Tag Archives: Regions

Introducing AWS Capabilities by Region for easier Regional planning and faster global deployments

Post Syndicated from Channy Yun (윤석찬) original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-aws-capabilities-by-region-for-easier-regional-planning-and-faster-global-deployments/

At AWS, a common question we hear is: “Which AWS capabilities are available in different Regions?” It’s a critical question whether you’re planning Regional expansion, ensuring compliance with data residency requirements, or architecting for disaster recovery.

Today, I’m excited to introduce AWS Capabilities by Region, a new planning tool that helps you discover and compare AWS services, features, APIs, and AWS CloudFormation resources across Regions. You can explore service availability through an interactive interface, compare multiple Regions side-by-side, and view forward-looking roadmap information. This detailed visibility helps you make informed decisions about global deployments and avoid project delays and costly rework.

Getting started with Regional comparison
To get started, go to AWS Builder Center and choose AWS Capabilities and Start Exploring. When you select Services and features, you can choose the AWS Regions you’re most interested in from the dropdown list. You can use the search box to quickly find specific services or features. For example, I chose US (N. Virginia), Asia Pacific (Seoul), and Asia Pacific (Taipei) Regions to compare Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) features.

Now I can view the availability of services and features in my chosen Regions and also see when they’re expected to be released. Select Show only common features to identify capabilities consistently available across all selected Regions, ensuring you design with services you can use everywhere.

The result will indicate availability using the following states: Available (live in the region); Planning (evaluating launch strategy); Not Expanding (will not launch in region); and 2026 Q1 (directional launch planning for the specified quarter).

In addition to exploring services and features, AWS Capabilities by Region also helps you explore available APIs and CloudFormation resources. As an example, to explore API operations, I added Europe (Stockholm) and Middle East (UAE) Regions to compare Amazon DynamoDB features across different geographies. The tool lets you view and search the availability of API operations in each Region.

The CloudFormation resources tab helps you verify Regional support for specific resource types before writing your templates. You can search by Service, Type, Property, and Config.For instance, when planning an Amazon API Gateway deployment, you can check the availability of resource types like AWS::ApiGateway::Account.

You can also search detailed resources such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance type availability, including specialized instances such as Graviton-based, GPU-enabled, and memory-optimized variants. For example, I searched 7th generation compute-optimized metal instances and could find c7i.metal-24xl and c7i.metal-48xl instances are available across all targeted Regions.

Beyond the interactive interface, the AWS Capabilities by Region data is also accessible through the AWS Knowledge MCP Server. This allows you to automate Region expansion planning, generate AI-powered recommendations for Region and service selection, and integrate Regional capability checks directly into your development workflows and CI/CD pipelines.

Now available
You can begin exploring AWS Capabilities by Region in AWS Builder Center immediately. The Knowledge MCP server is also publicly accessible at no cost and does not require an AWS account. Usage is subject to rate limits. Follow the getting started guide for setup instructions.

We would love to hear your feedback, so please send us any suggestions through the Builder Support page.

— Channy

Modernization of real-time payment orchestration on AWS

Post Syndicated from Neeraj Kaushik original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/modernization-of-real-time-payment-orchestration-on-aws/

The global real-time payments market is experiencing significant growth. According to Fortune Business Insights, the market was valued at USD 24.91 billion in 2024 and is projected to grow to USD 284.49 billion by 2032, with a CAGR of 35.4%. Similarly, Grand View Research reports that the global mobile payment market, valued at USD 88.50 billion in 2024, is expected to grow at a CAGR of 38.0% from 2025 to 2030. (Disclaimer: Third-party market research and statistics are provided for informational purposed only. AWS and IBM make no representations about the accuracy of this information.)

This rapid expansion underscores the urgency for financial institutions to modernize their payment processing infrastructure. Financial institutions often need to process high volume of transactions with near-zero latency to meet stringent service level agreements (SLAs) to support surging mobile payments volume.

However, traditional payment orchestration systems, often built on monolithic architectures, struggle to meet these demands due to latency, availability, and scalability challenges. Additionally, their reliance on on-premises infrastructure leads to higher costs and an impediment to innovation, reinforcing the need for modernization.

As sustainability becomes a priority, organizations are turning to cloud-based solutions to optimize infrastructure, reduce carbon footprints, and enhance energy efficiency. This shift provides scalability and performance, and aligns with global sustainability goals, securing the future of real-time payments.

In this post, we discuss the real-time payment orchestration framework. It uses an event-driven architecture and AWS serverless services to enhance the resiliency, efficiency, and scalability of real-time payments. By decomposing payment processing into distinct business capabilities, financial institutions can improve modularity and flexibility. Implementing tenant-based segregation helps with data isolation and security. Additionally, adopting asynchronous communication through Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) enhances scalability and resilience.

Traditional real-time payment orchestration

Payment orchestration serves as a middleware solution, streamlining transaction processing across multiple payment methods, gateways, and financial institutions. It orchestrates key business functions such as payment authorization, payment processing, settlement and clearing, compliance and risk management, and account management for both inbound and outbound payment flows.

The following diagram depicts the high-level business capabilities supported by payment orchestrators across various payment flows, including real-time payments, digital disbursements, tax payments, wires, and more.

Payment processing system flowchart showing main components from acceptance to billing

Detailed flowchart depicting a payment processing system with multiple components. The diagram shows primary payment types at the top (including Realtime Payments, Digital Disbursement, Credit Transfer, and Peer to Peer Payments) flowing down through core processing stages including Payment Acceptance, Execution, Clearing, Reporting, Tracking, Reversals, and Billing.

Many financial institutions adopt a tenant-based approach organized by geography due to varying clearing processes, localized regulations, and transaction requirements across AWS Regions. However, without proper separation of services, teams often continue to add region-specific logic to existing services, gradually increasing their monolithic complexity and using the same infrastructure for all payment flows.

Traditional payment systems process transactions linearly, with each step waiting for the previous one to complete. However, analysis of payment workflows reveals numerous opportunities for parallel execution:

  • Sanctions screening and fraud detection – Compliance and fraud checks can run simultaneously with initial routing decisions, rather than sequentially blocking all subsequent processing
  • Payment routing and authorization requests – When basic validations are complete, routing and authorization can proceed in parallel rather than one after another
  • Payment execution and ledger updates – The actual payment execution doesn’t need to wait for ledger records to be updated—these can occur concurrently
  • Settlement, reconciliation, and tracking – These post-transaction processes can be initiated independently as soon as the primary transaction is complete

This parallel approach can dramatically improve throughput and reduce latency compared to traditional queue-based systems where operations form a sequential chain that extends processing time and creates bottlenecks.

Most legacy payment orchestration systems rely heavily on on-premises virtual machines (VMs), leading to several challenges:

  • Multi-Region support for disaster recovery and multi-tenancy resulting in significant capital expenditure and operational overhead
  • High latency and SLA issues caused by sequential message processing and delays between globally separated data centers
  • Limited reusability of payment flows as monolithic architectures require region-specific changes for local clearing mechanisms and regulations, increasing complexity and costs
  • Scalability challenges and high memory consumption due to inefficient resource utilization and execution of irrelevant logic across regions
  • Complex cross-border payment routing caused by variations in clearing rules, transaction limits, and local regulations, increasing latency and routing errors
  • Integration challenges with diverse data formats because legacy systems rely on proprietary standards (for example, ISO 20022, SWIFT MT), complicating data conversion and compliance
  • High deployment complexity for new payment flows due to monolithic architectures requiring extensive region-specific modifications, slowing time to market
  • Environmental impact and high carbon footprint from on-premises infrastructure consuming excessive energy, whereas cloud-based approaches improve efficiency

Solution overview

To overcome these challenges, the proposed architecture embraces the following design principles to build a future-ready, real-time payment orchestration solution:

  • Performance at scale – Handling over 1,000 transactions per second (TPS) with consistent low latency under varying load conditions.
  • High availability – Achieving 99.999% uptime to meet the strict requirements of financial transactions.
  • Geographic resilience – Supporting global operations with region-specific compliance while maintaining consistent performance.
  • Cost optimization – Reducing total cost of ownership through efficient resource utilization and serverless technologies.
  • Security and compliance – Supporting data protection and regulatory adherence across different jurisdictions.
  • Operational simplicity – Streamlining deployment, monitoring, and maintenance across the payment ecosystem.
  • Microservices – Decomposing payment processing into distinct business capabilities, so financial institutions can improve modularity and flexibility. This microservices-based approach allows for independent scaling and development of critical components.

The following diagram depicts the high-level solution architecture for real-time payments. The existing channels using synchronous or asynchronous APIs can be modified to use edge-optimized endpoints to reduce latency.

Event-driven payment orchestration system with pub/sub channels connecting multiple payment processing modules

Architecture diagram detailing an AWS-based payment orchestration platform utilizing event-driven principles. Features reusable components across two regions, with dedicated modules for payment initiation, execution, reconciliation, billing, and risk management. Implements pub/sub messaging patterns for inter-component communication and connects to enterprise systems including accounting, compliance, and analytics.

An event-driven architecture is used for payment orchestration, which handles communication through a pub/sub pattern. This architecture maintains persistent connections, improving performance of the end-to-end real-time payment processing.

The event-driven architecture for real-time payment processing allows multiple payment operations to occur simultaneously using different adaptors, as opposed to the traditional systems where payment processes are sequential and flow through a single pipeline. Payment events are distributed to specialized payment processor microservices based on their function (initiation, execution, tracking, settlements), enabling each to process independently without waiting for others to complete.

Because we’re transitioning from sequential processing to distributed, maintaining transaction traceability is crucial. The payment tracking adapters shown in the preceding diagram connect to enterprise analytics systems, creating a specialized layer for monitoring transactions. The pub/sub model allows for attaching correlation IDs to events, enabling systems to track related events across different topics and processing stages.

A standardized event schema serves as the foundation for this architecture, providing consistency across regional deployments while allowing for customization at the adapter level. This schema defines uniform event structures containing tenant-specific metadata and supports versioning to accommodate evolving requirements. By isolating region-specific variations to the adapter layer, the solution maintains core functionality while interfacing with diverse enterprise systems through configuration-driven customization rather than code changes.

For most payment processes, especially those with independent processing steps that can run in parallel, this architecture delivers net performance gains despite the topic switching overhead, particularly for complex transactions where multiple independent validations or processing steps are required.

Deployment on the AWS Cloud

The solution uses edge-optimized Amazon API Gateway for channels. An edge-optimized API endpoint routes requests to the nearest Amazon CloudFront Point of Presence (POP), which can help in cases where your clients are geographically distributed to enable efficient routing within each geographical region, enhancing global responsiveness by minimizing network round trips and making sure requests take the shortest possible path before transitioning from the public internet to the client network.

The following diagram illustrates the high-level solution architecture for real-time payments.

Multi-region AWS payment architecture with managed Kafka topics connecting Lambda microservices and DynamoDB storage

Comprehensive AWS payment orchestration solution implementing modern cloud-native architecture principles. Core processing logic implemented as Lambda functions covering initiation, execution, reconciliation, billing, tracking, risk management, and settlement workflows. Leverages Amazon MSK for reliable event streaming between components, with dedicated Kafka topics for each processing stage. Data persistence handled by Amazon DynamoDB, supporting cross-region operations. Architecture demonstrates AWS best practices for financial services, including regional redundancy, serverless computing, managed services, and event-driven design patterns. System integrates with external banking infrastructure and enterprise systems while maintaining separation of concerns through microservices architecture. Features built-in support for compliance monitoring, risk management, and payment tracking through specialized Lambda functions.

The solution uses Amazon MSK to implement an event-driven architecture that efficiently handles both inbound and outbound channels traffic through API requests and asynchronous message-based events. Amazon MSK communicates using a high-performance binary protocol between producers, consumers, and brokers, providing low latency and high throughput. Real-time payments are logically partitioned across multiple tenants within geographical regions—North America, EMEA, LATAM, and Asia-Pacific.

Each real-time payment tenant follows an active/active disaster recovery strategy by deploying MSK clusters across multiple AWS Regions, designed to achieve high availability and resilience. Amazon MSK offer both serverless and provisioned cluster options. The team can decide to select one or the other depending on the non-functional requirements and team expertise. Amazon MSK automatically manages partition leadership with leaders in primary Regions and followers in secondary Regions. During failover, leaders are re-elected in healthy Regions, designed to help maintain processing capabilities during regional incidents. Sticky partitioning uses consistent hashing for deterministic routing, and cooperative rebalancing enables efficient failover. Multi-AZ deployment provides zone redundancy and isolated clusters per Region for data sovereignty compliance through programmatic AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) and virtual private cloud (VPC) boundaries.

To support seamless cross-Region replication and maintain message continuity, Amazon MSK Replicator—a fully managed feature of Amazon MSK—is used to replicate topics and synchronize consumer group offsets across clusters. MSK Replicator simplifies the process of building multi-Region Kafka applications by not needing custom code, open-source tool configuration, or infrastructure management. It automatically provisions and scales the necessary resources, so teams can focus on business logic while only paying for the data being replicated. In the event of a regional outage or failover, traffic can be automatically redirected to a healthy Region without data loss or service disruption, providing near-zero Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and uninterrupted operations for downstream services such as payment processors and audit trail consumers.

In addition to regional redundancy, the architecture uses an event-driven architecture to enable parallel and decoupled processing of payment transactions. Events such as transaction initiation, validation, and settlement are emitted asynchronously and consumed by various microservices independently, which drastically reduces end-to-end latency.

To process these events at scale, the architecture can use AWS Lambda, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), or Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) depending upon non-functional requirements. Automatic scaling responds to Amazon CloudWatch metrics, and exponential backoff retry logic with dead-letter queues (DLQs) handles throttling scenarios. Circuit breakers prevent cascade failures during high error rates.

