Tag Archives: Regions

Now Open — AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region in Australia

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

Following up on Jeff’s post on the announcement of the Melbourne Region, today I’m pleased to share the general availability of the AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region with three Availability Zones and API name ap-southeast-4.

The AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region is the second infrastructure Region in Australia, in addition to the Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region, and 12th the twelfth Region in Asia Pacific, joining existing Rregions in Singapore, Tokyo, Seoul, Mumbai, Hong Kong, Osaka, Jakarta, Hyderabad, Sydney, and Mainland China Beijing and Ningxia Regions.

Melbourne city historic building: Flinders Street Station built of yellow sandstone

AWS in Australia: Long-Standing History
In November 2012, AWS established a presence in Australia with the AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region. Since then, AWS has provided continuous investments in infrastructure and technology to help drive digital transformations in Australia, to support hundreds of thousands of active customers each month.

Amazon CloudFront — Amazon CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) service built for high performance, security, and developer convenience that was first launched in Australia alongside Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region in 2012. To further accelerate the delivery of static and dynamic web content to end users in Australia, AWS announced additional CloudFront locations for Sydney and Melbourne in 2014. In addition, AWS also announced a Regional Edge Cache in 2016 and an additional CloudFront point of presence (PoP) in Perth in 2018. CloudFront points of presence ensure popular content can be served quickly to your viewers. Regional Edge Caches are positioned (network-wise) between the CloudFront locations and the origin and further help to improve content performance. AWS currently has seven edge locations and one Regional Edge Cache location in Australia.

AWS Direct Connect — As with CloudFront, the first AWS Direct Connect location was made available with Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region launch in 2012. To continue helping our customers in Australia improve application performance, secure data, and reduce networking costs, AWS announced the opening of additional Direct Connect locations in Sydney (2014), Melbourne (2016), Canberra (2017), Perth (2017), and an additional location in Sydney (2022), totaling six locations.

AWS Local Zones — To help customers run applications that require single-digit millisecond latency or local data processing, customers can use AWS Local Zones. They bring AWS infrastructure (compute, storage, database, and other select AWS services) closer to end users and business centers. AWS customers can run workloads with low latency requirements on the AWS Local Zones location in Perth while seamlessly connecting to the rest of their workloads running in AWS Regions.

Upskilling Local Developers, Students, and Future IT Leaders
Digital transformation will not happen on its own. AWS runs various programs and has trained more than 200,000 people across Australia with cloud skills since 2017. There is an additional goal to train more than 29 million people globally with free cloud skills by 2025. Here’s a brief description of related programs from AWS:

  • AWS re/Start is a digital skills training program that prepares unemployed, underemployed, and transitioning individuals for careers in cloud computing and connects students to potential employers.
  • AWS Academy provides higher education institutions with a free, ready-to-teach cloud computing curriculum that prepares students to pursue industry-recognized certifications and in-demand cloud jobs.
  • AWS Educate provides students with access to AWS services. AWS is also collaborating with governments, educators, and the industry to help individuals, both tech and nontech workers, build and deepen their digital skills to nurture a workforce that can harness the power of cloud computing and advanced technologies.
  • AWS Industry Quest is a game-based training initiative designed to help professionals and teams learn and build vital cloud skills and solutions. At re:Invent 2022, AWS announced the first iteration of the program for the financial services sector. National Australia Bank (NAB) is AWS Industry Quest: Financial Services’ first beta customer globally. Through AWS Industry Quest, NAB has trained thousands of colleagues in cloud skills since 2018, resulting in more than 4,500 industry-recognized certifications.

In addition to the above programs, AWS is also committed to supporting Victoria’s local tech community through digital upskilling, community initiatives, and partnerships. The Victorian Digital Skills is a new program from the Victorian Government that helps create a new pipeline of talent to meet the digital skills needs of Victorian employers. AWS has taken steps to help solve the retraining challenge by supporting the Victorian Digital Skills Program, which enables mid-career Victorians to reskill on technology and gain access to higher-paying jobs.

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

As of May 2022, two projects in Australia are operational. Amazon Solar Farm Australia – Gunnedah and Amazon Solar Farm Australia – Suntop will aim to generate 392,000 MWh of renewable energy each year, equal to the annual electricity consumption of 63,000 Australian homes. Once Amazon Wind Farm Australia – Hawkesdale also becomes operational, it will boost the projects’ combined yearly renewable energy generation to 717,000 MWh, or enough for nearly 115,000 Australian homes.

