All posts by Veliswa Boya

New – Announcing Automated Data Preparation for Amazon QuickSight Q

Post Syndicated from Veliswa Boya original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-announcing-automated-data-preparation-for-amazon-quicksight-q/

In this post that was published in September 2021, Jeff Barr announced general availability of Amazon QuickSight Q. To recap, Amazon QuickSight Q is a natural language query capability that lets business users ask simple questions of their data.

QuickSight Q is powered by machine learning (ML), providing self-service analytics by allowing you to query your data using plain language and therefore eliminating the need to fiddle with dashboards, controls, and calculations. With last year’s announcement of QuickSight Q, you can ask simple questions like “who had the highest sales in EMEA in 2021” and get your answers (with relevant visualizations like graphs, maps, or tables) in seconds.

Data used for analytics is often stored in a data warehouse like Amazon Redshift, and these unfortunately tend to be optimized for programmatic access via SQL rather than for natural language interaction. Furthermore, BI teams, understandably, tend to optimize data sources for consumption by dashboard authors, BI engineers, and other data teams, therefore using technical naming conventions that are optimized for dashboards (for example, “CUST_ID” instead of “Customer”) and SQL queries. These technical naming conventions are not intuitive to be used by business users.
To solve this, BI teams spend hours manually translating technical names into commonly used business language names to prepare the data for natural language questions.

Today, I’m excited to announce automated data preparation for Amazon QuickSight Q. Automated data preparation utilizes machine learning to infer semantic information about data and adds it to datasets as metadata about the columns (fields), making it faster for you to prepare data in order to support natural language questions.

A Quick Overview of Topics in QuickSight Q
Topics became available with the introduction of QuickSight Q. Topics are a collection of one or more datasets that represent a subject area that your business users can ask questions about. Looking at the example mentioned earlier (“who had the highest sales in EMEA in 2021”), one or more datasets (for example, a Sales/Regional Sales dataset) would be selected during the creation of this Topic.

As the author, once the Topic is created:

  • You would spend time selecting the most relevant columns from the dataset to add to the Topic (for example, excluding time_stamp, date_stamp columns, etc.). This can be challenging because without visibility to usage data of columns in dashboards and reports, you can find it hard to objectively decide which columns are most relevant to your business users to include in a Topic.
  • You would then spend hours reviewing the data and manually curating it to set configurations that are specific to natural language (for example, add “Area” as a synonym for the “Region” column).
  • Lastly, you would spend time formatting the data in order to ensure that it is more useful when presented.
  • QuickSight Q Topic

    QuickSight Q Topic

How Does Automated Data Preparation for Amazon QuickSight Q Work?
Creating from Analysis: The new automated data preparation for Amazon QuickSight Q saves time by enabling the capability to create a Topic from analysis and therefore saving you the hours that you would spend doing all the translation by automatically choosing user-friendly names and synonyms based on ML-trained models that seek to find synonyms and common terms for the data field in question. Moreover, instead of you selecting the most relevant columns, automated data preparation for Amazon QuickSight Q automatically selects high-value columns based on how they are used in the analysis. It then binds the Topic to this existing analysis’ dataset and prepares an index of unique string values within the data to enable natural language search.

Automated Field Selection and Classification: I mentioned earlier that automated data preparation for Amazon QuickSight Q selects high value columns, but how does it know which columns are high-value? Automated data preparation for Amazon QuickSight Q automates column selection based on signals from existing QuickSight assets, such as reports or dashboards, to help you create a Topic that is relevant to your business users. In addition to selecting high-value fields from a dataset, automated data preparation for Amazon QuickSight Q also imports new calculated fields that the author has created in the analysis, thereby not requiring them to recreate these in a Topic.