One of the key benefits of the solution is the reusability of payment flows across different regions. Although each region has its own unique compliance requirements and settlement rules, the core functionalities of real-time payments (payment authorization, payment processing, settlement and clearing) are largely similar. This reusability enables rapid deployment of payment solutions across new regions without rearchitecting the entire system. For example, the real-time payment system in the US and UK might share similar business logic for real-time gross settlement but differ in the clearing and compliance requirements. The solution treats these as bounded contexts within the microservices architecture, providing flexibility while making sure each region can handle its own specific rules and regulations.

Sustainability

AWS relentlessly innovates its infrastructure design, build, and operations to make progress towards net-zero carbon by 2040 and being water positive by 2030. Amazon MSK with AWS Graviton based instances use up to 60% less energy than comparable M5 instances, helping you achieve your sustainability goals. Lambda is inherently sustainable by design. Its serverless model makes sure compute resources are only used when needed, drastically reducing idle infrastructure and wasted energy. Instead of keeping always-on servers for infrequent tasks, Lambda provisions compute power just-in-time, achieving near-zero idle capacity.

Security and compliance in financial services

Given the sensitive nature of payment transactions and financial data, you should apply the security controls required to meet financial regulations such as AWS PCI DSS and AWS Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-3 according to your organization’s needs.

The solution should incorporate multi-layered security controls, continuous monitoring, and automated compliance auditing to meet the rigorous expectations of banking regulators and internal risk teams. For more information, refer to Security Guidance.

Conclusion

The modernization of payment orchestration systems using an event-driven architecture and AWS serverless technologies marks a significant advancement in meeting the demands of today’s rapidly evolving financial services landscape. This solution addresses the key challenges faced by traditional payment systems while delivering substantial benefits in performance, scalability, cost optimization, global resilience, sustainability, and compliance. By using cutting-edge cloud technologies and robust security controls, financial institutions can now build a future-ready foundation that adapts to evolving business needs while maintaining the highest standards of performance, security, and reliability. As the real-time payments market continues its explosive growth, this modern architecture provides a solution that meets today’s demands and is also well-positioned to support tomorrow’s payment innovations. Organizations looking to modernize their payment infrastructure can use this blueprint to accelerate their digital transformation journey, supporting sustainable, secure, and efficient payment processing at scale in an increasingly competitive global marketplace.

The architecture presented here is for reference purposes only. IBM will work closely with you to deploy the solution in accordance with industry standards and compliance requirements.For additional resources, refer to:

IBM Consulting is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner that helps customers who use AWS to harness the power of innovation and drive their business transformation. They are recognized as a Global Systems Integrator (GSI) for over 22 competencies, including Financial Services Consulting. For additional information, please contact an IBM Representative.

Now Open — AWS Asia Pacific (New Zealand) Region

Post Syndicated from Donnie Prakoso original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-open-aws-asia-pacific-new-zealand-region/

Kia ora! Today, I’m pleased to share the general availability of the AWS Asia Pacific (New Zealand) Region with three Availability Zones and API name ap-southeast-6. With the new Region, customers can now run workloads and securely store data in New Zealand while serving end users with even lower latency.

The new AWS Asia Pacific (New Zealand) Region will help organizations run their applications and serve end users while maintaining data residency in New Zealand. The NZD $7.5 billion Amazon Web Services (AWS) investment to establish an AWS Region in New Zealand is expected to contribute NZD $10.8 billion to New Zealand’s gross domestic product (GDP) which is estimated to create 1,000 new jobs annually and will enable Kiwi organizations of all sizes to innovate and scale faster using the most secure and resilient infrastructure.

AWS in New Zealand
Since we opened our first office in New Zealand in 2013, we’ve been continuously expanding our infrastructure to better serve Kiwi customers:

Connectivity to the global AWS network – In 2016, AWS enhanced New Zealand’s connectivity to the AWS Global Infrastructure by establishing diverse, high-capacity subsea cable connections, improving network reliability and performance for customers.

Amazon CloudFront – In 2020, AWS expanded its infrastructure footprint in New Zealand by adding two Amazon CloudFront edge locations in Auckland.

AWS Local Zones – To further enhance its infrastructure offerings in New Zealand, AWS introduced an AWS Local Zone in Auckland in 2023 helping customers deliver applications that require single-digit millisecond latency.

AWS Direct Connect – In the same year, AWS also added a Direct Connect location in Auckland to help customers securely link their on-premises networks to AWS resulting in lower networking costs and improved application performance. With this Region launch, AWS is adding another Direct Connect location in Auckland.

Let’s take a look at how AWS customers are leveraging AWS capabilities for diverse needs.

Security and compliance
The New Zealand government has a cloud first policy to encourage cloud adoption across the public sector. AWS supports 143 security standards and compliance certifications, including Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH), Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-3, and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) 800-171, helping customers satisfy compliance requirements around the globe and providing a secure cloud infrastructure.

MATTR, a New Zealand-based organization providing infrastructure and digital trust services to businesses and governments, sees significant benefits from the new Region. To learn more about how MATTR and other organizations like Kiwibank and Deloitte plan to use the AWS New Zealand Region, visit this news article.

Accelerating AI innovation in New Zealand
AWS delivers the most comprehensive set of capabilities for generative AI at every layer of the stack, including a choice of cutting-edge large language models (LLMs) for implementing generative AI with Amazon Bedrock, and the most capable generative AI assistant to transform how work gets done with Amazon Q.

New Zealand customers are already benefiting from the generative AI capabilities offered by AWS.

Thematic is a New Zealand-based global leader in customer intelligence and feedback analysis. Thematic uses generative AI to turn customer feedback data from multiple channels into curated, accurate, and reliable customer intelligence.

“Using Amazon Bedrock is just so incredibly easy that it just makes sense. Whenever we design a solution, we do test more than 10 large language models (LLMs). Consistently the ones offered by AWS are winning those competitions,” said Nathan Holmberg, CTO and Co-Founder, Thematic.

To learn more on other customers like One NZ utilized generative AI, visit this article.

Building cloud skills together
Since signing a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the New Zealand government in 2022, Amazon has trained more than 50,000 Kiwis toward our goal of 100,000. Amazon is committed to continuing to invest in cloud education through programs including AWS Academy, AWS Skills Builder, AWS Educate, and AWS re/Start. Organizations are using AWS to scale globally while investing in local talent development, supporting New Zealand’s growing demand for cloud expertise.

Xero, a global small business platform helps customers supercharge their business by bringing together the most important small business tools, including accounting, payroll and payments — on one platform. Leveraging AWS since 2016, Xero has scaled its platform globally, enhancing its features and enabling continual innovation.

“Amazon’s commitment to the New Zealand tech industry through their NZD $7.5B investment is promising. It’s a significant vote of confidence that will help connect New Zealand tech exporters with new global opportunities across the AWS ecosystem and the broader Amazon network,” says Bridget Snelling, Xero Country Manager, Aotearoa New Zealand.

Sustainable digital transformation
Through The Climate Pledge, Amazon is committed to reaching net-zero carbon across its business by 2040. AWS is committed to supporting New Zealand’s sustainability goals with efficient and responsible operations of its data centers in the country. The AWS Asia Pacific (New Zealand) Region is underpinned by renewable energy from day one through its agreement with Mercury New Zealand.

Energy companies are using AWS to modernize operations while advancing sustainability goals. Sharesies, a wealth development platform, is using AWS to modernize operations while advancing sustainability goals.

“Sharesies is very supportive of storing customer data in-country and being able to use renewable energy, “ says Sharesies Chief Technical Officer Richard Clark. “To do this in New Zealand on the AWS Cloud and have it fully powered by Mercury’s wind energy is a huge step forward. And very exciting!”

AWS partners in New Zealand
The AWS Partner Network (APN) in New Zealand includes a growing ecosystem of consulting and technology partners helping customers of all sizes design, architect, build, migrate, and manage their workloads on AWS. AWS Partners like Custom D, Grant Thornton Digital, MongoDB, and Parallo are actively supporting customers to deliver innovative solutions tailored to the unique needs of New Zealand organizations across various industries. With the new Region, these partners can now leverage the full capabilities of AWS cloud services locally.

AWS community in New Zealand
New Zealand is also home to one AWS Hero, 26 AWS Community Builders, 6 AWS User Groups and almost 9,000 community members across AWS User Groups in Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch. If you’re interested in joining AWS User Groups New Zealand, visit their Meetup and social media pages.

Here’s what our AWS Hero Arshad Zackeriya, says about the new Region:

“The launch of the AWS Region in New Zealand is a game-changer for our country. It’s not just about a new set of data centers; it’s about unlocking the potential of New Zealand’s businesses and developer communities, allowing us to build a better, more connected Aotearoa for all.”

Available now
The AWS Asia Pacific (New Zealand) Region is the first infrastructure Region in New Zealand and sixteenth Region in Asia Pacific. With this launch, AWS now spans 120 Availability Zones within 38 geographic Regions around the world, with announced plans for 10 more Availability Zones and three more AWS Regions in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Chile, and the European Sovereign Cloud.

The new Asia Pacific (New Zealand) Region is ready to support your business, and you can find a detailed list of the services available in this Region on the AWS Services by Region page. To learn more, visit the AWS Global Infrastructure page, and start building on ap-southeast-6!

Happy building!
— Donnie

Now open – AWS Asia Pacific (Taipei) Region

Post Syndicated from Betty Zheng (郑予彬) original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-open-aws-asia-pacific-taipei-region/

Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced that AWS Asia Pacific (Taipei) Region is generally available with three Availability Zones and Region code ap-east-2. The new Region brings AWS infrastructure and services closer to customers in Taiwan.

Skyline of Taipei including the Taipei 101 building

Skyline of Taipei including the Taipei 101 building

As the first infrastructure Region in Taipei and the fifteenth Region in Asia Pacific, the new Region expands the AWS global footprint to 117 Availability Zones across 37 geographic Regions worldwide. The new AWS Region will help developers, startups, and enterprises, as well as education, entertainment, financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, and nonprofit organizations run their applications and serve end users while maintaining data residency in Taiwan.

AWS in Taiwan

AWS has maintained a presence in Taiwan for more than a decade, starting with the opening of the AWS Taipei office in 2014. Since then, AWS has introduced many infrastructure offerings in Taiwan including:

In 2014, AWS launched the first Amazon CloudFront edge location and added another in 2018, offering customers a secure and efficient content delivery network for accelerating data, video, application, and API delivery worldwide.

In 2018, AWS established two AWS Direct Connect locations in Taiwan to enhance connectivity options. With the launch of the AWS Asia Pacific (Taipei) Region, we’ve added a new Direct Connect location in Taiwan to provide customers with higher speed and bandwidth.

In 2020, AWS launched AWS Outposts in Taiwan, helping customers seamlessly extend AWS infrastructure and services to their on-premises or edge locations for a consistent hybrid experience.

In 2022, AWS launched AWS Local Zone in Taipei to support low-latency applications requiring single-digit millisecond responsiveness.

Today, with the launch of the AWS Asia Pacific (Taipei) Region, we further strengthen our commitment to support innovation in Taiwan. Organizations in regulated industries will be able to store data locally while maintaining complete control over data location and movement. From high-tech manufacturing to semiconductor companies and small and medium enterprises (SMEs), businesses will gain access to the scalable infrastructure needed for growth and innovation.

AWS customers in Taiwan

Organizations across Taiwan are already using AWS to innovate and deliver differentiated experiences to their customers, for example:

Cathay Financial Holdings (CFH) is a leader in financial technology in Taiwan. It continuously introduces the latest technology to create a full-scenario financial service ecosystem. Since 2021, CFH has built a cloud environment on AWS that strengthens its security control and meets compliance requirements.

“Cathay Financial Holdings will continue to accelerate digital transformation in the industry, also improve the stability, security, timeliness, and scalability of our financial services,” said Marcus Yao, senior executive vice president of CFH. “With the new AWS Region in Taiwan, CFH is expected to provide customers with even more diverse and convenient financial services.”

Gamania Group is revolutionizing the entertainment landscape by integrating AI with celebrity IP through their innovative Vyin AI platform. Gamania utilized the robust and scalable infrastructure of AWS to develop secure, responsive AI interactions.

Benjamin Chen, chief strategy officer and head of Innovation Lab, said: “The core goal of Vyin AI is to create a digital identity that is fully interactive, lifelike, and safe to use. This demands technologies that are stable, responsive, and secure. To that end, we rely on the robust and resilient cloud infrastructure of AWS, and look forward to the low-latency advantages offered by the AWS Region in Taiwan. AWS provides a highly stable and secure environment for Vyin AI to provide users with secure and AI hallucination free interactions. AWS Cloud services allow us to focus more on core AI technology innovation and the enhancement of the ‘hyper-personalized interactive’ user experience, thereby accelerating product iteration and optimization.”

Chunghwa Telecom is a leader in cloud network services in Taiwan with the broadest mainstream 5G bandwidth, exceptional network speed, and globally recognized mobile internet capabilities. Chunghwa Telecom utilizes generative AI platforms such as Amazon Bedrock to build innovative services and create intelligent applications for various industries.

Dr. Rong-Shy Lin, president of CHT, stated: “With the launch of the AWS Region in Taiwan, CHT’s partnership with AWS has entered a new phase. We will deepen the integration of key advantages of the AWS Region, such as low latency and local data storage, combining them with CHT’s extensive backbone network, rich cloud experience, and professional team that has obtained multiple AWS Competency certifications. This will allow CHT to provide solutions that meet strict security and compliance requirements for government, financial, critical infrastructure, and highly regulated industries. At the same time, we are utilizing AWS technologies such as Amazon Bedrock to develop innovative applications and accelerate digital transformation and AI adoption. We will continue to provide optimized cloud and network services in Taiwan while supporting customers’ global expansion.”