AWS Customers in Australia
We have customers in Australia that are doing incredible things with AWS, for example:

National Australia Bank Limited (NAB)
NAB is one of Australia’s largest banks and Australia’s largest business bank. “We have been exploring the potential use cases with AWS since the announcement of the AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region,” said Steve Day, Chief Technology Officer at NAB.

Locating key banking applications and critical workloads geographically close to their compute platform and the bulk of their corporate workforce will provide lower latency benefits. Moreover, it will simplify their disaster recovery plans. With AWS Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region, it will also accelerate their strategy to move 80 percent of applications to the cloud by 2025.

Littlepay
This Melbourne-based financial technology company works with more than 250 transport and mobility providers to enable contactless payments on local buses, city networks, and national public transport systems.

“Our mission is to create a universal payment experience around the world, which requires world-class global infrastructure that can grow with us,” said Amin Shayan, CEO at Littlepay. “To drive a seamless experience for our customers, we ingest and process over 1 million monthly transactions in real time using AWS, which enables us to generate insights that help us improve our services. We are excited about the launch of a second AWS Region in Australia, as it gives us access to advanced technologies, like machine learning and artificial intelligence, at a lower latency to help make commuting a simpler and more enjoyable experience.”

Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT)
RMIT is a global university of technology, design, and enterprise with more than 91,000 students and 11,000 staff around the world.

“Today’s launch of the AWS Region in Melbourne will open up new ways for our researchers to drive computational engineering and maximize the scientific return,” said Professor Calum Drummond, Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Vice-President, Research and Innovation, and Interim DVC, STEM College, at RMIT.

“We recently launched RMIT University’s AWS Cloud Supercomputing facility (RACE) for RMIT researchers, who are now using it to power advances into battery technologies, photonics, and geospatial science. The low latency and high throughput delivered by the new AWS Region in Melbourne, combined with our 400 Gbps-capable private fiber network, will drive new ways of innovation and collaboration yet to be discovered. We fundamentally believe RACE will help truly democratize high-performance computing capabilities for researchers to run their datasets and make faster discoveries.”

Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS)
ABS holds the Census of Population and Housing every five years. It is the most comprehensive snapshot of Australia, collecting data from around 10 million households and more than 25 million people.

“In this day and age, people expect a fast and simple online experience when using government services,” said Bindi Kindermann, program manager for 2021 Census Field Operations at ABS. “Using AWS, the ABS was able to scale and securely deliver services to people across the country, making it possible for them to quickly and easily participate in this nationwide event.”

With the success of the 2021 Census, the ABS is continuing to expand its use of AWS into broader areas of its business, making use of the security, reliability, and scalability of the cloud.

You can find more inspiring stories from our customers in Australia by visiting Customer Success Stories page.

Things to Know
AWS User Groups in Australia — Australia is also home to 9 AWS Heroes, 43 AWS Community Builders and community members of 17 AWS User Groups in various cities in Australia. Find an AWS User Group near you to meet and collaborate with fellow developers, participate in community activities and share your AWS knowledge.

AWS Global Footprint — With this launch, AWS now spans 99 Availability Zones within 31 geographic Regions around the world. We have also announced plans for 12 more Availability Zones and 4 more AWS Regions in Canada, Israel, New Zealand, and Thailand.

Available Now — The new Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region is ready to support your business, and you can find a detailed list of the services available in this Region on the AWS Regional Services List.

To learn more, please visit the Global Infrastructure page, and start building on ap-southeast-4!

Happy building!

— Donnie

AWS Week in Review – January 16, 2023

Post Syndicated from Antje Barth original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-week-in-review-january-16-2023/

Today, we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the US to honor the late civil rights leader’s life, legacy, and achievements. In this article, Amazon employees share what MLK Day means to them and how diversity makes us stronger.

Coming back to our AWS Week in Review—it’s been a busy week!

Last Week’s Launches
Here are some launches that got my attention during the previous week:

AWS Local Zones in Perth and Santiago now generally available – AWS Local Zones help you run latency-sensitive applications closer to end users. AWS now has a total of 29 Local Zones; 12 outside of the US (Bangkok, Buenos Aires, Copenhagen, Delhi, Hamburg, Helsinki, Kolkata, Muscat, Perth, Santiago, Taipei, and Warsaw) and 17 in the US. See the full list of available and announced AWS Local Zones and learn how to get started.

AWS Local Zones Locations

AWS Clean Rooms now available in preview – During AWS re:Invent this past November, we announced AWS Clean Rooms, a new analytics service that helps companies across industries easily and securely analyze and collaborate on their combined datasets—without sharing or revealing underlying data. You can now start using AWS Clean Rooms (Preview).