Automated Language Settings: At the beginning of this article, I talked about technical naming conventions that are not intuitive for business users. Now, instead of you spending time translating these technical names, column names are automatically updated with friendly names and synonyms using common terms. Looking at our Sales dataset example, CUST_ID has been assigned a friendly name, “Customer”, and a number of synonyms. Synonyms will now be added automatically to columns (with the option to customize further) to support a wide vocabulary that may be relevant to your business users.

Friendly names & Synonyms for columns

Friendly Names & Synonyms for Columns

Automated Metadata Settings: Automated data preparation for Amazon QuickSight Q detects Semantic Type of a column based on the column values and updates the corresponding configuration automatically. Formats for values will now be set to be used if a particular column is presented in the answer. These formats are derived from formats that you may have defined in an analysis.

Semantic Type Settings

Semantic Type Settings

Available Today
Automated Data Preparation for Amazon QuickSight Q is available today in all AWS Regions where QuickSight Q is available. To learn more, visit the Amazon QuickSight Q page. Join the QuickSight Community to ask, answer, and learn with others in the QuickSight Community.

– Veliswa x

New – Announcing Amazon EFS Elastic Throughput

Post Syndicated from Veliswa Boya original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-announcing-amazon-efs-elastic-throughput/

Today, we are announcing the availability of Amazon EFS Elastic Throughput, a new throughput mode for Amazon EFS that is designed to provide your applications with as much throughput as they need with pay-as-you-use pricing. This new throughput mode enables you to further simplify running workloads and applications on AWS by providing shared file storage that doesn’t need provisioning or capacity management.

Elastic Throughput is ideal for spiky and unpredictable workloads with performance requirements that are difficult to forecast. When you enable Elastic Throughput on an Amazon EFS file system, you no longer need to think about actively managing your file system performance or over-paying for idle resources in order to ensure performance for your applications. When you enable Elastic Throughput, you don’t specify or provision throughput capacity, Amazon EFS automatically delivers the throughput performance your application needs while you the builder pays only for the amount of data read or written.

Amazon EFS is built to provide serverless, fully elastic file storage that lets you share file data for your cloud-based applications without having to think about provisioning or managing storage capacity and performance. With Elastic Throughput, Amazon EFS now extends its simplicity and elasticity to performance, enabling you to run an even broader range of file workloads on Amazon EFS. Amazon EFS is well suited to support a broad spectrum of use cases that include analytics and data science, machine learning, CI/CD tools, content management and web serving, and SaaS applications.

A Quick Review
As you may already know, Amazon EFS already has the Bursting Throughput mode, which is available as a default and supports bursting to higher levels for up to 12 hours a day. If your application is throughput constrained on Bursting mode (for example, utilizes more than 80 percent of permitted throughput or exhausts burst credits), then you should consider using Provisioned (which we announced in 2018), or the new Elastic Throughput modes.

With this announcement of Elastic Throughput mode, and in addition to the already existing Provisioned Throughput mode, Amazon EFS now offers two options for workloads that require higher levels of throughput performance. You should use Provisioned Throughput if you know your workload’s performance requirements and you expect your workload to consume a higher share (more than 5 percent on average) of your application’s peak throughput capacity. You should use Elastic Throughput if you don’t know your application’s throughput or your application is very spiky.

To access Elastic Throughput mode (or any of the Throughput modes), select Customize (selecting Create instead will create your file system with the default Bursting mode).

Create File system

Create File system

New - Elastic Throughput

New – Elastic Throughput

You can also enable Elastic Throughput for new and existing General Purpose file systems using the Amazon EFS console or programmatically using the Amazon EFS CLI, Amazon EFS API, or AWS CloudFormation.

Elastic Throughput in Action
Once you have enabled Elastic Throughput mode, you will be able to monitor your cost and throughput usage using Amazon CloudWatch and set alerts on unplanned throughput charges using AWS Budgets.

I have a test file system elasticblog that I created previously using the Amazon EFS console, and now I cannot wait to see Elastic Throughput in action.