AWS Partners in Taiwan

The AWS Partner Network in Taiwan plays a crucial role in helping customers adopt cloud technologies and maximize value from the new AWS Asia Pacific (Taipei) Region. These specialized partners combine deep technical expertise with local market knowledge to accelerate digital transformation across industries.

eCloudvalley Digital Technology Group is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner with a team of cloud experts with more than 600 certifications.

“eCloudvalley Group has always embraced our mission of being a cloud evangelist, driving the adoption of cloud technology across Taiwan’s industries,” said MP Tsai, chairman of eCloudvalley Group. “With over a decade of close collaboration with AWS, we are honored to help more and more customers and industries move to the cloud while being part of customers’ digital transformation journey on AWS. We believe that the launch of the AWS Asia Pacific (Taipei) Region will further support Taiwan companies’ digital transformation and innovation in Taiwan with its world-leading cloud technology, while industries with higher local data residency requirements, such as finance and healthcare, will be able to further advance their cloud transformation journey.”

Nextlink Technology Inc. is an AWS Premier Consulting Partner, certified Managed Service Provider (MSP) and has AWS Level 1 Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP) and Government Consulting Competency.

“The investment of AWS in local infrastructure will help drive the digital transformation of Taiwan companies, boosting the development of various industries spanning from traditional industries to emerging digital sectors,” said Shasta Ho, the CEO of Nextlink Technology Inc. “We look forward to continuing working with AWS to help enterprises across industries deeply utilize the new AWS Asia Pacific (Taipei) Region. This local advantage will address customer needs in data localization, low latency, compliance, and high performance computing workloads. We also look forward to using AWS world-leading cloud technologies to power customers’ digital transformation journeys while contributing to the diversification of Taiwan’s economy.”

SAP has been a strategic partner of AWS for more than a decade, with thousands of enterprise customers worldwide running their SAP workloads on AWS.

“SAP is thrilled to see AWS establish new data centers in Taiwan,” said George Chen, SAP global vice president and managing director for Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. “This investment provides Taiwan enterprises with greater choice, lower service latency, and enhanced operational flexibility. As a long-term strategic partner, SAP is committed to accelerating cloud transformation for these businesses. Through RISE with SAP, we can help customers seamlessly migrate to the cloud, enjoying greater flexibility, scalability, and reduced operational costs. By combining SAP’s enterprise solutions with the robust cloud platform of AWS, we’ll jointly empower Taiwan’s enterprises to unlock innovative AI applications and run their core businesses securely and reliably locally, driving Taiwan enterprise cloud transformation together.”

Supporting sustainable innovation in Taiwan

As Taiwan progresses toward its goal of net-zero emissions by 2050, AWS Cloud solutions are empowering organizations to enhance operational efficiency while reducing environmental impact. The new AWS Asia Pacific (Taipei) Region incorporates the AWS commitment to sustainability, helping organizations meet both technical and environmental objectives.

Ace Energy is a pioneer in Taiwan’s energy management sector. Since 2013, Ace Energy has been using AWS services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), and AWS IoT Core to provide innovative energy solutions through their Energy Saving Performance Contract model. Ace Energy has deployed energy management solutions across 1,000 locations, helped a semiconductor manufacturer reduce steam consumption by 65 percent, achieved 22 million new Taiwan dollars in annual energy savings, and decreased carbon emissions by 8,000 tons through their waste heat recovery technology.

Taiwan Power Company (Taipower) is Taiwan’s state power utility and has revolutionized its operations through AWS since 2018. By implementing smart grid technologies with drones, robotics, and virtual reality for smart patrol, Taipower has enhanced customer experience through the “Taiwan Power” application. The company has improved operational efficiency through data-driven decision-making and earned six consecutive Platinum Awards in the Corporate Sustainability category at the Taiwan Corporate Sustainability Awards.

Building cloud skills together

Since 2014, AWS has built comprehensive programs for cloud education and skills development in Taiwan. For example, educational programs such as AWS Academy, AWS Educate, and AWS Skill Builder have helped train more than 200,000 people in Taiwan on cloud skills. These programs will expand alongside our infrastructure investments to build a foundation for Taiwan’s digital future.

Taiwan boasts a vibrant AWS community that welcomes your involvement. Take part in knowledge-sharing and networking at local AWS User Groups in Taipei, engage with the four celebrated AWS Heroes in Taiwan, or consider becoming part of the growing community of AWS enthusiasts by joining the ranks of the 17 AWS Community Builders already contributing to Taiwan’s cloud ecosystem. All these community connections provide valuable opportunities to accelerate your cloud journey through local expertise and collaborative learning.

Stay tuned
The AWS Asia Pacific (Taipei) Region is ready to support your business. You can find a detailed list of the services available in this Region on the AWS Services by Region page. For news about AWS Region openings, check out the Regional news of the AWS News Blog.

Start building on the Asia Pacific (Taipei) Region now.

–Betty

AWS Weekly Roundup: South America expansion, Q Developer in OpenSearch, and more (May 12, 2025)

Post Syndicated from Micah Walter original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-weekly-roundup-south-america-expansion-q-developer-in-opensearch-and-more-may-12-2025/

I’ve always been fascinated by how quickly we’re able to stand up new Regions and Availability Zones at AWS. Today there are 36 launched Regions and 114 launched Availability Zones. That’s amazing!

This past week at AWS was marked by significant expansion to our global infrastructure. The announcement of a new Region in the works for South America means customers will have more options for meeting their low latency and data residency requirements. Alongside the expansion, AWS announced the availability of numerous instance types in additional Regions.

In addition to the infrastructure expansion, AWS is also expanding the reach of Amazon Q Developer into Amazon OpenSearch Service.

Last week’s launches

Instance announcements

AWS expanded instance availability for an array of instance types across additional Regions.

Additional updates

Upcoming events

We are in the middle of AWS Summit season! AWS Summits run throughout the summer in cities all around the world. Be sure to check the calendar to find out when a AWS Summit is happening near you. Here are the remaining Summits for May, 2025.

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In the works – AWS South America (Chile) Region

Post Syndicated from Elizabeth Fuentes original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/coming-soon-aws-south-america-chile-region/

Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced plans to launch a new AWS Region in Chile by the end of 2026. The AWS South America (Chile) Region will consist of three Availability Zones at launch, bringing AWS infrastructure and services closer to customers in Chile. This new Region joins the AWS South America (São Paulo) and AWS Mexico (Central) Regions as our third AWS Region in Latin America. Each Availability Zone is separated by a meaningful distance to support applications that need low latency while significantly reducing the risk of a single event impacting availability.

Skyline of Santiago de Chile with modern office buildings in the financial district in Las Condes

The new AWS Region will bring advanced cloud technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), closer to customers in Latin America. Through high-bandwidth, low-latency network connections over dedicated, fully redundant fiber, the Region will support applications requiring synchronous replication while giving you the flexibility to run workloads and store data locally to meet data residency requirements.

AWS in Chile
In 2017, AWS established an office in Santiago de Chile to support local customers and partners. Today, there are business development teams, solutions architects, partner managers, professional services consultants, support staff, and personnel in various other roles working in the Santiago office.

As part of our ongoing commitment to Chile, AWS has invested in several infrastructure offerings throughout the country. In 2019, AWS launched an Amazon CloudFront edge location in Chile. This provides a highly secure and programmable content delivery network that accelerates the delivery of data, videos, applications, and APIs to users worldwide with low latency and high transfer speeds.

AWS strengthened its presence in 2021 with two significant additions. First, an AWS Ground Station antenna location in Punta Arenas, offering a fully managed service for satellite communications, data processing, and global satellite operations scaling. Second, AWS Outposts in Chile, bringing fully managed AWS infrastructure and services to virtually any on-premises or edge location for a consistent hybrid experience.

In 2023, AWS further enhanced its infrastructure with two key developments, an AWS Direct Connect location in Chile that lets you create private connectivity between AWS and your data center, office, or colocation environment, and AWS Local Zones in Santiago, placing compute, storage, database, and other select services closer to large population centers and IT hubs. The AWS Local Zone in Santiago helps customers deliver applications requiring single-digit millisecond latency to end users.

The upcoming AWS South America (Chile) Region represents our continued commitment to fueling innovation in Chile. Beyond building infrastructure, AWS plays a crucial role in developing Chile’s digital workforce through comprehensive cloud education initiatives. Through AWS Academy, AWS Educate, and AWS Skill Builder, AWS provides essential cloud computing skills to diverse groups—from students and developers to business professionals and emerging IT leaders. Since 2017, AWS has trained more than two million people across Latin America on cloud skills, including more than 100,000 in Chile.

AWS customers in Chile
AWS customers in Chile have been increasingly moving their applications to AWS and running their technology infrastructure in AWS Regions around the world. With the addition of this new AWS Region, customers will be able to provide even lower latency to end users and use advanced technologies such as generative AI, Internet of Things (IoT), mobile services, banking industry, and more, to drive innovation. This Region will give AWS customers the ability to run their workloads and store their content in Chile.

Here are some examples of customers in Chile using AWS to drive innovation:

The Digital Government Secretariat (SGD) is the Chilean government institution responsible for proposing and coordinating the implementation of the Digital Government Strategy, providing an integrated government approach. SGD coordinates, advises, and provides cross-sector support in the strategic use of digital technologies, data, and public information to improve state administration and service delivery. To fulfill this mission, SGD relies on AWS to operate critical digital platforms including Clave Única (single sign-on), FirmaGob (digital signature), the State Electronic Services Integration Platform (PISEE), DocDigital, SIMPLE, and the Administrative Procedures and Services Catalog (CPAT), among others.

Transbank, Chile’s largest payment solutions ecosystem managing the largest percentage of national transactions, used AWS to significantly reduce time-to-market for new products. Moreover, Transbank implemented multiple AWS-powered solutions, enhancing team productivity and accelerating innovation. These initiatives showcase how financial technology companies can use AWS to drive innovation and operational efficiency. “The new AWS Region in Chile will be very important for us,” said Jorge Rodríguez M., Chief Architecture and Technology Officer (CA&TO) of Transbank. “It will further reduce latency, improve security and expand the possibilities for innovation, allowing us to serve our customers with new and better services and products.”

To learn more about AWS customers in Chile, visit AWS Customer Success Stories.

AWS sustainability efforts in Chile
AWS is committed to water stewardship in Chile through innovative conservation projects. In the Maipo Basin, which provides essential water for the Metropolitan Santiago and Valparaiso regions, AWS has partnered with local farmers and climate-tech company Kilimo to implement water-saving initiatives. The project involves converting 67 hectares of agricultural land from flood to drip irrigation, which will save approximately 200 million liters of water annually.

This water conservation effort supports AWS commitment to be water positive by 2030 and demonstrates our dedication to environmental sustainability in the communities where AWS operate. The project uses efficient drip irrigation systems that deliver water directly to plant root systems through a specialized pipe network, maximizing water efficiency for agricultural use. To learn more about this initiative, read our blog post AWS expands its water replenishment program to China and Chile—and adds projects in the US and Brazil.

AWS community in Chile
The AWS community in Chile is one of the most active in the region, comprising of AWS Community Builders, two AWS User Groups (AWS User Group Chile and AWS Girls Chile), and an AWS Cloud Club. These groups hold monthly events and have organized two AWS Community Days. At the first Community Day, held in 2023, we had the honor of having Jeff Barr as the keynote speaker.

Chile AWS Community Day 2023

Stay tuned
We’ll announce the opening of this and the other Regions in future blog posts, so be sure to stay tuned! To learn more, visit the AWS Region in Chile page.

— Eli

Thanks to Leonardo Vilacha for the Chile AWS Community Day 2023 photo.

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In the works – New Availability Zone in Maryland for US East (Northern Virginia) Region

Post Syndicated from Channy Yun (윤석찬) original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in-the-works-new-availability-zone-in-maryland-for-us-east-n-virginia-region/

The US East (Northern Virginia) Region was the first Region launched by Amazon Web Services (AWS), and it has seen tremendous growth and customer adoption over the past several years. Now hosting active customers ranging from startups to large enterprises, AWS has steadily expanded the US East (Northern Virginia) Region infrastructure and capacity. The US East (Northern Virginia) Region consists of six Availability Zones, providing customers with enhanced redundancy and the ability to architect highly available applications.

Today, we’re announcing that a new Availability Zone located in Maryland will be added to the US East (Northern Virginia) Region, which is expected to open in 2026. This new Availability Zone will be connected to other Availability Zones by high-bandwidth, low-latency network connections over dedicated, fully redundant fiber. The upcoming Availability Zone in Maryland will also be instrumental in supporting the rapid growth of generative AI and advanced computing workloads in the US East (Northern Virginia) Region.

All Availability Zones are physically separated in a Region by a meaningful distance, many kilometers (km) from any other Availability Zone, although all are within 100 km (60 miles) of each other. The network performance is sufficient to accomplish synchronous replication between Availability Zones in Maryland and Virginia within the US East (Northern Virginia) Region. If your application is partitioned across multiple Availability Zones, your workloads are better isolated and protected from issues such as power outages, lightning strikes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and more.

With this announcement, AWS now has four new Regions in the works—New Zealand, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud—and 13 upcoming new Availability Zones.

Geographic information for the new Availability Zone
In March, we provided more granular visibility into the geographic location information of all AWS Regions and Availability Zones. We have updated the AWS Regions and Availability Zones page to reflect the new geographic information for this upcoming Availability Zone in Maryland. As shown in the following screenshot, the infrastructure for the upcoming Availability Zone will be located in Maryland, United States of America, for the US East (Northern Virginia) us-east-1 Region.

You can continue to use this geographic information to choose Availability Zones that align with your regulatory, compliance, and operational requirements.

After the new Availability Zone is launched, it will be available along with other Availability Zones in the US East (Northern Virginia) Region through the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), and AWS SDKs.

Stay tuned
We plan to make this new Availability Zone in the US East (Northern Virginia) Region generally available in 2026. As usual, check out the Regional news of the AWS News Blog so that you’ll be among the first to know when the new Availability Zone is open!