Amazon Kendra updates – Amazon Kendra is an intelligent search service powered by machine learning (ML) that helps you search across different content repositories with built-in connectors. With the new Amazon Kendra Intelligent Ranking for self-managed OpenSearch, you can now improve the quality of your OpenSearch search results using Amazon Kendra’s ML-powered semantic ranking technology.

Amazon Kendra also released an Amazon S3 connector with VPC support to index and search documents from Amazon S3 hosted in your VPC, a new Google Drive Connector to index and search documents from Google Drive, a Microsoft Teams Connector to enable Microsoft Teams messaging search, and a Microsoft Exchange Connector to enable email-messaging search.

Amazon Personalize updates – Amazon Personalize helps you improve customer engagement through personalized product and content recommendations. Using the new Trending-Now recipe, you can now generate recommendations for items that are rapidly becoming more popular with your users. Amazon Personalize now also supports tag-based resource authorization. Tags are labels in the form of key-value pairs that can be attached to individual Amazon Personalize resources to manage resources or allocate costs.

Amazon SageMaker Canvas now delivers up to 3x faster ML model training time – SageMaker Canvas is a visual interface that enables business analysts to generate accurate ML predictions on their own—without having to write a single line of code. The accelerated model training times help you prototype and experiment more rapidly, shortening the time to generate predictions and turn data into valuable insights.

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 and blog posts that you may find interesting:

AWS open-source news and updates – My colleague Ricardo writes this weekly open-source newsletter in which he highlights new open-source projects, tools, and demos from the AWS Community. Read edition #141 here.

ML model hosting best practices in Amazon SageMaker – This seven-part blog series discusses best practices for ML model hosting in SageMaker to help you identify which hosting design pattern meets your needs best. The blog series also covers advanced concepts such as multi-model endpoints (MME), multi-container endpoints (MCE), serial inference pipelines, and model ensembles. Read part one here.

I would also like to recommend this really interesting Amazon Science article about differential privacy for end-to-end speech recognition. The data used to train AI models is protected by differential privacy (DP), which adds noise during training. In this article, Amazon researchers show how ensembles of teacher models can meet DP constraints while reducing error by more than 26 percent relative to standard DP methods.

Upcoming AWS Events
Check your calendars and sign up for these AWS events:

#BuildOnLive – Build On AWS Live events are a series of technical streams on twitch.tv/aws that focus on technology topics related to challenges hands-on practitioners face today.

  • Join the Build On Live Weekly show about the cloud, the community, the code, and everything in between, hosted by AWS Developer Advocates. The show streams every Thursday at 09:00 US PT on twitch.tv/aws.
  • Join the new The Big Dev Theory show, co-hosted with AWS partners, discussing various topics such as data and AI, AIOps, integration, and security. The show streams every Tuesday at 08:00 US PT on twitch.tv/aws.

Check the AWS Twitch schedule for all shows.

AWS Community Days – AWS Community Day events are community-led conferences that deliver a peer-to-peer learning experience, providing developers with a venue to acquire AWS knowledge in their preferred way: from one another.

AWS Innovate Data and AI/ML edition – AWS Innovate is a free online event to learn the latest from AWS experts and get step-by-step guidance on using AI/ML to drive fast, efficient, and measurable results.

  • AWS Innovate Data and AI/ML edition for Asia Pacific and Japan is taking place on February 22, 2023. Register here.
  • Registrations for AWS Innovate EMEA (March 9, 2023) and the Americas (March 14, 2023) will open soon. Check the AWS Innovate page for updates.

You can browse all upcoming in-person and virtual events.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Week in Review!

— Antje

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

How to select a Region for your workload based on sustainability goals

Post Syndicated from Sam Mokhtari original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/how-to-select-a-region-for-your-workload-based-on-sustainability-goals/

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud is a constantly expanding network of Regions and points of presence (PoP), with a global network infrastructure linking them together. The choice of Regions for your workload significantly affects your workload KPIs, including performance, cost, and carbon footprint.

The Well-Architected Framework’s sustainability pillar offers design principles and best practices that you can use to meet sustainability goals for your AWS workloads. It recommends choosing Regions for your workload based on both your business requirements and sustainability goals. In this blog, we explain how to select an appropriate AWS Region for your workload. This process includes two key steps:

  • Assess and shortlist potential Regions for your workload based on your business requirements.
  • Choose Regions near Amazon renewable energy projects and Region(s) where the grid has a lower published carbon intensity.