File system (elasticblog)

File system (elasticblog)

I have provisioned an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon C2) instance which I mounted to my file system. This EC2 instance has data that I will add to the file system.

I have also created CloudWatch Alarms, which will monitor throughput usage and set alarm thresholds (ReadIOBytes, WriteIOBytes, TotalIOBytes, and MetadataIOBytes).

CloudWatch for Throughput Usage

CloudWatch for Throughput Usage

The CloudWatch dashboard for my test file system elasticblog looks like this.

CloudWatch Dashboard - TotalIOBytes for File System

CloudWatch Dashboard – TotalIOBytes for File System

Elastic Throughput allows you to drive throughput up to a limit of 3 GiB/s for read operations and 1 GiB/s for write operations per file system in all Regions.

Available Now
Amazon EFS Elastic Throughput is available in all Regions supporting EFS except for the AWS China Regions.

To learn more, see the Amazon EFS User Guide. Please send feedback to AWS re:Post for Amazon Elastic File System or through your usual AWS support contacts.

– Veliswa x

Announcing General Availability of Amazon Connect Cases

Post Syndicated from Veliswa Boya original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/announcing-general-availability-of-amazon-connect-cases/

In June 2022 AWS announced a preview of Amazon Connect Cases, a feature of Amazon Connect that simplifies these customer interactions and reduces the average handle times of issues.

Today I am excited to announce the general availability of Amazon Connect Cases. Cases, a feature of Amazon Connect, makes it easy for your contact center agents to create, collaborate on, and quickly resolve customer issues that require several customer conversations and follow-up tasks, and they can focus on solving the customer issue, no matter how simple or how complex. Agents have relevant case details (such as date and time opened, issue summary, or customer information) in a single unified view, and they can focus on solving the customer issue.

Getting started with Cases takes only a few clicks because it is built into Amazon Connect. With Cases, you automatically create cases or find existing cases, saving agents time searching and entering data manually. Cases accelerates resolution times, improves efficiency, and reduces errors to help increase customer satisfaction.

Best of all, Cases is part of the unified agent application that also includes the Amazon Connect Contact Control Panel to handle contacts, Amazon Connect Customer Profiles to identify the customer and personalize the experience, Amazon Connect Wisdom to surface relevant knowledge articles, and Amazon Connect Tasks to automate, track, and monitor follow up items.

An Overview of Amazon Connect Cases

Litigation Practice Group is a provider of legal support for debt relief. Litigation’s Director of Business Intelligence, Alex Miles, spoke about how they have experienced Cases. He said:

“Amazon Connect not only addresses many of the technological limitations we were facing but brings with it a suite of modern solutions for all our business needs. One of those needs is case management to handle operating activities, including payments, document control, and legal cases. Amazon Connect Cases seamlessly integrates with our existing contact center workflows. Our agents and legal teams now have full performance visibility and spend less time on manual tasks, creating more time to find solutions to enhance the customer journey.”

Cases provides built-in case management capabilities, eliminating the need for contact centers to build custom solutions or integrate with third-party products to handle complex customer
issues. For every issue, Cases enables agents to view case history and activity all in one place, automatically capture case data from interactive voice response (IVR) or chats (via Amazon Lex), and track follow-up work with Tasks.

  1. View case history and activity all in one place – Agents view the details of the customer issue (including calls, tasks, and chats associated with the case) all in one place within the unified Amazon Connect agent application. The timeline view shows agents a case at a glance, removing the need for agents to go back and forth between applications.

    View case history and activity in one place

    View case history and activity in one place

  2. Automatically capture case data from interactive voice response (IVR) or chats – With this feature you can automatically create and update cases by using information gathered in a customer’s self-service IVR or chatbot interaction. When agent assistance is required, the contact will then be routed to an available agent with the relevant case attached, resulting in improved average handle time and first-contact resolution.