To learn more, visit the AWS Global Infrastructure Regions and Availability Zones page or AWS Regions and Availability Zones in the AWS documentation and send feedback to AWS re:Post or through your usual AWS Support contacts.

— Channy

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Announcing the European region for Amazon Q Developer

Post Syndicated from Brian Beach original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/amazon-q-developer-european-region/

As I sat down to write this post, my daughter called from the top of the Eiffel Tower on a trip with her high school class. While she excitedly pointed her camera toward the Parisian skyline, I was struck by how technology has transformed our concept of distance. Her world, at eighteen, is infinitely more connected than the one I knew at her age. I couldn’t help but smile at the timing of this call, because today Amazon Q Developer is expanding to Europe.

The launch of Amazon Q Developer Pro Tier in the Frankfurt (eu-central-1) region marks a significant milestone for our European customers, addressing two critical needs: data residency and performance optimization. For organizations that need to meet EU data residency requirements, the ability to store customer content within EU boundaries can help provide the assurances they require. Beyond compliance, this regional presence brings performance benefits. European customers will experience reduced latency in their interactions with Amazon Q Developer, as requests are processed closer to home. This proximity not only improves response times but also enhances the overall development experience, making real-time interactions with Amazon Q Developer more fluid and natural.

Amazon Q Developer Pro tier users now have the choice of creating a profile in N. Virginia (us-east-1) or Frankfurt (eu-central-1). Associated data – including customizations – is stored in this region. While data is stored in Frankfurt, Amazon Q utilizes cross-region inferencing to optimize request processing. At launch, this includes Frankfurt, Ireland, Paris and Stockholm, as shown in the following image.

A map of Western Europe showing connections between four cities: Frankfurt (shown as a central hub with concentric circles) connected by curved orange lines to Stockholm (Sweden), Ireland, and Paris (France). The map has a dark background with countries shown in gray.

Finally, it is important to note that certain operations, such as querying AWS resources in other regions (e.g. “List my S3 buckets in Tokyo”), will naturally involve cross-region calls regardless of your Q Developer profile’s location.

The Frankfurt region includes all GA features except the command line and the ability to chat with Support. You can read more in the Amazon Q Developer User Guide. We invite you to experience these new capabilities by upgrading to the Pro tier and selecting Frankfurt as your region during profile creation. Get started with Amazon Q Developer, and share your feedback with us as we continue to expand our global presence.

Detailed geographic information for all AWS Regions and Availability Zones is now available

Post Syndicated from Prasad Rao original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-available-geography-information-for-all-aws-regions-and-availability-zones/

Starting today, you can get more granular visibility of geographic location information for AWS Regions and AWS Availability Zones (AZs). This detailed information will help you choose the Regions and AZs that align with your regulatory, compliance, and operational requirements.

We continue to expand the AWS global infrastructure to meet your business requirements and now have 114 AZs across 36 Regions. We have announced plans to add 12 more AZs and four Regions in New Zealand, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.

One of the things we’ve learned from our customers is the need to have more visibility into the specific location of infrastructure within an AWS Region. This is important for customers in highly regulated industries such as the financial industry or gaming, where there are specific requirements for the physical placement of infrastructure. For example, FanDuel, a leading sports gaming company based in the U.S., is scaling into new markets across the U.S. and Canada. They are taking advantage of the improved geographic transparency to make more informed decisions and ensure they’re meeting data residency requirements as they scale their business quickly.

Geographies for AWS Regions
To find the geographic information for your Region, you can visit the AWS Global Infrastructure Regions and Availability Zones page. Once you navigate to this page, you can choose any tab on the map and scroll to the bottom to review the geographic information for each Region. See the following image for an example showing the North America Regions. As would be expected, the infrastructure for the US West (Oregon) Region is located in the United States of America, and the Canada (Central) Region is located in Canada.

Geographies for Availability Zones
To find the specific geographic information for an AZ, you can visit the AWS Regions and Availability Zones page in AWS Documentation. Choose the Region you’re interested in and you’ll find a table showing you the geography for that Region. As you see in the following screenshot, the infrastructure of the AZ with AZ ID use1-az1 is located in Virginia, United States of America.

Geographies_AZs

Stay tuned
We will update these pages to reflect new geographic information as we continue to grow our AWS Global infrastructure footprint and add more AWS Regions and AZs.

Quick links
To learn more, visit the AWS Global Infrastructure Regions and Availability Zones page or AWS Regions and Availability Zones in AWS Documentation, and send feedback to AWS re:Post or through your usual AWS Support contacts.

– Prasad

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Top Architecture Blog Posts of 2024

Post Syndicated from Andrea Courtright original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/top-architecture-blog-posts-of-2024/

Well, it’s been another historic year! We’ve watched in awe as the use of real-world generative AI has changed the tech landscape, and while we at the Architecture Blog happily participated, we also made every effort to stay true to our channel’s original scope, and your readership this last year has proven that decision was the right one.

AI/ML carries itself in the top posts this year, but we’re also happy to see that foundational topics like resiliency and cost optimization are still of great interest to our audience.

(By the way, if you were hoping for more AI/ML content, head on over to our sister channel, the AWS Machine Learning Blog!).

Without further ado, here are our top posts from 2024!

#10 Deploy Stable Diffusion ComfyUI on AWS elastically and efficiently

This post helps you get started using ComfyUI, and was so successful that we followed it up later in the year with How to build custom nodes workflow with ComfyUI on EKS!

Architecture for deploying stable diffusion on ComfyUI

Figure 1. Architecture for deploying stable diffusion on ComfyUI

#9 Let’s Architect! Designing Well-Architected systems

In keeping with Let’s Architect! series, we have our first of three favorites for the year. This set of resources helps you apply Well-Architected standards in practice.

Let's Architect

Figure 2. Let’s Architect

#8 Let’s Architect! Learn About Machine Learning on AWS

As I said, Let’s Architect! has a winning series, and they’ve got a finger on the pulse of the tech world. This post about machine learning showcases some of the most exciting things happening at AWS.

Let's Architect

Figure 3. Let’s Architect

If you’re more interested in generative AI, you can also take a look at another post from 2024: Let’s Architect! GenAI

#7 Creating an organizational multi-Region failover strategy

Preparedness is another common theme in this year’s favorites. Michael, John, and Saurabh are well-versed in multi-Region architecture, and they’re here to share some strategies to contain failure impact.

When the application experiences an impairment using S3 resources in the primary Region, it fails over to use an S3 bucket in the secondary Region.

Figure 4. When the application experiences an impairment using S3 resources in the primary Region, it fails over to use an S3 bucket in the secondary Region.

#6 Building a three-tier architecture on a budget

Let’s talk cost optimization. This post about a three-tier architecture that relies on the AWS Free Tier is a must-read for anyone looking for tips to help them avoid unnecessary costs (and that’s everyone).

Example of a three-tier architecture on AWS

Figure 5. Example of a three-tier architecture on AWS

#5 Announcing updates to the AWS Well-Architected Framework guidance

As usual, Haleh & team are pros at making sure the Well-Architected Framework is current and relevant. Take a look at the enhanced and expanded guidance in all six pillars.

Well-Architected logo

Figure 6. Well-Architected logo

#4 Let’s Architect! Serverless developer experience in AWS

One more winning post from Luca, Federica, Vittorio, and Zamira! This collection of developer resources includes new ideas in AWS Lambda, Amazon Q Developer, and Amazon DynamoDB.

Let's Architect

Figure 7. Let’s Architect

#3 London Stock Exchange Group uses chaos engineering on AWS to improve resilience

This post from April 1 was not an April Fool’s joke! See how LSEG designed failure scenarios to test their resilience and observability.

Chaos engineering pattern for hybrid architecture (3-tier application)

Figure 8. Chaos engineering pattern for hybrid architecture (3-tier application)

#2 Achieving Frugal Architecture using the AWS Well-Architected Framework Guidance

Frugality AND Well-Architected? What a winning combo! This post, inspired by the 2023 re:Invent keynote, outlines the seven laws of Frugal Architecture.

Well-Architected logo

Figure 9. Well-Architected logo

#1 How an insurance company implements disaster recovery of 3-tier applications

And finally, our number one post of the year! Amit and Luiz showcase a customer solution with real-world applications that builds on the guidelines of other posts in this list! Well done!

The Pilot Light scenario for a 3-tier application that has application servers and a database deployed in two Regions

Figure 10. The Pilot Light scenario for a 3-tier application that has application servers and a database deployed in two Regions

Thank you!

As always, thanks to our contributors for their dedication and desire to share, and to you, our readers! We would be nothing with you. Literally.

For other top post lists, see our Top 10 and Top 5 posts from previous years.

Enhance the resilience of critical workloads by architecting with multiple AWS Regions

Post Syndicated from John Formento original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/enhance-the-resilience-of-critical-workloads-by-architecting-with-multiple-aws-regions/

In this post, we will share how you can use multi-Region as an architectural approach to achieve higher resilience on Amazon Web Services (AWS). This approach relies on first operating a workload across multiple Availability Zones within an AWS Region, before expanding to achieve even higher resilience by using multiple Regions. This is because within a Region there are multiple Availability Zones, which are physically separated by many miles but still close enough together (60 miles or less) to allow for single-digit millisecond latency. Each Availability Zone features one or more data centers, each housed in its own facility with its own redundant networking, connectivity, and power. Availability Zones provide fundamental building blocks that can help you achieve your resilience goals for your applications. First, you can benefit from the separation between Availability Zones by using Zonal services to specify which Availability Zone a resource is in, such as an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance. This means that if you build your application with redundant replicas of your application resources in each Availability Zone, you can gain excellent resilience to infrastructure events impacting any one Availability Zone.

A multi-Region approach is a reliable way to achieve a bounded recovery time for critical applications in the rare event of a service failure in a Region that is impacting your application. Each Region has strict logical and physical separation from other Regions. This purposeful design helps avoid service and infrastructure disruptions in one Region affecting another Region. This unique property of Regions can be used to build multi-Region applications with predictable fault domains.

While a multi-Region approach can improve your application’s resilience to failures, it can be challenging to build and operate such an application. It requires careful work to take advantage of the isolation between Regions, with care taken to not remove this isolation benefit at the application level. For example, if you fail over an application between Regions, you need to maintain strict separation between your application stacks in each Region, be aware of all the application dependencies, and fail over all parts of the application together. This kind of system requires planning and coordination amongst many engineering and business teams, especially with a complex, microservices-based architecture that could have several dependencies between applications.

If you’re replicating data between Regions using an asynchronous approach, you should be aware of the risk that not all your data has been replicated to the standby Region when you fail over. Because there’s a finite time needed to copy data over between Regions, data might be out of sync between the primary and standby Regions. If you use a synchronously replicated database across Regions to support your applications running from more than one Region concurrently, you avoid issues with data being out of sync when starting your application in the new Region. However, this introduces higher latency characteristics into your application’s resources. This is because writes need to commit to more than one Region, and the Regions can span hundreds or thousands of miles from one another. This latency characteristic needs to be accounted for in your application design. In addition, synchronous replication can increase the chance for correlated failures because writes need to be committed to more than one Region to be successful. If there is an impairment within one Region, you’ll need to form a quorum for writes to be successful, which typically involves having your database in three Regions and having a quorum of two out of three.

Finally, you need to practice the failover and simulate Region impairments to know that it works when you need it. It’s a substantial time and resource investment to regularly rotate your application between Regions to practice failover, but it’s a recommended practice if you plan to build a multi-Region application.

Given these additional considerations when implementing a multi-Region approach, for most AWS customers, multi-AZ is the right approach for building and operating resiliently in the cloud. This approach helps mitigate most infrastructure failures, which are usually contained within an Availability Zone. A multi-Region approach is most common in the following scenarios.

Meet regulatory and compliance requirements and enhance disaster recovery capabilities

Regulated industries like financial services and healthcare and life sciences can require that applications be multi-Region. Healthcare providers and pharmaceutical companies, for example, often deploy electronic health records (EHR), clinical trial management systems, and other applications across multiple Regions for enhanced data redundancy, disaster recovery, and compliance with regional data privacy regulations (like HIPAA in the US or GDPR in the EU). Epic on AWS, for example, is typically deployed across multiple Availability Zones and multiple Regions to increase the resilience of customers’ EHR and integrated application environment, making full use of the resources and geographic diversity of the AWS Cloud.

Banks and financial institutions, including Fidelity and Vanguard, also deploy many of their core trading and investment platforms and customer-facing applications across multiple Regions for enhanced business continuity and compliance with local data protection regulations.

Achieve a bounded recovery time to support highly available business-critical workloads

With growing demand for always-on applications and services, companies are increasingly reliant on cloud-based services and infrastructure for day-to-day operations and business continuity. While a single Region supports highly available and resilient applications, distributing workloads across multiple Regions enables a bounded recovery time in the rare event of a disruption to the application. The physical and logical separation of Regions provides a well-defined fault isolation boundary that you can use to create predictable fault boundaries for your applications. If their application experiences issues in one Region, the workloads can continue operating in another Region, which minimizes downtime for customers and users.

Streaming platforms like Netflix, NBCUniversal, and Disney, for example, deploy their content delivery networks (CDNs) and video streaming infrastructure across multiple Regions to provide a seamless media experience for their customers. In many cases, video streaming and video gaming companies deploy their infrastructure across multiple Regions to offer lower-latency gaming experiences for players worldwide.

Automotive companies such as Honda deploy their connected vehicle platforms across multiple Regions to scale globally. They use geo-location routing that identifies the closest broker the vehicle should communicate with based on customer-configured rules that govern how vehicles connect to the cloud infrastructure. This allows them to reliably connect millions of vehicles to the cloud while supporting high availability.

