Tens of thousands of .NET applications are running across the world, many of which are ASP.NET web applications. This number becomes interesting when you consider that the .NET framework, as we know it, will be changing significantly. The current release schedule for .NET 5.0 is November 2020, and going forward there will be just one .NET that you can use to target multiple platforms like Windows and Linux. This is important because those .NET applications running in version 4.8 and lower can’t automatically upgrade to this new version of .NET. This is because .NET 5.0 is based on .NET Core and thus has breaking changes when trying to upgrade from an older version of .NET…

Previously, I compared all database options offered by AWS for you. In this post, I compare the available messaging options. The goal of messaging on AWS is to decouple the producers of messages from consumers. The messaging pattern allows us to process the messages asynchronously. This has several advantages. You can roll out a new version of consumers of messages while the producers can continue to send new messages at full speed. You can also scale the consumers independently from the producers. You get a buffer in your system that can absorb spikes without overloading it. /images/2020/07/messaging.jpg Do you prefer listening to a podcast episode over reading a bl…

You often use artifact repositories to store and share software or deployment packages. Centralized artifacts enable teams to operate independently and share versioned software artifacts across your organization. Sharing versioned artifacts across organizations increases code reuse and reduces delivery time. Having a central artifact store enables tighter artifact governance and improves security visibility. This post uses some of these patterns to show you how to integrate AWS CodeArtifact in an effective, cost-controlled, and efficient manner. AWS CodeArtifact Service Usage AWS CodeArtifact concepts AWS CodeArtifact uses the following elements: Asset – An i…

This post discusses the benefits of and how to build an AWS CI/CD pipeline in AWS CodePipeline for multi-region deployment. The CI/CD pipeline triggers on application code changes pushed to your AWS CodeCommit repository. This automatically feeds into AWS CodeBuild for static and security analysis of the CloudFormation template. Another CodeBuild instance builds the application to generate an AMI image as output. AWS Lambda then copies the AMI image to other Regions. Finally, AWS CloudFormation cross-region actions are triggered and provision the instance into target Regions based on AMI image. The solution is based on using a single pipeline with cross-region actions, …