    Automatically capture case data from your IVR and chatbots

    Automatically capture case data from your IVR and chatbots

  3. Take action with task management – This feature is Cases working together with Amazon Connect Tasks to help you reduce resolution time and improve efficiency. Tasks, which tracks the work that must be done to resolve the customer’s issue, ensures that a case is captured and includes prior and pending actions needed to resolve the issue. This makes it easier for agents to create, prioritize, and monitor work assigned to other agents or teams. Here I’d also like to highlight how all this results in great collaboration between agents and ultimately, teams.

    Take action with task management

    Take action with task management

  4. Get started in a few clicks! Turn on Cases and configure permissions, fields, and templates, all within Amazon Connect. No third-party tools or integrations are required.
    Get Started

    Get Started

General Availability
Amazon Connect Cases is generally available in US East (N. Virginia), and US West (Oregon).

– Veliswa x

AWS and VMware Announce VMware Cloud on AWS integration with Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP

Post Syndicated from Veliswa Boya original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-and-vmware-announce-vmware-cloud-on-aws-integration-with-amazon-fsx-for-netapp-ontap/

Our customers are looking for cost-effective ways to continue to migrate their applications to the cloud. VMware Cloud on AWS is a fully managed, jointly engineered service that brings VMware’s enterprise-class, software-defined data center architecture to the cloud. VMware Cloud on AWS offers our customers the ability to run applications across operationally consistent VMware vSphere-based public, private, and hybrid cloud environments by bringing VMware’s Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) to AWS.

In 2021, we announced the fully managed shared storage service Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP. This service provides our customers with access to the popular features, performance, and APIs of ONTAP file systems with the agility, scalability, security, and resiliency of AWS, making it easier to migrate on-premises applications that rely on network-attached storage (NAS) appliances to AWS.

Today I’m excited to announce the general availability of VMware Cloud on AWS integration with Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP. Prior to this announcement, customers could only use VMware VSAN where they could scale datastore capacity with compute. Now, they can scale storage independently and SDDCs can be scaled with the additional storage capacity that is made possible by FSx for NetApp ONTAP.

Customers can already add storage to their SDDCs by purchasing additional hosts or by adding AWS native storage services such as Amazon S3, Amazon EFS, and Amazon FSx for providing storage to virtual machines (VMs) on existing hosts. You may be thinking that nothing about this announcement is new.

Well, with this amazing integration, our customers now have the flexibility to add an external datastore option to support their growing workload needs. If you are running into storage constraints or are continually met with unplanned storage demands, this integration provides a cost-effective way to incrementally add capacity without the need to purchase more hosts. By taking advantage of external datastores through FSx for NetApp ONTAP, you have the flexibility to add more storage capacity when your workloads require it.

An Overview of VMware Cloud on AWS Integration with Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP
There are two account connectivity options for enabling storage provisioned by FSx for NetApp ONTAP to be made available for mounting as a datastore to a VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC. Both options use a dedicated Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) for the FSx file system to prevent routing conflicts.

The first option is to create a new Amazon VPC under the same connected AWS account and have it connected with the VMware-owned Shadow VPC using VMware Transit Connect. The diagram below shows the architecture of this option:

The first option is to enable storage under the same customer-owned account

The first option is to enable storage under the same AWS connected account

The second option is to create a new AWS account, which by default comes with an Amazon VPC for the Region. Similar to the first option, VMware Transit Connect is used to attach this new VPC with the VMware-owned Shadow VPC. Here is a diagram showing the architecture of this option:

The second option is to enable storage provisioned by FSx for NetApp ONTAP by creating a new AWS account

The second option is to enable storage by creating a new AWS account

Getting Started with VMware Cloud on AWS Integration with Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP
The first step is to create an FSx for NetApp ONTAP file system in your AWS account. The steps that you will follow to do this are the same, whether you’re using the first or second path to provision and mount your NFS datastore.