Conclusion

No matter the industry or scenario, AWS is the definitive choice for organizations that want to build and run highly available, resilient applications in the cloud, with resilience built into its infrastructure, operational models, and comprehensive capabilities across Regions. To learn how to choose between the different options for building resilience into your application, see the Well-Architected reliability pillar, and for a detailed framework for choosing multi-Region, see AWS Multi-Region Fundamentals.

Now open — AWS Mexico (Central) Region

Post Syndicated from Elizabeth Fuentes original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-open-aws-mexico-central-region/

In February 2024, we announced plans to expand Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure in Mexico. Today, I’m excited to announce the general availability of the AWS Mexico (Central) Region with three Availability Zones and API code mx-central-1. This new AWS Region is the first AWS infrastructure Region in Mexico and adds to our growing presence in Latin America.

The AWS Region in Mexico represents a significant commitment to the country’s digital future. AWS is planning to invest more than $5 billion in Mexico over 15 years. This AWS Region will provide customers with advanced and secure cloud technologies, including cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities with purpose-built processors, while supporting Mexico’s growing digital economy. With this effort, AWS will support an average of more than 7,000 full-time equivalent jobs annually in Mexico, adding more than $10 billion to Mexico’s gross domestic product (GDP). AWS has also launched a $300,000 AWS InCommunities Fund in Queretaro to help local groups, schools, and organizations initiate new community projects.

mexico city

Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City

The AWS Mexico (Central) Region provides organizations in Mexico with a new option to run their workloads and store data locally. Organizations that need data residency capabilities, enhanced performance with lower latency, or robust security standards can now use infrastructure located in Mexico.

AWS in Mexico
AWS has operated infrastructure in Mexico since 2020. The infrastructure includes seven Amazon CloudFront edge locations, AWS Outposts, and strategic offerings such as AWS Local Zones in Queretaro and AWS Direct Connect. These infrastructure offerings help customers run low-latency applications while maintaining secure connectivity.

Performance and Innovation
The AWS Mexico (Central) Region brings AWS infrastructure and services closer to local customers. With this new Region, AWS provides lower latency for customers in Mexico compared to using other AWS Regions. Customers will also be able to use our innovation in purpose-built processors, notably AWS Graviton, that delivers up to 40% better price performance compared to x86-based Amazon EC2 instances across diverse workloads.

This technological advantage extends to our cutting-edge AI and ML capabilities, including:

  • Advanced ML infrastructure with AWS Trainium and AWS Inferentia for scalable generative AI deployment.
  • Purpose-built processors optimized for cloud workloads to deliver best price-performance.

Security and Compliance
AWS provides comprehensive security capabilities with support for 143 security standards and compliance certifications, including PCI-DSS, HIPAA/HITECH, FedRAMP, GDPR, FIPS 140-2, and NIST 800-171. All AWS customers own their data, choose where to store it, and decide if/when to move it. This means customers storing content in the AWS Mexico (Central) Region have the assurance that their content will not leave Mexico, unless they chose to move it.

AWS Customers in Mexico
Leading Mexican organizations are already achieving significant results with AWS. Companies such as Aeroméxico, Banco Santander Mexico, Cinépolis, Grupo Salinas, Kavak, Palace Resorts, and Vector Casa de Bolsa are running mission-critical workloads on AWS. Here are key examples:

BBVA, a leading multinational financial services company, is using AWS to accelerate its data-driven transformation. Using Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Bedrock, BBVA is empowering over 1,000 data scientists to build, train, and deploy machine learning models efficiently. This technology enables BBVA to explore advanced technologies and create innovative financial solutions, supporting their goal of becoming a true data and AI-driven digital organization.

Grupo Multimedios, a leading Mexican media group, is pioneering the use of generative AI, by implementing Amazon Bedrock for their media asset manager (MAM), reducing content research time by 88%, decreasing news generation time by 40%, and increasing content production by 70% (250 additional news items daily). As the fastest-growing media group embracing technological leadership, their AI implementation demonstrates a commitment to innovation while streamlining operations.

Bowhead Health, a digital healthcare company, is revolutionizing cancer research by using Amazon Bedrock to accelerate the research pipeline. The company has built a vast, de-identified dataset that’s ready for analysis without traditional recruitment barriers. Bowhead Health also delivers robust, real-world insights to drive faster breakthroughs in oncology drug development.

SkyAlert, an innovative technology company protecting millions in earthquake-prone areas, transformed its alert system by migrating to AWS in 2018. Before AWS, their system required 20 virtual machines and experienced significant delays during critical moments. Using AWS Lambda, AWS Fargate, and Amazon Pinpoint, they can now scale automatically and deliver messages to users quickly. With the opening of the AWS Mexico (Central) Region, SkyAlert anticipates further improvements to their services with local AWS infrastructure. As Santiago Cantú, Co-Founder of SkyAlert, explains, “The opening of the AWS Region in Mexico is an extremely important event for SkyAlert and for the security of those who trust us. Having local AWS infrastructure will improve our ability to deliver critical alerts, which potentially save lives, even faster and more reliably. This perfectly aligns with our mission to provide the most robust and advanced earthquake early warning system available. The new Region will allow us to take even greater advantage of AWS services, ensuring that we continue to be at the forefront of innovation in disaster preparedness.”

Building Skills Together
AWS has made significant investments in upskilling initiatives in Mexico including:

  • Training over 500,000 individuals in cloud technology since 2017.
  • Collaborating with the the Ministry of Economy to train 138,000 people in digital technology as of 2024.
  • Partnering with universities like Universidad Panamericana and Tec de Monterrey to teach digital skills.
  • Training programs with Canacintra for 20,000 Small and Medium Businesses (SMB) leaders.

AWS Commitment to Sustainability
Amazon is committed to reaching net-zero carbon across its business by 2040. A recent Accenture study shows that running workloads on AWS is up to 4.1 times more energy-efficient than on-premises environments. When workloads are optimized on AWS, the associated carbon footprint can be lowered by up to 99%. The AWS Mexico (Central) Region incorporates sustainable design practices, using air-cooling technology that eliminates the need for cooling water in operations. With this new Region, customers will also benefit from AWS sustainability efforts across its infrastructure. To learn more about sustainability at AWS, visit the AWS Cloud sustainability page.

Things to know
AWS Community in Mexico – The AWS Community in Mexico is one of the most vibrant in Latin America, with 26+ AWS Community Builders and 15 AWS User Groups. These groups are located in Jalisco, Puebla, Monterrey, Mérida, Mexico City, Mexicali, Cancún, León, Querétaro, San Luis Potosí, Ensenada, Saltillo, Tijuana, and Villahermosa, plus a specialized User Group called Embajadoras cloud (Cloud ambassadors) focused on women’s professional development. Together, these groups comprise 9,000+ total members.

AWS Global footprint – With this launch, AWS now spans 114 Availability Zones within 36 geographic Regions.

Available now – The new AWS Mexico (Central) Region is ready to support your business, and you can find a detailed list of the services available in this Region on the AWS Services by Region page.

To start building in mx-central-1, visit the AWS Global Infrastructure page.

Thanks to David Victoria for the AWS Community México 2024 photo.

— Eli

Announcing the new AWS Asia Pacific (Thailand) Region

Post Syndicated from Donnie Prakoso original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/announcing-the-new-aws-asia-pacific-thailand-region/

Today, we’re pleased to announce that the AWS Asia Pacific (Thailand) Region is now generally available with three Availability Zones and API name ap-southeast-7.

The AWS Asia Pacific (Thailand) Region is the first infrastructure Region in Thailand and the fourteenth Region in Asia Pacific, joining existing Regions in Hong Kong, Hyderabad, Jakarta, Malaysia, Melbourne, Mumbai, Osaka, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo, as well as the Beijing and Ningxia China Regions.

Lumphini Park, one of the largest green spaces in central Bangkok spanning 142 acres.

The adoption of cloud computing has gained significant momentum in Thailand, driven by evolving business needs and government initiatives such as Thailand 4.0. These initiatives aim to transform Thailand into an innovation-driven economy by using emerging technologies to enhance productivity, competitiveness, and sustainable growth.

The new AWS Region will help startups, enterprises, government agencies, educational institutions, and nonprofit organizations run their applications and serve end users while maintaining data residency in Thailand. This aligns with Thailand’s digital transformation goals and the growing demand for cloud services. Over the next 15 years, Amazon Web Services (AWS) planned investments in Thailand are estimated to contribute $10B to Thailand’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and support an estimated average of 11,000 full-time equivalent (FTE) jobs in local Thai businesses annually.

Growing presence of AWS in Thailand
Our journey in Thailand began in 2013 with the first AWS office in Bangkok. Since then, AWS has continuously expanded its infrastructure and services in the country:

Amazon CloudFront – Since 2020, AWS has established six Amazon CloudFront edge locations throughout Thailand. These edge locations are part of the highly secure and programmable AWS content delivery network (CDN), designed to accelerate the delivery of data, videos, applications, and APIs to users worldwide with low latency and high transfer speeds.

AWS Outposts – In the same year, 2020, AWS introduced AWS Outposts to the Thai market. As a fully managed solution, AWS Outposts brings AWS infrastructure and services to virtually any on-premises or edge location, enabling a truly consistent hybrid experience. This service is particularly valuable for workloads that require low latency, local data processing, or local data storage.

AWS Local Zones – In 2022, AWS strengthened its commitment to Thailand by launching AWS Local Zones in Bangkok. This infrastructure deployment places compute, storage, database, and other select services closer to large population, industry, and IT centers. As a result, customers can deliver applications requiring single-digit millisecond latency to end users.

AWS Direct Connect – AWS established a AWS Direct Connect location in Bangkok in 2023 to enhance connectivity options and added a new AWS Direct Connect location with the launch of the AWS Asia Pacific (Thailand) Region. Customers can use AWS Direct Connect to establish secure and dedicated network connections to their AWS resources, providing improved network performance and reduced bandwidth costs.

AWS customer success stories in Thailand
Organizations in Thailand are using our services to drive innovation and transformation. Here are a few examples:

2C2P
2C2P, a leading Thailand-based FinTech startup, chose AWS for its robust security capabilities. As an omnichannel payment service provider in Southeast Asia, the company processes millions of customer payments globally using AWS CloudHSM for cryptographic key management, AWS Shield for distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection, and AWS Secrets Manager to safeguard sensitive credentials.

“Through AWS, we’ve unlocked the power to securely, dynamically, and compliantly scale to meet the surge in payment transaction volumes. AWS CloudHSM plays a pivotal role in fulfilling compliance requirements and propelling us toward accelerated business expansion,” says Myo Zaw, Chief Technology Officer at 2C2P.

aCommerce
aCommerce, the largest ecommerce enabler in Southeast Asia, has revolutionized market intelligence by launching AskIQ, a generative AI–powered feature on AWS. This software as a service (SaaS) platform provides the world’s leading brands with comprehensive competitor and category performance tracking capabilities across Southeast Asia’s largest ecommerce sites.

Leena Chanvirach, VP of Data Products at aCommerce Group, emphasizes the strategic value of their AWS collaboration: “Our collaboration with AWS allows clients to double down on their core competencies and business priorities. This best-of-both-worlds approach gives brands a competitive edge without the burden of building and maintaining sophisticated data infrastructure in-house.”

Ascend Money
Ascend Money, a leading Southeast Asian FinTech company, achieved a 70 percent reduction in compute costs while simultaneously improving application performance by up to 40 percent in certain workloads. Ascend Money implemented a sophisticated compute strategy using Amazon EC2 instances, resulting in significant operational improvements.

“AWS has significantly improved our performance, enabling us to deliver more innovative services to our customers,” says Peerawit Phuangkaeo, Head of Technical Operations at Ascend Money.

Building cloud skills together
AWS has built comprehensive programs for cloud education and skills development in Thailand, training more than 50,000 individuals in cloud skills since 2017. Here are some of the programs:

AWS Skill Builder
AWS Skill Builder is an online learning center where you can learn from AWS experts and build cloud skills online. AWS has made cloud education more accessible to Thai learners by offering more than 600 courses, with 106 courses specifically available in Thai language. The recent launch of the Amazon AI Ready initiative has further expanded the learning opportunities, particularly in the growing field of AI.

AWS Educate
Since its introduction in 2016, AWS Educate has played a transformative role in Thai education. The program has successfully integrated cloud computing into educational curricula across Thailand, providing students with direct access to AWS resources and hands-on experience. The impact has been substantial, with over 20,000 Thai students enrolled in the program. Beyond student education, AWS Educate has invested in training Thai educators, preparing them to deliver engaging and practical cloud computing courses that prepare students for the demands of the digital economy.

AWS Academy
AWS Academy has been instrumental in connecting academic learning with industry needs since its launch in Thailand in 2017. Through strategic partnerships with more than 30 leading universities and colleges across the country, AWS Academy has created a robust pipeline of cloud-skilled professionals. The program provides educational institutions with comprehensive cloud computing curricula that align with industry needs, making sure that students graduate with practical, job-ready skills.

Through these various initiatives and programs, AWS is not just providing educational resources, it’s building a foundation for Thailand’s digital future by helping equip the workforce with the necessary skills to use cloud technologies effectively.

Supporting sustainable innovation in Thailand
The AWS commitment to sustainability extends to supporting innovative companies in Thailand that are driving environmental initiatives.

BODA Technology & Consultancy
BODA, an AWS powered sustainability startup, uses AWS IoT Core to develop AI-powered solutions for energy efficiency optimization. The company has successfully improved operations in over 100,000 buildings and factories across Thailand, enabling these facilities to maximize efficiency while reducing costs and environmental impact.

GSPC Group
GSPC Group, a leading sustainable power company in Thailand, demonstrates how AWS supports the energy sector’s digital transformation. Following the merger between Global Power Synergy Public Company and Glow Energy, the group chose AWS Cloud for migrating its photovoltaic solar plant operations. Working with AWS and AWS Partner Dailitech, GSPC Group has achieved a 20–25 percent reduction in hardware, software, and licensing costs since moving to the cloud.