To demonstrate this two-step process, let’s assume we have a web application that must be deployed in the AWS Cloud to support end users in the UK and Sweden. Also, let’s assume there is no local regulation that binds the data residency to a specific location. Let’s select a Region for this workload based on guidance in the sustainability pillar of AWS Well-Architected Framework.

Shortlist potential Regions for your workload

Let’s follow the best practice on Region selection in the sustainability pillar of AWS Well-Architected Framework. The first step is to assess and shortlist potential Regions for your workload based on your business requirements.

In What to Consider when Selecting a Region for your Workloads, there are four key business factors to consider when evaluating and shortlisting each AWS Region for a workload:

  • Latency
  • Cost
  • Services and features
  • Compliance

To shortlist your potential Regions:

  • Confirm that these Regions are compliant, based on your local regulations.
  • Use the AWS Regional Services Lists to check if the Regions have the services and features you need to run your workload.
  • Calculate the cost of the workload on each Region using the AWS Pricing Calculator.
  • Test the network latency between your end user locations and each AWS Region.

At this point, you should have a list of AWS Regions. For this sample workload, let’s assume only Europe (London) and Europe (Stockholm) Regions are shortlisted. They can address the requirements for latency, cost, and features for our use case.

Choose Regions for your workload

After shortlisting the potential Regions, the next step is to choose Regions for your workload. Choose Regions near Amazon renewable energy projects or Regions where the grid has a lower published carbon intensity. To understand this step, you need to first understand the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol to track emissions.

Based on the GHG Protocol, there are two methods to track emissions from electricity production: market-based and location-based. Companies may choose one of these methods based on their relevant sustainability guidelines to track and compare their year-to-year emissions. Amazon uses the market-based model to report our emissions.

AWS Region(s) selection based on market-based method

With the market-based method, emissions are calculated based on the electricity that businesses have chosen to purchase. For example, the business could decide to contract and purchase electricity produced by renewable energy sources like solar and wind.

Amazon’s goal is to power our operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025 – five years ahead of our original 2030 target. We contract for renewable power from utility-scale wind and solar projects that add clean energy to the grid. These new renewable projects support hundreds of jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars investment in local communities. Find more details about our work around the globe. We support these grids through the purchase of environmental attributes, like Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) and Guarantees of Origin (GoO), in line with our renewable energy methodology. As a result, we have a number of Regions listed that are powered by more than 95% renewable energy on the Amazon sustainability website.

Choose one of these Regions to help you power your workload with more renewable energy and reduce your carbon footprint. For the sample workload we’re using as our example, both the Europe (London) and Europe (Stockholm) Regions are in this list. They are powered by over 95% renewable energy based on the market-based emission method.

AWS Regions selection based on location-based carbon method 

The location-based method considers the average emissions intensity of the energy grids where consumption takes place. As a result, wherever the organization conducts business, it assesses emissions from the local electricity system. You can use the emissions intensity of the energy grids through a trusted data source to assess Regions for your workload.

Let’s look how we can use Electricity Maps data to select a Region for our sample workload:

1. Go to Electricity Maps (see Figure 1)

2. Search for South Central Sweden zone to get carbon intensity of electricity consumed for Europe (Stockholm) Region (display aggregated data on yearly basis)

Carbon intensity of electricity for South Central Sweden

Figure 1. Carbon intensity of electricity for South Central Sweden

3. Search for Great Britain to get carbon intensity of electricity consumed for Europe (London) Region (display aggregated data on yearly basis)

Carbon intensity of electricity for Great Britain

Figure 2. Carbon intensity of electricity for Great Britain

As you can determine from Figure 2, the Europe (Stockholm) Region has a lower carbon intensity of electricity consumed compared to the Europe (London) Region.

For our sample workload, we have selected the Europe (Stockholm) Region due to latency, cost, features, and compliance. It also provides 95% renewable energy using the market-based method, and low grid carbon intensity with the location-based method.

Conclusion

In this blog, we explained the process for selecting an appropriate AWS Region for your workload based on both business requirements and sustainability goals.

Further reading:

Now Open the 30th AWS Region – Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region in India

Post Syndicated from Channy Yun original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-open-the-30th-aws-region-asia-pacific-hyderabad-region-in-india/

In November 2020, Jeff announced the upcoming AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) as the second Region in India. Yes! Today we are announcing the general availability of the 30th AWS Region, Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region, with three Availability Zones and the ap-south-2 API name.

The Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region is located in the state of Telangana. As the capital and the largest city in Telangana, Hyderabad is already an important talent hub for IT professionals and entrepreneurs. For example, AWS Hyderabad User Groups has more than 4,000 community members and holds active meetups, including an upcoming Community Day in December 2022.