  1. Open the Amazon FSx service page.
  2. On the dashboard, choose Create file system to start the file system creation wizard.
  3. On the Select file system type page, select Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, and then click Next which takes you to the Create ONTAP file system page. Here select the Standard create method.

The following video shows a complete guide on how to create an FSx for NetApp ONTAP:

The same process can be found in this FSx for ONTAP User Guide.

After the file system is created, locate the NFS IP address under the Storage virtual machines tab. The NFS IP address is the floating IP that is used to manage access between file system nodes, and it is required for configuring VMware Transit Connect.

Location of the NFS IP address under the Storage virtual machines tab - AWS console

Location of the NFS IP address under the Storage virtual machines tab – AWS console

Location of the NFS IP address under the Storage virtual machines tab - AWS console

Location of the NFS IP address under the Storage virtual machines tab – AWS console

You are done with creating the FSx for NetApp ONTAP file system, and now you need to create an SDDC group and configure VMware Transit Connect. In order to do this, you need to navigate between the VMware Cloud Console and the AWS console.

Sign in to the VMware Cloud Console, then go to the SDDC page. Here locate the Actions button and select Create SDDC Group. Once you’ve done this, provide the required data for Name (in the following example I used “FSx SDDC Group” for the name) and Description. For Membership, only include the SDDC in question.

After the SDDC Group is created, it shows up in your list of SDDC Groups. Select the SDDC Group, and then go to the External VPC tab.

External VPC tab Add Account - VMC Console

External VPC tab Add Account – VMC Console

Once you are in the External VPC tab, click the ADD ACCOUNT button, then provide the AWS account that was used to provision the FSx file system, and then click Add.

Now it’s time for you to go back to the AWS console and sign in to the same AWS account where you created your Amazon FSx file system. Here navigate to the Resource Access Manager service page and click the Accept resource share button.

Resource Access Manager service page to access the Accept resource share button - AWS console

Resource Access Manager service page to access the Accept resource share button – AWS console

Return to the VMC Console. By now, the External VPC is in an ASSOCIATED state. This can take several minutes to update.

External VPC tab - VMC Console

External VPC tab – VMC Console

Next, you need to attach a Transit Gateway to the VPC. For this, navigate back to the AWS console. A step-by-step guide can be found in the AWS Transit Gateway documentation.

The following is an example that represents a typical architecture of a VPC attached to a Transit Gateway:

A typical architecture of a VPC attached to a Transit Gateway

A typical architecture of a VPC attached to a Transit Gateway

You are almost at the end of the process. You now need to accept the transit gateway attachment and for this you will navigate back to the VMware Cloud Console.

Accept the Transit Gateway attachment as follows:

  1. Navigating back to the SDDC Group, External VPC tab, select the AWS account ID used for creating your FSx NetApp ONTAP, and click Accept. This process may take a few minutes.
  2. Next, you need to add the routes so that the SDDC can see the FSx file system. This is done on the same External VPC tab, where you will find a table with the VPC. In that table, there is a button called Add Routes. In the Add Route section, add two routes:
    1. The CIDR of the VPC where the FSx file system was deployed.
    2. The floating IP address of the file system.
  3. Click Done to complete the route task.

In the AWS console, create the route back to the SDDC by locating VPC on the VPC service page and navigating to the Route Table as seen below.

VPC service page Route Table navigation - AWS console

VPC service page Route Table navigation – AWS console

Ensure that you have the correct inbound rules for the SDDC Group CIDR by locating Security Groups under VPC and finding the Security Group that is being used (it should be the default one) to allow the inbound rules for SDDC Group CIDR.