Things to know
AWS Community in Thailand — Thailand is home to two AWS Heroes, seven AWS Community Builders, and more than 17,000 members of the AWS User Group. If you’re interested in joining AWS User Group Thailand, visit their Facebook page.

AWS Global footprint — AWS now spans 111 Availability Zones within 35 geographic regions worldwide. We have announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in Germany, Taiwan, Mexico, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and New Zealand. 

The new Asia Pacific (Thailand) Region is ready to support your business. To learn more, visit the AWS Global Infrastructure page and start building on ap-southeast-7!

Happy building!
— Donnie

How an insurance company implements disaster recovery of 3-tier applications

Post Syndicated from Amit Narang original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/how-an-insurance-company-implements-disaster-recovery-of-3-tier-applications/

A good strategy for resilience will include operating with high availability and planning for business continuity. It also accounts for the incidence of natural disasters, such as earthquakes or floods and technical failures, such as power failure or network connectivity. AWS recommends a multi-AZ strategy for high availability and a multi-Region strategy for disaster recovery. In this post, we explore how one of our customers, a US-based insurance company, uses cloud-native services to implement the disaster recovery of 3-tier applications.

At this insurance company, a relevant number of critical applications are 3-tier Java or .Net applications. These applications require access to IBM DB2, Oracle, or Microsoft SQLServer databases that run on Amazon EC2 instances. The requirement was to create a disaster recovery strategy that implements a Pilot Light or Warm/Standby scenario. This design needs to keep costs at a minimum, and it needs to allow for failure detection and manual failover of resources. Furthermore, it needs to keep the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) under 15 minutes. Finally, the solution could not use any public resources.

The solution

Amazon Route53 Application Recovery Controller (Route53 ARC) helps manage and orchestrate application failover and recovery across multiple AWS Regions or on-premises environments. It is specifically focused on managing DNS routing and traffic management during failover and recovery operation; however, some customers decide to implement their own strategies for application recovery. In this blog, we are going to focus on how one of our financial services customer implements it.

The Well-Architected framework explains that a good disaster recovery plan needs to manage configuration drift. A good practice is to use the delivery pipeline to deploy to both Regions and to regularly test the recovery pattern. There are customers that go a step further and even choose to operate in the secondary Region for a period of time.

The solution chosen by one of our leading insurance customers encompasses two distinct scenarios: a failover and a failback scenario. The failover scenario covers a list of steps to failover applications from the primary Region to the secondary Region. The failback process is the return of the operations to the primary Region.

Failover

Our customer decided to test the Pilot Light scenario. This scenario considers an application and a database deployed both in the primary and secondary Regions. As a requirement to achieve the 15-minute RPO, an application deployed in the primary Region needs to replicate data to the secondary Region. This async replication is implemented for each of the company’s database engines (DB2, SQLServer, Oracle) using native tooling. Leveraging native tooling was an existing practice and going with it would help minimize any operational impact.

It is important to notice that the detection and failover mechanisms is created in the secondary Region. This ensures these components will remain available when the primary Region becomes unavailable. Another important aspect is to establish connectivity between the two networks. This is needed to allow for the database replication.

The Pilot Light scenario for a 3-tier application that has application servers and a database deployed in two Regions

Figure 1. The Pilot Light scenario for a 3-tier application that has application servers and a database deployed in two Regions

The failover procedure uses the following steps for detection and failover:

  1. An Amazon EventBridge scheduler runs the AWS Lambda function every 60 seconds.
  2. The Lambda function tests the application endpoint and adds a custom metric to Amazon CloudWatch. If the application is unavailable, a CloudWatch Alarm will start the Lambda Function that initiates the failover.
  3. A Lambda function initiates the failover by starting a Jenkins pipeline. The pipeline will failover the application and the database to the secondary Region. The Jenkins pipeline starts with a manual approval step, ensuring that the failover process does not start automatically.
  4. Once approvers validate the necessity of the failover, they approve the workflow, and the pipeline moves to the next stage.
  5. The pipeline failovers the database, promoting the database in the secondary Region to the primary state and enables write operations.
  6. Next, start or scale out application servers that run on EC2 instances or containers. This is important to assure they will support the increased load in the secondary Region once failover is complete.
  7. At this point, database and application servers are ready to receive load. Next, the Application Load Balancer (ALB) needs to failover to the secondary Region. Route53 failover routing policy automatically failovers between Regions, but this customer wanted to manually control this step using a health check. To implement a manual failover of the ALB, the pipeline creates a file in a designated S3 bucket. A Lambda function regularly checks if this file exists in the expected location. If so, it triggers a CloudWatch Alarm and the Route53 health check will fail. At this point, Route 53 will redirect traffic to the ALB in the secondary Region, becoming the new active endpoint.

Failback

The failback scenario starts when all the required services become online in the primary Region. AWS recommends using AWS Personal Health Dashboard to check for service health. Figure 2 illustrates the failback process in detail. It shows the step-by-step flow from initiating the failback procedure to the final DNS switchover, highlighting the key components and interactions involved in each stage. This visual representation helps to clarify the complex process of returning operations to the primary Region.

Diagram of the failback process

Figure 2. Diagram of the failback process

The failback procedure is implemented in six steps:

  1. A cloud operator or Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) initiates the failback procedure by submitting a form on an HTML page. A Lambda function starts a Jenkins pipeline.
  2. The pipeline initiates the delta sync replication of the database. This ensures that data changes made in the secondary Region are replicated to the primary Region.
  3. The next stage is a manual approval to recover back to the primary Region, where the SRE verifies that the databases are in sync and all services needed are online in the primary Region.
  4. Upon approval, the pipeline starts the application servers in the primary Region.
  5. Next, the database in the primary Region is promoted for write operations. The database endpoint in the secondary Region is updated to point to the primary Region’s database.
  6. As explained in the failover section, the DNS switchover depends on a file existing in S3. Since this file was created for our failover event, the pipeline will now remove this file. The Lambda function identifies the change and updates the state of the CloudWatch Alarm, then the Route53 Healthcheck will change the state. At this point, the ALB in the primary Region becomes active and failback completes successfully.

Benefits

This customer identified the following benefits in implementing this design:

  • Customizable solution that aligns with the company’s internal processes, operating model, and technologies in use
  • Standardized pattern applicable across the organization for applications with different technologies, including databases, Windows and Linux applications running on EC2
  • Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of less than 15 minutes
  • A cost optimized solution that uses cloud native services to implement the detection and failover scenarios

Conclusion

The solution for the disaster recovery of 3-tier applications demonstrates this financial services customer’s commitment to ensuring business continuity and resilience. This design showcases the company’s ability to tailor their architecture to their specific requirements. Achieving an RPO and RTO of less than 15 minutes for critical applications is a remarkable feat. It ensures minimal disruption to business operations during regional outages.

Furthermore, this solution leverages existing technologies and processes within the company, allowing for seamless integration and adoption across the organization. The ability to standardize this pattern for applications with different technologies helps simplifying the operating model.

If you’re an enterprise seeking to enhance the resilience of your critical applications, this disaster recovery solution from one of our enterprise customers serves as an inspiring example. To further explore the disaster recovery strategies and best practices on AWS, we recommend the following resources:

Hybrid Cloud Journey using Amazon Outposts and AWS Local Zones

Post Syndicated from Arun Chellappa Ganesan original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/hybrid-cloud-journey-using-amazon-outposts-and-aws-local-zones/

This post was co-written with Amy Flanagan, Vice President of Architecture and leader of the Virtual Architecture Team (VAT) at athenahealth, and Anusha Dharmalingam, Executive Director and Senior Architect at athenahealth.

athenahealth has embarked on an ambitious journey to modernize its technology stack by leveraging AWS’s hybrid cloud solutions. This transformation aims to enhance scalability, performance, and developer productivity, ultimately improving the quality of care provided to its patients.

athenahealth’s core products, including revenue cycle management, electronic health records, and patient engagement portals, have been built and refined over 25 years. The company initially deployed its Perl-based web application stack centrally in data centers, allowing it to scale horizontally to meet the growing demands of healthcare providers. However, as the company expanded, it encountered significant scaling and operational challenges in maintaining legal applications due to its monolithic architecture and tightly coupled codebase.

The need for modernization

With a legacy system acting as a multi-purpose database, athenahealth faced issues with developer productivity and operational efficiency. The monolithic architecture led to complex dependencies and made it difficult to implement new features. Realizing the need to modernize, athenahealth decided to refactor its applications and move to the cloud, taking advantage of AWS’s robust infrastructure and services.

Decomposing monoliths to microservices

athenahealth adopted the strangler fig pattern to decompose its monolithic applications into microservices. Starting with peripheral services, they gradually moved to core services, using containers and modern development practices. 80% of athenahealth’s AWS footprint are containerized workloads deployed on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS). Java became the primary language for these microservices, with purpose-built databases like Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, and Amazon OpenSearch.

Event-driven communication between services was facilitated through Amazon EventBridge, Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK), and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS). A data lake was established on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), fed by change data capture from relational databases. Despite progress, refactoring core services proved time-consuming and challenging.

Introducing AWS Outposts and AWS Local Zones

To address these challenges, athenahealth leveraged AWS Local Zones and AWS Outposts, extending AWS infrastructure and services to their on-premises data centers. This hybrid cloud approach allowed athenahealth to deploy modernized code while maintaining low-latency access to existing databases. Deployment across both AWS Local Zones close to the datacenter and AWS Outposts in the datacenter enabled athenahealth to get a highly available hybrid architecture. Local Zones offers additional elasticity, making it suitable for specific use cases. Additionally, the combination of deployment solutions enables optimal access to athenahealth on-premises services and AWS Regional services.

Benefits of AWS Outposts and AWS Local Zones

  • Scalability and performance: Outposts and Local Zones enabled athenahealth to curb the growth of their monolithic codebase, allowing for seamless integration of modern microservices with existing systems.
  • Developer productivity: Developers were able to focus on container-based workloads, using familiar tools and environments, thereby reducing context switching and improving efficiency.
  • Operational efficiency: By running containerized applications on Outposts and Local Zones, athenahealth achieved consistent performance and reliability, crucial for healthcare applications.

Hybrid cloud architecture

athenahealth’s hybrid cloud architecture includes two data centers geographically distributed for high availability and disaster recovery. As shown in Figure 1, the company operates two data centers that are geographically distributed, each housing two Outposts and connecting to two Local Zones. This configuration not only supports geo-proximity-based traffic distribution for optimal performance but also establishes a primary and standby setup for disaster recovery purposes. By connecting these Outposts to separate AWS Regions, athenahealth achieves additional redundancy, enhancing their system’s resilience and ensuring continuous operation. In addition, within a single Region the deployment across Outpost and Local Zone provides high availability for the applications. This hybrid setup enables athenahealth to seamlessly integrate their legacy monolithic application with modernized microservices. By using AWS Outposts and AWS Local Zones as an extension of their data centers, athenahealth can run containerized applications with low-latency access to on-premises databases. This architecture supports the company’s goals of curbing the growth of their monolithic codebase and improving developer productivity by allowing for consistent performance and reliability across their infrastructure. With two Outposts and two Local Zones deployed, athenahealth ensures that their critical healthcare services remain available and reliable, meeting the stringent demands of the industry.

AWS Outposts and AWS Local Zones at athenahealth

Figure 1. AWS Outposts and AWS Local Zones at athenahealth

Application deployment

athenahealth’s hybrid cloud architecture is designed to optimize the deployment of containerized workloads while ensuring efficient use of AWS Outposts’ capacity and elastic AWS Local Zone capacity. By leveraging Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), athenahealth deploys application containers on Outposts and AWS Local Zones, enabling low-latency access to on-premises databases. The control plane for these applications is managed in the AWS Region, while the worker nodes run locally on the Outposts and Local Zones. This setup ensures that critical applications requiring immediate data access can operate with minimal latency, thereby maintaining high performance and reliability.

To further optimize the use of AWS resources, athenahealth deploys non-latency-sensitive services, such as logging, monitoring, and CI/CD, directly in AWS Regions, as shown in Figure 2. These services do not require direct access to on-premises databases, allowing athenahealth to preserve the limited capacity of Outposts for applications that truly benefit from low-latency access. By strategically dividing the deployment of applications between Outposts and Local Zones and AWS Regions, athenahealth achieves a balanced, efficient, and scalable hybrid cloud environment that supports the company’s ongoing modernization efforts.

Amazon EKS on Amazon Outposts

Figure 2. Amazon EKS on Amazon Outposts

Primary use cases

athenahealth’s primary use cases for their hybrid cloud architecture focus on curbing the growth of their monolithic codebase while facilitating modernization and cloud migration. By leveraging AWS Outposts and AWS Local Zones, they supported two key use cases:

  • Enabling microservices running in AWS Regions to access on-premises databases with low latency
  • Offloading certain features of their monolithic application to Outposts and Local Zones, as shown in Figure 3

This approach reduces the load on legacy systems and enhances service delivery. These strategies allow athenahealth to maintain efficient operations and accelerate their transition to a hybrid cloud-based infrastructure.

Microservices running in AWS Regions interact with on-premises databases through Outposts and Local Zones, ensuring low-latency data access

Figure 3. Microservices running in AWS Regions interact with on-premises databases through Outposts and Local Zones, ensuring low-latency data access

Conclusion

This technology transformation is a significant step forward, enabling athenahealth to be more agile, efficient, and responsive to the evolving needs of its vast network of healthcare providers and patients. athenahealth’s journey to AWS hybrid cloud showcases the transformative power of modernizing legacy systems. With increased scalability, improved application performance, and streamlined developer workflows, the company can now focus even more on its core mission of delivering innovative, patient-centric solutions that improve health outcomes. As athenahealth progresses, it will continue to refine its hybrid cloud strategy, ensuring the delivery of high-quality healthcare services to clinicians and patients alike.