The new Hyderabad Region gives customers an additional option for running their applications and serving end users from data centers located in India. Customers with data-residency requirements arising from statutes, regulations, and corporate policy can run workloads and securely store data in India while serving end users with even lower latency.

Here are the latest numbers of latency:

AWS Services in the Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region
In the new Hyderabad Region, you can use C5, C5d, C6g, M5, M5d, M6gd, R5, R5d, R6g, I3, I3en, T3, and T4g instances, and use a long list of AWS services including: Amazon API Gateway, AWS AppConfig, AWS Application Auto Scaling, Amazon Aurora, Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, AWS Config, AWS Certificate Manager, AWS Cloud Control API, AWS CloudFormation, AWS CloudTrail, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon CloudWatch Events, Amazon CloudWatch Logs, AWS CodeDeploy, AWS Database Migration Service, AWS Direct Connect, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR), Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon EMR, Elastic Load Balancing, Elastic Load Balancing – Network (NLB), Amazon EventBridge, AWS Fargate, AWS Health Dashboard, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), AWS Lambda, AWS Marketplace, Amazon OpenSearch Service, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Redshift, Amazon Route 53, AWS Secrets Manager, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon S3 Glacier, Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), AWS Step Functions, AWS Support API, Amazon Simple Workflow Service (Amazon SWF), AWS Systems Manager, AWS Trusted Advisor, VM Import/Export, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), AWS VPN, and AWS X-Ray.

AWS in India
AWS has a long-standing history of helping drive digital transformation in India. AWS first established a presence in the country in 2011, with the opening of an office in Delhi. In 2016, AWS launched the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region giving enterprises, public sector organizations, startups, and SMBs access to state-of-the-art public cloud infrastructure. In May 2019, AWS expanded the Region to include a third Availability Zone to support rapid customer growth and provide more choice, flexibility, the ability to replicate workloads across more Availability Zones, and even higher availability.

There are currently 33 Amazon CloudFront edge locations: Mumbai, India (10), New Delhi (7), Chennai (7), Bangalore (4), Hyderabad (3), and Kolkata (2) in India. The edge locations work in concert with a CloudFront Regional edge cache in Mumbai to speed delivery of content. There are six AWS Direct Connect locations, all of which connect to the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region: two in Mumbai, one in Chennai, one in Hyderabad, one in Delhi, and one in Bangalore. Finally, the first AWS Local Zones launched in Delhi, India for bringing selected AWS services very close to a particular geographic area. We announced plans to launch three more AWS Local Zones in India, in the cities of Chennai, Bengaluru, and Kolkata.

AWS is also investing in the future of the Indian technology community and workforce, training tech professionals to expand their skillset and cloud knowledge. In fact, since 2017, AWS has trained over three million individuals in India on cloud skills. AWS has worked with government officials, educational institutes, and corporate organizations to achieve this milestone, which has included first-time learners and mid-career professionals alike.

AWS continues to invest in upskilling local developers, students, and the next generation of IT leaders in India through programs such as AWS Academy, AWS Educate, AWS re/Start, and other Training and Certification programs.

AWS Customers in India
We have many amazing customers in India that are doing incredible things with AWS, for example:

  • SonyLIV is the first Over the top (OTT) service in India born on the AWS Cloud. SonyLIV launched Kaun Banega Crorepati (KBC) interactive game show to allow viewers to submit answers to questions on the show in real time via their mobile devices. SonyLIV uses Amazon ElastiCache to support real-time, in-memory caching at scale, Amazon CloudFront as a low-latency content delivery network, and Amazon SQS as a highly available message queuing service.
  • DocOnline is a digital healthcare platform that provides video or phone doctor consultations to over 3.5 million families in 10 specialties and 14 Indian languages. DocOnline delivers over 100,000 consultations, diagnostic tests, and medicines every year. DocOnline has built its entire business on AWS to power its online consultation services 24-7 and to continuously measure and improve health outcomes. Being in the Healthcare domain, DocOnline needs to comply with regulatory guidelines, including Data Residency, PII security, and Disaster Recovery in seismic zones. With the AWS Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) Region, DocOnline can ensure critical patient data is hosted in India on the most secure, extensive, and reliable cloud platform while serving customers with even faster response times.
  • ICICI Lombard General Insurance is one of the first among the large insurance companies in India to move over 140+ applications, including its core application, to AWS. The rapid advances in technology and computing power delivered by cloud computing are poised to radically change the way insurance is delivered as well as consumed. ICICI Lombard has launched new generation products like cyber insurance, telehealth, cashless homecare, and IoT-based risk management solutions for marine transit insurance, providing seamless integration with various digital partners for digital distribution of insurance products and virtual motor claims inspection solutions, which have seen adoption increase from 61 percent last year to 80 percent this year. ICICI Lombard was able to process group health endorsements for their corporate customers in less than a day as compared to 10–12 days earlier. ICICI Lombard is looking at the cloud for further transformative possibilities in real-time inspection of risk and personalized underwriting.
  • Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW), Government of India, needed a highly reliable, scalable, and resilient technical infrastructure to power a large-scale COVID-19 vaccination drive for India’s more than 1.3 billion citizens in 2021. To facilitate the required performance and speed, the MoHFW engaged India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology to build and launch the Co-WIN application powered by AWS, which scales in seconds to handle user registrations and consistently supports 10 million vaccinations daily.