Security Groups under VPC that is being used to allow the inbound rules for SDDC Group CIDR

Security Groups under VPC that are being used to allow the inbound rules for SDDC Group CIDR

Lastly, mount the NFS Datastore in the VMware Cloud Console as follows:

  1. Locate your SDDC.
  2. After selecting the SDDC, Navigate to the Storage Tab.
  3. Click Attach Datastore to mount the NFS volume(s).
  4. The next step is to select which hosts in the SDDC to mount the datastore to and click Mount to complete the task.
Attach a new datastore

Attach A New Datastore

Available Today
Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP is available today for VMware Cloud on AWS customers in US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), Europe (London), Europe (Milan), Europe (Paris), Europe (Stockholm), South America (São Paulo), AWS GovCloud (US-East), and AWS GovCloud (US-West).

– Veliswa x

Welcome to AWS Storage Day 2022

Post Syndicated from Veliswa Boya original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/welcome-to-aws-storage-day-2022/

We are on the fourth year of our annual AWS Storage Day! Do you remember our first Storage Day 2019 and the subsequent Storage Day 2020? I watched Storage Day 2021, which was streamed live from downtown Seattle. We continue to hear from our customers about how powerful the Storage Day announcements and educational sessions were. With this year’s lineup, we aim to share our insights on how to protect your data and put it to work. The free Storage Day 2022 virtual event is happening now on the AWS Twitch channel. Tune in to hear from experts about new announcements, leadership insights, and educational content related to the broad portfolio of AWS Storage services.

Our customers are looking to reduce and optimize storage costs, while building the cloud storage skills they need for themselves and for their organizations. Furthermore, our customers want to protect their data for resiliency and put their data to work. In this blog post, you will find our insights and announcements that address all these needs and more.

Let’s get into it…

Protect Your Data
Data protection has become an operational model to deliver the resiliency of applications and the data they rely on. Organizations use the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) cybersecurity framework and its Identify->Protect->Detect->Respond->Recover process to approach data protection overall. It’s necessary to consider data resiliency and recovery upfront in the Identify and Protect functions, so there is a plan in place for the later Respond and Recover functions.

AWS is making data resiliency, including malware-type recovery, table stakes for our customers. Many of our customers use Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) for mission-critical applications. If you already use Amazon EBS and you regularly back up EBS volumes using EBS multi-volume snapshots, I have an announcement that you will find very exciting.

Amazon EBS
Amazon EBS scales fast for the most demanding, high-performance workloads, and this is why our customers trust Amazon EBS for critical applications such as SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft. Currently, Amazon EBS enables you to back up volumes at any time using EBS Snapshots. Snapshots retain the data from all completed I/O operations, allowing you to restore the volume to its exact state at the moment before backup.

Many of our customers use snapshots in their backup and disaster recovery plans. A common use case for snapshots is to create a backup of a critical workload such as a large database or file system. You can choose to create snapshots of each EBS volume individually or choose to create multi-volume snapshots of the EBS volumes attached to a single Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance. Our customers love the simplicity and peace of mind that comes with regularly backing up EBS volumes attached to a single EC2 instance using EBS multi-volume snapshots, and today we’re announcing a new feature—crash consistent snapshots for a subset of EBS volumes.

Previously, when you wanted to create multi-volume snapshots of EBS volumes attached to a single Amazon EC2 instance, if you only wanted to include some—but not all—attached EBS volumes, you had to make multiple API calls to keep only the snapshots you wanted. Now, you can choose specific volumes you want to exclude in the create-snapshots process using a single API call or by using the Amazon EC2 console, resulting in significant cost savings. Crash consistent snapshots for a subset of EBS volumes is also supported by Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager policies to automate the lifecycle of your multi-volume snapshots.

This feature is now available to you at no additional cost. To learn more, please visit the EBS Snapshots user guide.

Put Your Data to Work
We give you controls and tools to get the greatest value from your data—at an organizational level down to the individual data worker and scientist. Decisions you make today will have a long-lasting impact on your ability to put your data to work. Consider your own pace of innovation and make sure you have a cloud provider that will be there for you no matter what the future brings. AWS Storage provides the best cloud for your traditional and modern applications. We support data lakes in AWS Storage, analytics, machine learning (ML), and streaming on top of that data, and we also make cloud benefits available at the edge.