Further reading

Now open — AWS Asia Pacific (Malaysia) Region

Post Syndicated from Donnie Prakoso original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-open-aws-asia-pacific-malaysia-region/

In March of last year, Jeff Barr announced the plan for an AWS Region in Malaysia. Today, I’m pleased to share the general availability of the AWS Asia Pacific (Malaysia) Region with three Availability Zones and API name ap-southeast-5.

The AWS Asia Pacific (Malaysia) Region is the first infrastructure Region in Malaysia and the thirteenth Region in Asia Pacific, joining the existing Asia Pacific Regions in Hong Kong, Hyderabad, Jakarta, Melbourne, Mumbai, Osaka, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo and the Mainland China Beijing and Ningxia Regions.

The Petronas Twin Towers in the heart of Kuala Lumpur’s central business district.

The new AWS Region in Malaysia will play a pivotal role in supporting the Malaysian government’s strategic Madani Economy Framework. This initiative aims to improve the living standards of all Malaysians by 2030 while supporting innovation in Malaysia and across ASEAN. The construction and operation of the new AWS Region is estimated to add approximately $12.1 billion (MYR 57.3 billion) to Malaysia’s gross domestic product (GDP) and will support an average of more than 3,500 full-time equivalent jobs at external businesses annually through 2038.

The AWS Region in Malaysia will help to meet the high demand for cloud services while supporting innovation in Malaysia and across Southeast Asia.

AWS in Malaysia
 In 2016, Amazon Web Services (AWS) established a presence with its first AWS office in Malaysia. Since then, AWS has provided continuous investments in infrastructure and technology to help drive digital transformations in Malaysia in support of hundreds of thousands of active customers each month.

Amazon CloudFront – In 2017, AWS announced the launch of the first edge location in Malaysia, which helps improve performance and availability for end users. Today, there are four Amazon CloudFront locations in Malaysia.

AWS Direct Connect – To continue helping our customers in Malaysia improve application performance, secure data, and reduce networking costs, in 2017, AWS announced the opening of additional Direct Connect locations in Malaysia. Today, there are two AWS Direct Connect locations in Malaysia.

AWS Outposts – As a fully managed service that extends AWS infrastructure and AWS services, AWS Outposts is ideal for applications that need to run on-premises to meet low latency requirements. Since 2020, customers in Malaysia have been able to order AWS Outposts to be installed at their datacenters and on-premises locations.

AWS customers in Malaysia
Cloud adoption in Malaysia has been steadily gaining momentum in recent years. Here are some examples of AWS customers in Malaysia and how they are using AWS for various workloads:

PayNet – PayNet is Malaysia’s national payments network and shared central infrastructure for the financial market in Malaysia. PayNet uses AWS to run critical national payment workloads, including the MyDebit online cashless payments system and e-payment reporting.

Pos Malaysia Berhad (Pos Malaysia) – Pos Malaysia is the national post and parcel service provider, holding the sole mandate to deliver services under the universal postal service obligation for Malaysia. They migrated critical applications to AWS, which increased their business agility and ability to deliver enhanced customer experiences. Also, they scaled their compute capacity to handle deliveries to more than 11 million addresses and a network of more than 3,500 retail touchpoints using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), ensuring disruption-free services.

Deriv – Deriv, one of the world’s largest online brokers, is using Amazon Q Business to increase productivity, efficiency, and innovation in its operations across customer support, marketing, and recruiting departments. With Amazon Q Business, Deriv has been able to boost productivity and reduce onboarding time by 45 percent.

Asia Pacific University – As one of the leading tech universities in Malaysia, Asia Pacific University (APU) uses AWS serverless technology such as Lambda to reduce operational costs. The automated scalability of AWS services has led to high availability and faster deployment that ensure APU’s applications and services are accessible to the students and staff at all times, enhancing the overall user experience. 

Aerodyne – Aerodyne Group is a DT3 (Drone Tech, Data Tech, and Digital Transformation) solutions provider of drone-based enterprise solutions. They’re running their DRONOS software as a service (SaaS) platform on AWS to help drone operators worldwide grow their businesses.

Building cloud skills together
AWS and various organizations in Malaysia have been working closely to build necessary cloud skills for builders in Malaysia. Here are some of the initiatives:

Program AKAR powered by AWS re/Start – Program AKAR is the first financial services-aligned cloud skills program initiated by AWS and PayNet. This new program aims to bridge the growing skills gap in Malaysia’s digital economy by equipping university students with transferrable skills for careers in the sector. As part of this initial collaboration, PayNet, AWS re/Start, and WEPS have committed to starting the program with 100 students in 2024, with the first 50 from Asia Pacific University serving as a pilot. 

AWS Academy — AWS Academy aims to bridge the gap between industry and academia by preparing students for industry-recognized certifications and careers in the cloud with a free and ready-to-teach cloud computing curriculum. AWS Academy currently runs courses in 48 Malaysian universities, covering various domains. Since 2018, 23,000 students have been trained through this program.

AWS Skills Guild at PETRONAS – PETRONAS, a global energy and solutions provider with a presence in over 50 countries, has been an AWS customer since 2014. AWS is also collaborating with PETRONAS to train their employees using the AWS Skills Guild program.

AWS’s contribution to sustainability in Malaysia
With The Climate Pledge, Amazon is committed to reaching net-zero carbon across its business by 2040 and is on a path to powering its operations with 100 percent renewable energy by 2025.

In September 2023, AWS announced its collaboration with Petronas and Gentari, a global clean energy company, to accelerate sustainability and decarbonization efforts in the global energy transition. Shortly after, in December 2023, AWS customer PKT Logistics Group became the first Malaysian company to join over 300 global companies in The Climate Pledge to accelerate the world’s path to net-zero carbon.

In July 2024, AWS and Zero Waste Management collaborated on the first-ever AWS InCommunities Malaysia initiative, Green Wira Programme, to train educators to build sustainability initiatives in schools to advance Malaysia’s sustainable future.

Amazon is committed to investing and innovating across its businesses to help create a more sustainable future.

Things to know
AWS Community in Malaysia – Malaysia is also home to one AWS Hero, nine AWS Community Builders and about 9,000 community members of three AWS User Groups in various cities in Malaysia. If you’re interested in joining AWS User Groups Malaysia, visit their Meetup and Facebook pages.

AWS Global footprint – With this launch, AWS now spans 108 Availability Zones within 34 geographic Regions around the world. We have also announced plans for 18 more Availability Zones and six more AWS Regions in Mexico, New Zealand, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Thailand, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.

Available now – The new Asia Pacific (Malaysia) Region is ready to support your business, and you can find a detailed list of the services available in this Region on the AWS Services by Region page.

To learn more, please visit the AWS Global Infrastructure page, and start building on ap-southeast-5!

Happy building!
— Donnie

AWS Weekly Roundup: Advanced capabilities in Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Q, and more (July 15, 2024).

Post Syndicated from Abhishek Gupta original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-weekly-roundup-advanced-capabilities-in-amazon-bedrock-and-amazon-q-and-more-july-15-2024/

As expected, there were lots of exciting launches and updates announced during the AWS Summit New York. You can quickly scan the highlights in Top Announcements of the AWS Summit in New York, 2024.

NY-Summit-feat-img

My colleagues and fellow AWS News Blog writers Veliswa Boya and Sébastien Stormacq were at the AWS Community Day Cameroon last week. They were energized to meet amazing professionals, mentors, and students – all willing to learn and exchange thoughts about cloud technologies. You can access the video replay to feel the vibes or just watch some of the talks!

AWS Community Day Cameroon 2024

Last week’s launches
In addition to the launches at the New York Summit, here are a few others that got my attention.

Advanced RAG capabilities Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock – These include custom chunking options to enable customers to write their own chunking code as a Lambda function; smart parsing to extract information from complex data such as tables; and query reformulation to break down queries into simpler sub-queries, retrieve relevant information for each, and combine the results into a final comprehensive answer.

Amazon Bedrock Prompt Management and Prompt Flows – This is a preview launch of Prompt Management that help developers and prompt engineers get the best responses from foundation models for their use cases; and Prompt Flows accelerates the creation, testing, and deployment of workflows through an intuitive visual builder.

Fine-tuning for Anthropic’s Claude 3 Haiku in Amazon Bedrock (preview) – By providing your own task-specific training dataset, you can fine tune and customize Claude 3 Haiku to boost model accuracy, quality, and consistency to further tailor generative AI for your business.

IDE workspace context awareness in Amazon Q Developer chat – Users can now add @workspace to their chat message in Q Developer to ask questions about the code in the project they currently have open in the IDE. Q Developer automatically ingests and indexes all code files, configurations, and project structure, giving the chat comprehensive context across your entire application within the IDE.

New features in Amazon Q Business –  The new personalization capabilities in Amazon Q Business are automatically enabled and will use your enterprise’s employee profile data to improve their user experience. You can now get answers from text content in scanned PDFs, and images embedded in PDF documents, without having to use OCR for preprocessing and text extraction.

Amazon EC2 R8g instances powered by AWS Graviton4 are now generally available – Amazon EC2 R8g instances are ideal for memory-intensive workloads such as databases, in-memory caches, and real-time big data analytics. These are powered by AWS Graviton4 processors and deliver up to 30% better performance compared to AWS Graviton3-based instances.

Vector search for Amazon MemoryDB is now generally available – Vector search for MemoryDB enables real-time machine learning (ML) and generative AI applications. It can store millions of vectors with single-digit millisecond query and update latencies at the highest levels of throughput with >99% recall.

Introducing Valkey GLIDE, an open source client library for Valkey and Redis open source – Valkey is an open source key-value data store that supports a variety of workloads such as caching, and message queues. Valkey GLIDE is one of the official client libraries for Valkey and it supports all Valkey commands. GLIDE supports Valkey 7.2 and above, and Redis open source 6.2, 7.0, and 7.2.

Amazon OpenSearch Service enhancements – Amazon OpenSearch Serverless now supports workloads up to 30TB of data for time-series collections enabling more data-intensive use cases, and an innovative caching mechanism that automatically fetches and intelligently manages data, leading to faster data retrieval, efficient storage usage, and cost savings. Amazon OpenSearch Service has now added support for AI powered Natural Language Query Generation in OpenSearch Dashboards Log Explorer so you can get started quickly with log analysis without first having to be proficient in PPL.

Open source release of Secrets Manager Agent for AWS Secrets Manager – Secrets Manager Agent is a language agnostic local HTTP service that you can install and use in your compute environments to read secrets from Secrets Manager and cache them in memory, instead of making a network call to Secrets Manager.

Amazon S3 Express One Zone now supports logging of all events in AWS CloudTrail – This capability lets you get details on who made API calls to S3 Express One Zone and when API calls were made, thereby enhancing data visibility for governance, compliance, and operational auditing.

Amazon CloudFront announces managed cache policies for web applications – Previously, Amazon CloudFront customers had two options for managed cache policies, and had to create custom cache policies for all other cases. With the new managed cache policies, CloudFront caches content based on the Cache-Control headers returned by the origin, and defaults to not caching when the header is not returned.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New at AWS page.

We launched existing services in additional Regions:

Other AWS news
Here are some additional projects, blog posts, and news items that you might find interesting:

Context window overflow: Breaking the barrier – This blog post dives into intricate workings of generative artificial intelligence (AI) models, and why is it crucial to understand and mitigate the limitations of CWO (context window overflow).

Using Agents for Amazon Bedrock to interactively generate infrastructure as code – This blog post explores how Agents for Amazon Bedrock can be used to generate customized, organization standards-compliant IaC scripts directly from uploaded architecture diagrams.

Automating model customization in Amazon Bedrock with AWS Step Functions workflow – This blog post covers orchestrating repeatable and automated workflows for customizing Amazon Bedrock models and how AWS Step Functions can help overcome key pain points in model customization.

AWS open source news and updates – My colleague Ricardo Sueiras writes about open source projects, tools, and events from the AWS Community; check out Ricardo’s page for the latest updates.

Upcoming AWS events
Check your calendars and sign up for upcoming AWS events:

AWS Summits – Join free online and in-person events that bring the cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. To learn more about future AWS Summit events, visit the AWS Summit page. Register in your nearest city: Bogotá (July 18), Taipei (July 23–24), AWS Summit Mexico City (Aug. 7), and AWS Summit Sao Paulo (Aug. 15).

AWS Community Days – Join community-led conferences that feature technical discussions, workshops, and hands-on labs led by expert AWS users and industry leaders from around the world. Upcoming AWS Community Days are in Aotearoa (Aug. 15), Nigeria (Aug. 24), New York (Aug. 28), and Belfast (Sept. 6).

Browse all upcoming AWS led in-person and virtual events and developer-focused events.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!

— Abhishek

This post is part of our Weekly Roundup series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!

AWS Weekly Roundup: Amazon S3 Access Grants, AWS Lambda, European Sovereign Cloud Region, and more (July 8, 2024).

Post Syndicated from Sébastien Stormacq original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-weekly-roundup-amazon-s3-access-grants-aws-lambda-european-sovereign-cloud-region-and-more-july-8-2024/

I counted only 21 AWS news since last Monday, most of them being Regional expansions of existing services and capabilities. I hope you enjoyed a relatively quiet week, because this one will be busier.

This week, we’re welcoming our customers and partners at the Jacob Javits Convention Center for the AWS Summit New York on Wednesday, July 10. I can tell you there is a stream of announcements coming, if I judge by the number of AWS News Blog posts ready to be published.

I am writing these lines just before packing my bag to attend the AWS Community Day in Douala, Cameroon next Saturday. I can’t wait to meet our customers and partners, students, and the whole AWS community there.

But for now, let’s look at last week’s new announcements.

Last week’s launches
Here are the launches that got my attention.