You can find more customer stories in India.

Available Now
The new Hyderabad Region is ready to support your business. You can find a detailed list of the services available in this Region on the AWS Regional Services List.

With this launch, AWS now spans 96 Availability Zones within 30 geographic Regions around the world, with three new Regions launched in 2022, including the AWS Middle East (UAE) Region, the AWS Europe (Zurich) Region, and the AWS Europe (Spain) Region. We have also announced plans for 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in Australia, Canada, Israel, New Zealand, and Thailand.

To learn more, see the Global Infrastructure page, and please send feedback through your usual AWS support contacts in India.

— Channy

AWS Week in Review – November 21, 2022

Post Syndicated from Danilo Poccia original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-week-in-review-november-21-2022/

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

A new week starts, and the News Blog team is getting ready for AWS re:Invent! Many of us will be there next week and it would be great to meet in person. If you’re coming, do you know about PeerTalk? It’s an onsite networking program for re:Invent attendees available through the AWS Events mobile app (which you can get on Google Play or Apple App Store) to help facilitate connections among the re:Invent community.

If you’re not coming to re:Invent, no worries, you can get a free online pass to watch keynotes and leadership sessions.

Last Week’s Launches
It was a busy week for our service teams! Here are the launches that got my attention:

AWS Region in Spain – The AWS Region in Aragón, Spain, is now open. The official name is Europe (Spain), and the API name is eu-south-2.

Amazon Athena – You can now apply AWS Lake Formation fine-grained access control policies with all table and file format supported by Amazon Athena to centrally manage permissions and access data catalog resources in your Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) data lake. With fine-grained access control, you can restrict access to data in query results using data filters to achieve column-level, row-level, and cell-level security.

Amazon EventBridge – With these additional filtering capabilities, you can now filter events by suffix, ignore case, and match if at least one condition is true. This makes it easier to write complex rules when building event-driven applications.

AWS Controllers for Kubernetes (ACK) – The ACK for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is now generally available and lets you provision and manage EC2 networking resources, such as VPCs, security groups and internet gateways using the Kubernetes API. Also, the ACK for Amazon EMR on EKS is now generally available to allow you to declaratively define and manage EMR on EKS resources such as virtual clusters and job runs as Kubernetes custom resources. Learn more about ACK for Amazon EMR on EKS in this blog post.

Amazon HealthLake – New analytics capabilities make it easier to query, visualize, and build machine learning (ML) models. Now HealthLake transforms customer data into an analytics-ready format in near real-time so that you can query, and use the resulting data to build visualizations or ML models. Also new is Amazon HealthLake Imaging (preview), a new HIPAA-eligible capability that enables you to easily store, access, and analyze medical images at any scale. More on HealthLake Imaging can be found in this blog post.

Amazon RDS – You can now transfer files between Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for Oracle and an Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) file system. You can use this integration to stage files like Oracle Data Pump export files when you import them. You can also use EFS to share a file system between an application and one or more RDS Oracle DB instances to address specific application needs.

Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS – We added centralized logging support for Windows containers to help you easily process and forward container logs to various AWS and third-party destinations such as Amazon CloudWatch, S3, Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, Datadog, and Splunk. See these blog posts for how to use this new capability with ECS and with EKS.

AWS SAM CLI – You can now use the Serverless Application Model CLI to locally test and debug an AWS Lambda function defined in a Terraform application. You can see a walkthrough in this blog post.

AWS Lambda – Now supports Node.js 18 as both a managed runtime and a container base image, which you can learn more about in this blog post. Also check out this interesting article on why and how you should use AWS SDK for JavaScript V3 with Node.js 18. And last but not least, there is new tooling support to build and deploy native AOT compiled .NET 7 applications to AWS Lambda. With this tooling, you can enable faster application starts and benefit from reduced costs through the faster initialization times and lower memory consumption of native AOT applications. Learn more in this blog post.