Amazon File Cache (Coming Soon)
Today we are also announcing Amazon File Cache, an upcoming new service on AWS that accelerates and simplifies hybrid cloud workloads. Amazon File Cache provides a high-speed cache on AWS that makes it easier for you to process file data, regardless of where the data is stored. Amazon File Cache serves as a temporary, high-performance storage location for your data stored in on-premises file servers or in file systems or object stores in AWS.

This new service enables you to make dispersed data sets available to file-based applications on AWS with a unified view and at high speeds with sub-millisecond latencies and up to hundreds of GB/s of throughput. Amazon File Cache is designed to enable a wide variety of cloud bursting workloads and hybrid workflows, ranging from media rendering and transcoding, to electronic design automation (EDA), to big data analytics.

Amazon File Cache will be generally available later this year. If you are interested in learning more about this service, please sign up for more information.

AWS Transfer Family
During Storage Day 2020, we announced that customers could deploy AWS Transfer Family server endpoints in Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (Amazon VPCs). AWS Transfer Family helps our customers easily manage and share data with simple, secure, and scalable file transfers. With Transfer Family, you can seamlessly migrate, automate, and monitor your file transfer workflows into and out of Amazon S3 and Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) using the SFTP, FTPS, and FTP protocols. Exchanged data is natively accessible in AWS for processing, analysis, and machine learning, as well as for integrations with business applications running on AWS.

On July 26th of this year, Transfer Family launched support for the Applicability Statement 2 (AS2) protocol. Customers across verticals such as healthcare and life sciences, retail, financial services, and insurance that rely on AS2 for exchanging business-critical data can now use AWS Transfer Family’s highly available, scalable, and globally available AS2 endpoints to more cost-effectively and securely exchange transactional data with their trading partners.

With a focus on helping you work with partners of your choice, we are excited to announce the AWS Transfer Family Delivery Program as part of the AWS Partner Network (APN) Service Delivery Program (SDP). Partners that deliver cloud-native Managed File Transfer (MFT) and business-to-business (B2B) file exchange solutions using AWS Transfer Family are welcome to join the program. Partners in this program meet a high bar, with deep technical knowledge, experience, and proven success in delivering Transfer Family solutions to our customers.

Five New AWS Storage Learning Badges
Earlier I talked about how our customers are looking to add the cloud storage skills they need for themselves and for their organizations. Currently, storage administrators and practitioners don’t have an easy way of externally demonstrating their AWS storage knowledge and skills. Organizations seeking skilled talent also lack an easy way of validating these skills for prospective employees.

In February 2022, we announced digital badges aligned to Learning Plans for Block Storage and Object Storage on AWS Skill Builder. Today, we’re announcing five additional storage learning badges. Three of these digital badges align to the Skill Builder Learning Plans in English for File, Data Protection & Disaster Recovery (DPDR), and Data Migration. Two of these badges—Core and Technologist—are tiered badges that are awarded to individuals who earn a series of Learning Plan-related badges in the following progression:

Image showing badge progression. To get the Storage Core badge users must first get Block, File, and Object badges. To get the Storage Technologist Badge users must first get the Core, Data Protection & Disaster Recovery, and Data Migration badges.

To learn more, please visit the AWS Learning Badges page.

Well, That’s It!
As I’m sure you’ve picked up on the pattern already, today’s announcements focused on continuous innovation and AWS’s ongoing commitment to providing the cloud storage training that your teams are looking for. Best of all, this AWS training is free. These announcements also focused on simplifying your data migration to the cloud, protecting your data, putting your data to work, and cost-optimization.

Now Join Us Online
Register for free and join us for the AWS Storage Day 2022 virtual event on the AWS channel on Twitch. The event will be live from 9:00 AM Pacific Time (12:00 PM Eastern Time) on August 10. All sessions will be available on demand approximately 2 days after Storage Day.