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) Access Grants now integrate with Amazon SageMaker and open souce Python frameworks – Amazon S3 Access Grants maps identities in directories such as Active Directory or AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) principals, to datasets in S3. The integration with Amazon SageMaker Studio for machine learning (ML) helps you map identities to your machine learning (ML) datasets in S3. The integration with the AWS SDK for Python (Boto3) plugin replaces any custom code required to manage data permissions, so you can use S3 Access Grants in open source Python frameworks such as Django, TensorFlow, NumPy, Pandas, and more.

AWS Lambda introduces new controls to make it easier to search, filter, and aggregate Lambda function logs – You can now capture your Lambda logs in JSON structured format without bringing your own logging libraries. You can also control the log level (for example, ERROR, DEBUG, or INFO) of your Lambda logs without making any code changes. Lastly, you can choose the Amazon CloudWatch log group to which Lambda sends your logs.

Amazon DataZone introduces fine-grained access control – Amazon DataZone has introduced fine-grained access control, providing data owners granular control over their data at row and column levels. You use Amazon DataZone to catalog, discover, analyze, share, and govern data at scale across organizational boundaries with governance and access controls. Data owners can now restrict access to specific records of data instead of granting access to an entire dataset.

AWS Direct Connect proposes native 400 Gbps dedicated connections at select locations – AWS Direct Connect provides private, high-bandwidth connectivity between AWS and your data center, office, or colocation facility. Native 400 Gbps connections provide higher bandwidth without the operational overhead of managing multiple 100 Gbps connections in a link aggregation group. The increased capacity delivered by 400 Gbps connections is particularly beneficial to applications that transfer large-scale datasets, such as for ML and large language model (LLM) training or advanced driver assistance systems for autonomous vehicles.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New at AWS page.

Other AWS news
Here are some additional news items that you might find interesting:

The list of services available at launch in the upcoming AWS Europe Sovereign Cloud Region is available – we shared the list of AWS services that will be initially available at launch in the new AWS European Sovereign Cloud Region. The list has no surprises. Services for security, networking, storage, computing, containers, artificial intelligence (AI), and serverless will be available at launch. We are building the AWS European Sovereign Cloud to offer public sector organizations and customers in highly regulated industries further choice to help them meet their unique digital sovereignty requirements, as well as stringent data residency, operational autonomy, and resiliency requirements. This is an investment of 7.8 billion euros (approximately $8.46 billion). The new Region will be available by the end of 2025.

Upcoming AWS events
Check your calendars and sign up for upcoming AWS events:

AWS Summits – Join free online and in-person events that bring the cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. To learn more about future AWS Summit events, visit the AWS Summit page. Register in your nearest city: New York (July 10), Bogotá (July 18), and Taipei (July 23–24).

AWS Community Days – Join community-led conferences that feature technical discussions, workshops, and hands-on labs led by expert AWS users and industry leaders from around the world. Upcoming AWS Community Days are in Cameroon (July 13), Aotearoa (August 15), and Nigeria (August 24).

Browse all upcoming AWS led in-person and virtual events and developer-focused events.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!

— seb

This post is part of our Weekly Roundup series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!

In the Works – AWS Region in Taiwan

Post Syndicated from Channy Yun original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in-the-works-aws-region-in-taiwan/

Today, we’re announcing that a new AWS Region will be coming to Taiwan by early 2025. The new AWS Asia Pacific (Taipei) Region will consist of three Availability Zones at launch, and will give AWS customers in Taiwan the ability to run workloads and store data that must remain in Taiwan.

Each of the Availability Zones will be physically independent of the others in the Region – close enough to support applications that need low latency, yet sufficiently distant to significantly reduce the risk that an event at an Availability Zone level might impact business continuity.

The Availability Zones in this Region will be connected together through high-bandwidth, low-latency network connections over dedicated, fully redundant fiber. This connectivity supports applications that need synchronous replication between Availability Zones for availability or redundancy. You can take a peek at the AWS Global Infrastructure page to learn more about how we design and build Regions and Availability Zones.

We are currently working on Regions in Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Thailand, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. The AWS Cloud operates 105 Availability Zones within 33 AWS Regions around the world, with announced plans for 21 more Availability Zones and seven more Regions, including Taiwan.

AWS in Taiwan
AWS has been investing and supporting customers and partners in Taiwan for more than 10 years. To support our customers in Taiwan, we have business development teams, solutions architects, partner managers, professional services consultants, support staff, and various other roles working in our Taipei office.

Other AWS infrastructure includes two Amazon CloudFront edge locations along with access to the AWS global backbone through multiple redundant submarine cables. You can access any other AWS Region (except Beijing and Ningxia) from AWS Direct Connect locations in Taipei, operated by Chief Telecom and Chunghwa Telecom. With AWS Direct Connect, your data that would have previously been transported over the internet is delivered through a private network connection between your facilities and AWS.

You can also use AWS Outposts in Taiwan, a family of fully managed solutions delivering AWS infrastructure and services to virtually any on-premises or edge location for a truly consistent hybrid experience. With AWS Local Zones in Taipei, you can deliver applications that require single-digit millisecond latency to end users.

AWS continues to invest in upskilling students, local developers and technical professionals, nontechnical professionals, and the next generation of IT leaders in Taiwan through offerings like AWS Academy, AWS Educate, and AWS Skill Builder. Since 2017, AWS has trained more than eight million people across the Asia Pacific-Japan region on cloud skills, including more than 100,000 people in Taiwan.

To learn more, join AWS Summit 2024 Taiwan in July; in-person events that bring the cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS.

AWS customers in Taiwan
AWS customers in Taiwan have been increasingly moving their applications to AWS and running their technology infrastructure in other AWS Regions around the world. With the addition of this new AWS Region, customers will be able to provide even lower latency to end users and use advanced technologies such as generative artificial intelligence (generative AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile services, and more, to drive innovation. This Region will give AWS customers the ability to run their workloads and store their content in Taiwan.

Here are some examples of customers using AWS to drive innovation:

Chunghwa Telecom is the largest integrated telecom provider in Taiwan. To improve AI data security and governance, they use Amazon Bedrock for a variety of generative AI applications, including automatically generating specifications documents for the software development lifecycle and crafting custom marketing campaigns. With Amazon Bedrock, Chunghwa Telecom is saving developer hours and has also developed an immersive, interactive virtual English teacher for the first time.

Gamania Group is a leader in the development and publication of online games in Taiwan. To maximize the value of running on AWS, they worked with AWS Training and Certification to enhance AWS skills across all of its departments, such as AWS Classroom training, AWS Well-Architected Framework, and AWS GameDay events. As a result, they reduced the time needed to make critical operational decisions by 50 percent, lowered its time-to-market by up to 70 percent, and accelerated the launch of new games.

KKCompany Technologies is a multimedia technology group building a music streaming platform, AI-powered streaming solution, and cloud intelligence service in Taiwan. The company specializes in generative AI, multimedia technology, and digital transformation consulting services for enterprises in Taiwan and Japan. You can find BlendVision, a cloud-based streaming solution in AWS Marketplace.

To learn more about Taiwan customer cases, visit AWS Customer Success Stories in English or our Traditional Chinese page.

Stay Tuned
We’ll announce the opening of this and the other Regions in future blog posts, so be sure to stay tuned! To learn more, visit the AWS Region in Taiwan page in Traditional Chinese.

— Channy

Creating an organizational multi-Region failover strategy

Post Syndicated from Michael Haken original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/creating-an-organizational-multi-region-failover-strategy/

AWS Regions provide fault isolation boundaries that prevent correlated failure and contain the impact from AWS service impairments to a single Region when they occur. You can use these fault boundaries to build multi-Region applications that consist of independent, fault-isolated replicas in each Region that limit shared fate scenarios. This allows you to build multi-Region applications and leverage a spectrum of approaches from backup and restore to pilot light to active/active to implement your multi-Region architecture. However, applications typically don’t operate in isolation; consider both the components you will use and their dependencies as part of your failover strategy. Generally, multiple applications make up what we refer to as a user story, a specific capability offered to an end user, like “posting a picture and caption on a social media app” or “checking out on an e-commerce site”. Because of this, you should develop an organizational multi-Region failover strategy that provides the necessary coordination and consistency to make your approach successful.

Overview

There are four high-level strategies that organizations can pick from to guide a multi-Region approach:

  • Component-level failover
  • Individual application failover
  • Dependency graph failover
  • Entire application portfolio failover

These strategies move from the most granular to the coarsest approach. Each strategy has tradeoffs and addresses different challenges, including flexibility of failover decision making, testability of the failover combinations, presence of modal behavior, and organizational investment in planning and implementation. By the end of this post, you will be able to identify the pros and cons of each strategy so you can make intentional choices about which you select for your multi-Region failover solution.

Component-level failover

Applications are made up of multiple components, including their infrastructure, code and config, data stores, and dependencies. The component-level failover strategy helps you recover from individual component impairments. This means that when a single component is impaired, the application will fail over to a component hosted in a different Region. Consider the application in Figure 1. When the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) resources used by the application experience elevated error rates or higher latency, the application fails over to use data from an S3 bucket in its secondary Region.

When the application experiences an impairment using S3 resources in the primary Region, it fails over to use an S3 bucket in the secondary Region.

Figure 1. When the application experiences an impairment using S3 resources in the primary Region, it fails over to use an S3 bucket in the secondary Region.

This strategy gives the most autonomy and flexibility to individual applications, but has four main tradeoffs:

  • It adds latency by using resources in a second Region because they are physically further away. This gives the application multiple modes of behavior, lower latency when all components are in one Region, and higher latency when the components are split between Regions. Modal behavior can produce unexpected and undesirable results.
  • It introduces the possibility for inconsistent data if asynchronous replication is used in the data store.
  • It typically requires a runtime update of the application’s configuration to switch a component to a different Region, which can be unreliable during a failure scenario.
  • There are 2N-1 possible configurations (where N is the number of components in the application) of the application, which can make every possible combination in an application difficult to test.

Individual application failover

The next strategy allows individual applications to make an autonomous decision to fail over all of its components together, shown in Figure 2. This removes the latency tradeoff from the previous strategy by keeping all of the application components in the same Region. It also significantly reduces the complexity by only having two possible configurations per application. Additionally, applications can be failed over to another Region without updating their configuration by using approaches like Amazon Route 53 DNS failover, removing the unreliability of runtime configuration updates.

Application 3 experiences an impairment and fails over to the secondary Region.

Figure 2. Application 3 experiences an impairment and fails over to the secondary Region

However, allowing individual applications to make their own failover decision can introduce the same modal behavior we saw with component-level failover, just in a different dimension. In the worst case, 50% of the applications in a user story could fail over while 50% don’t, meaning every application interaction could be a cross-Region request, shown in Figure 3.

The worst-case scenario of allowing applications to make failover decisions independently.

Figure 3. The worst-case scenario of allowing applications to make failover decisions independently

Additionally, while this approach removes the complexity of the component failover approach, it still exhibits a level of similar complexity, albeit smaller, by having 2N-1 combinations of application locations across Regions, also making this approach difficult to test and coordinate.

Dependency graph failover

To solve the complexity of the previous strategy, you might decide to coordinate failover of all applications that support a user story as a single unit. We call this a dependency graph and it ensures that all applications that interact with each other will always be in the same Region, as shown in Figure 4.

A dependency graph of applications that all support user story "A".

Figure 4. A dependency graph of applications that all support user story “A”

While this solves the previous latency, modal behavior, and complexity tradeoffs, it comes with its own challenges. In a portfolio with multiple user stories and applications, this graph can be very large and discovering each dependency, especially infrequently used ones, can be difficult. In fact, seemingly unrelated dependency graphs can be connected by a single vertex that is shared between them, as shown in Figure 5.

Two unrelated user stories share a dependency on Application 4, requiring both dependency graphs to failover if either experience an impairment.

Figure 5. Two unrelated user stories share a dependency on Application 4, requiring both dependency graphs to failover if either experience an impairment

For example, if every user story you provide depends on a single authentication and authorization system, when one graph of applications needs to failover, then so does the entire authorization system. In turn, every other user story that depends on that authorization system needs to fail over as well. To mitigate this, you might implement independent replicas of these types of applications in each Region, if possible, to remove edges from the dependency graph.

Entire portfolio failover

The final strategy is failing over an entire application portfolio, whether or not applications are impacted or have any interaction with those that are, as shown in Figure 6. This strategy helps remove the operational burden of creating and maintaining dependency graphs for every user story your business supports.

Every user story fails over together regardless of observed impact from a failure.

Figure 6. Every user story fails over together regardless of observed impact from a failure

The major tradeoff is the organizational investment to create multi-Region capabilities for every application – you might not have made that broad investment in the other strategies. You can make this strategy slightly more granular by implementing it for specific application tiers, for example, failing over all tier-1 applications together, as long as you know there aren’t dependencies across applications of different criticality.

You can also combine this approach with the second strategy. Let individual applications make failover decisions until you see broad enough impact, or impact from the modal behavior, that you decide to make all applications failover to your secondary Region to mitigate the effects.

Conclusion

This blog post has looked at four different high-level approaches for creating an organizational multi-Region failover strategy.

Each strategy optimizes for different outcomes. Component-level failover gives you the highest degree of flexibility without organizational capabilities or coordination, but introduces the most complexity and bimodal behavior. Individual application failover optimizes for less complexity in failover combinations than component-level while still maintaining decentralized flexibility in failover decision making. Dependency graph failover optimizes for only needing to failover the minimum set of applications to support a capability, which removes the presence of modal behavior while requiring more organizational investment to do so. Finally, portfolio failover optimizes for not needing to maintain dependency graphs, but requires significant additional investment to build a multi-Region capability for every application.

Creating the strategy can be an iterative journey. You might start with allowing individual applications to make failover decisions while you build toward a future state of managing failover of independent dependency graphs. For more information on creating multi-Region architectures, see AWS Multi-Region Fundamentals and Disaster Recovery of Workloads on AWS.