AWS Step Functions – Now supports cross-account access for more than 220 AWS services to process data, automate IT and business processes, and build applications across multiple accounts. Learn more in this blog post.

AWS Fargate – Adds the ability to monitor the utilization of the ephemeral storage attached to an Amazon ECS task. You can track the storage utilization with Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights and ECS Task Metadata endpoint.

AWS Proton – Now has a centralized dashboard for all resources deployed and managed by AWS Proton, which you can learn more about in this blog post. You can now also specify custom commands to provision infrastructure from templates. In this way, you can manage templates defined using the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) and other templating and provisioning tools. More on CDK support and AWS CodeBuild provisioning can be found in this blog post.

AWS IAM – You can now use more than one multi-factor authentication (MFA) device for root account users and IAM users in your AWS accounts. More information is available in this post.

Amazon ElastiCache – You can now use IAM authentication to access Redis clusters. With this new capability, IAM users and roles can be associated with ElastiCache for Redis users to manage their cluster access.

Amazon WorkSpaces – You can now use version 2.0 of the WorkSpaces Streaming Protocol (WSP) host agent that offers significant streaming quality and performance improvements, and you can learn more in this blog post. Also, with Amazon WorkSpaces Multi-Region Resilience, you can implement business continuity solutions that keep users online and productive with less than 30-minute recovery time objective (RTO) in another AWS Region during disruptive events. More on multi-region resilience is available in this post.

Amazon CloudWatch RUM – You can now send custom events (in addition to predefined events) for better troubleshooting and application specific monitoring. In this way, you can monitor specific functions of your application and troubleshoot end user impacting issues unique to the application components.

AWS AppSync – You can now define GraphQL API resolvers using JavaScript. You can also mix functions written in JavaScript and Velocity Template Language (VTL) inside a single pipeline resolver. To simplify local development of resolvers, AppSync released two new NPM libraries and a new API command. More info can be found in this blog post.

AWS SDK for SAP ABAP – This new SDK makes it easier for ABAP developers to modernize and transform SAP-based business processes and connect to AWS services natively using the SAP ABAP language. Learn more in this blog post.

AWS CloudFormation – CloudFormation can now send event notifications via Amazon EventBridge when you create, update, or delete a stack set.

AWS Console – With the new Applications widget on the Console home, you have one-click access to applications in AWS Systems Manager Application Manager and their resources, code, and related data. From Application Manager, you can view the resources that power your application and your costs using AWS Cost Explorer.

AWS Amplify – Expands Flutter support (developer preview) to Web and Desktop for the API, Analytics, and Storage use cases. You can now build cross-platform Flutter apps with Amplify that target iOS, Android, Web, and Desktop (macOS, Windows, Linux) using a single codebase. Learn more on Flutter Web and Desktop support for AWS Amplify in this post. Amplify Hosting now supports fully managed CI/CD deployments and hosting for server-side rendered (SSR) apps built using Next.js 12 and 13. Learn more in this blog post and see how to deploy a NextJS 13 app with the AWS CDK here.

Amazon SQS – With attribute-based access control (ABAC), you can define permissions based on tags attached to users and AWS resources. With this release, you can now use tags to configure access permissions and policies for SQS queues. More details can be found in this blog.

AWS Well-Architected Framework – The latest version of the Data Analytics Lens is now available. The Data Analytics Lens is a collection of design principles, best practices, and prescriptive guidance to help you running analytics on AWS.

AWS Organizations – You can now manage accounts, organizational units (OUs), and policies within your organization using CloudFormation templates.

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

Other AWS News
A few more stuff you might have missed:

Introducing our final AWS Heroes of the year – As the end of 2022 approaches, we are recognizing individuals whose enthusiasm for knowledge-sharing has a real impact with the AWS community. Please meet them here!

The Distributed Computing Manifesto – Werner Vogles, VP & CTO at Amazon.com, shared the Distributed Computing Manifesto, a canonical document from the early days of Amazon that transformed the way we built architectures and highlights the challenges faced at the end of the 20th century.

AWS re:Post – To make this community more accessible globally, we expanded the user experience to support five additional languages. You can now interact with AWS re:Post also using Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, French, Japanese, and Korean.

For AWS open-source news and updates, here’s the latest newsletter curated by Ricardo to bring you the most recent updates on open-source projects, posts, events, and more.