We look forward to seeing you on Twitch!

– Veliswa x

New – Amazon EC2 R6id Instances with NVMe Local Instance Storage of up to 7.6 TB

Post Syndicated from Veliswa Boya original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-ec2-r6id-instances/

In November 2021, we launched the memory-optimized Amazon EC2 R6i instances, our sixth-generation x86-based offering powered by 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code named Ice Lake).

Today I am excited to announce a disk variant of the R6i instance: the Amazon EC2 R6id instances with non-volatile memory express (NVMe) SSD local instance storage. The R6id instances are designed to power applications that require low storage latency or require temporary swap space.

Customers with workloads that require access to high-speed, low-latency storage, including those that need temporary storage for scratch space, temporary files, and caches, have the option to choose the R6id instances with NVMe local instance storage of up to 7.6 TB. The new instances are also available as bare-metal instances to support workloads that benefit from direct access to physical resources.

Here’s some background on what led to the development of the sixth-generation instances. Our customers who are currently using fifth-generation instances are looking for the following:

  • Higher Compute Performance – Higher CPU performance to improve latency and processing time for their workloads
  • Improved Price Performance – Customers are very sensitive to price performance to optimize costs
  • Larger Sizes – Customers require larger sizes to scale their enterprise databases
  • Higher Amazon EBS Performance – Customers have requested higher Amazon EBS throughput (“at least double”) to improve response times for their analytics applications
  • Local Storage – Large customers have expressed a need for more local storage per vCPU

Sixth-generation instances address these requirements by offering generational improvement across the board, including 15 percent increase in price performance, 33 percent more vCPUs, up to 1 TB memory, 2x networking performance, 2x EBS performance, and global availability.

Compared to R5d instances, the R6id instances offer:

  • Larger instance size (.32xlarge) with 128 vCPUs and 1024 GiB of memory, enabling customers to consolidate their workloads and scale up applications.
  • Up to 15 percent improvement in compute price performance and 20 percent higher memory bandwidth.
  • Up to 58 percent higher storage per vCPU and 34 percent lower cost per TB.
  • Up to 50 Gbps network bandwidth and up to 40 Gbps EBS bandwidth; EBS burst bandwidth support for sizes up to .4xlarge.
  • Always-on memory encryption.
  • Support for new Intel Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX 512) instructions such as VAES, VCLMUL, VPCLMULQDQ, and GFNI for faster execution of cryptographic algorithms such as those used in IPSec and TLS implementations.

The detailed specifications of the R6id instances are as follows:

Instance Name

 vCPUs RAM (GiB)

Local NVMe SSD Storage (GB)

EBS Throughput (Gbps)

Network Bandwidth (Gbps)
r6id.large 2 16 1 x 118 Up to 10 Up to 12.5
r6id.xlarge 4 32 1 x 237 Up to 10 Up to 12.5
r6id.2xlarge 8 64 1 x 474 Up to 10 Up to 12.5
r6id.4xlarge 16 128 1 x 950 Up to 10 Up to 12.5
r6id.8xlarge 32 256 1 x 1900 10 12.5
r6id.12xlarge 48 384 2 x 1425 15 18.75
r6id.16xlarge 64 512 2 x 1900 20 25
r6id.24xlarge 96 768 4 x 1425 30 37.5
r6id.32xlarge 128 1024 4 x 1900 40 50
r6id.metal 128 1024 4 x 1900 40 50

Now available

The R6id instances are available today in the AWS US East (Ohio), US East (N.Virginia), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Ireland) Regions as On-Demand, Spot, and Reserved Instances or as part of a Savings Plan. As usual, with EC2, you pay for what you use. For more information, see the Amazon EC2 pricing page.

To learn more, visit our Amazon EC2 R6i instances page, and please send feedback to AWS re:Post for EC2 or through your usual AWS Support contacts.

– Veliswa x