Upcoming AWS Events
As usual, there are many opportunities to meet:

AWS re:Invent – Our yearly event is next week from November 28 to December 2. If you can’t be there in person, get your free online pass to watch live the keynotes and the leadership sessions.

AWS Community Days – AWS Community Day events are community-led conferences to share and learn together. Join us in Sri Lanka (on December 6-7), Dubai, UAE (December 10), Pune, India (December 10), and Ahmedabad, India (December 17).

That’s all from me for this week. Next week we’ll focus on re:Invent, and then we’ll take a short break. We’ll be back with the next Week in Review on December 12!

— Danilo

Now Open–AWS Region in Spain

Post Syndicated from Marcia Villalba original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-open-aws-region-in-spain/

The AWS Region in Aragón, Spain, is now open. The official name is Europe (Spain), and the API name is eu-south-2. You can start using it today to deploy workloads and store your data in Spain.

The AWS Europe (Spain) Region has three Availability Zones (AZ) that you can use to reliably spread your applications across multiple data centers. Each Availability Zone is a fully isolated partition of AWS infrastructure that contains one or more data centers.

Availability Zones are separate and distinct geographic locations with enough distance to reduce the risk of a single event affecting the availability of the Region but near enough for business continuity for applications that require rapid failover and synchronous replication. This gives you the ability to operate production applications that are more highly available, fault-tolerant, and scalable than would be possible from a single data center.

Instances and Services
Applications running in this three-AZ Region can use C5, C5d, C6g, M5, M5d, M6g, R5, R5d, R6g, I3, I3en, T3, and T4g instances, and can use a long list of AWS services including: Amazon API Gateway, Amazon Aurora, AWS AppConfig, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR), Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Elastic Load Balancing–Network (NLB), Amazon EMR, Amazon OpenSearch Service, Amazon EventBridge, AWS Fargate, Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Route 53, Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon S3 Glacier, Amazon Simple Workflow Service (Amazon SWF), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), AWS Auto Scaling, AWS Certificate Manager, AWS CloudFormation, AWS CloudTrail, AWS CodeDeploy, AWS Config, AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS), AWS Direct Connect, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), AWS Lambda, AWS Marketplace, AWS Health Dashboard, AWS Secrets Manager, AWS Step Functions, AWS Support API, AWS Systems Manager, AWS Trusted Advisor, AWS VPN, VM Import/Export, and AWS X-Ray.

AWS in Spain
The new AWS Europe (Spain) Region is a natural progression for AWS to support the tens of thousands of customers on the Iberian Peninsula. The Region will support our customers’ most mission-critical workloads by providing lower latency to end users across Iberia and meeting data residency needs (now customers can store their data in Spain).

In addition to the new Region in Spain, AWS currently has four Amazon CloudFront edge locations available in Madrid, Spain. And since 2016, customers can benefit from AWS Direct Connect locations to establish private connectivity between AWS and their data centers and offices. The Region in Spain also offers low-latency connections to other AWS Regions in the area, as shown in the following chart:

Latency from the Spain Region

AWS also has had offices in Madrid since 2014 and in Barcelona since 2018 and has a broad network of local partners. In addition to expanding infrastructure, AWS continues to make investments in education initiatives, training, and start-up enablement to support Spain’s digital transformation and economic development plans.

  • AWS Activate – Since 2013, this program has given Spanish start-ups access to guidance and one-on-one time with AWS experts, along with web-based training, self-paced labs, customer support, offers from third parties, and up to $100,000 in credits to use AWS services.
  • AWS Educate and AWS Academy – AWS has trained over one hundred thousand individuals in Spain in cloud skills since 2017. These programs provide higher-education institutions, educators, and students with cloud computing courses and certifications. AWS Academy has delivered courses for institutions such as ESADE, IE, UNIR, and others.
  • AWS re/Start – AWS re/Start is a skills development and job training program that aims to build local talent by providing AWS Cloud skills development and job opportunities at no cost to learners who are unemployed or are members of under-represented communities in Spain. In November 2020, AWS launched this program in Spain in collaboration with Cámara de Comercio de Madrid and in 2021 in collaboration with Universidad of Granada.
  • AWS GetIT – AWS knows that having a diverse workforce gives organizations a better understanding of customers’ needs and is key to unlocking ideas and speeding up innovation. AWS supports many programs focused on diversity and launched AWS GetIT in Spain across 11 schools to introduce young students (ESO—Educación Secundaria Obligatoria—students) to cloud computing and inspire them to consider a career in technology.

Sustainability is also very important for AWS. In 2019, Amazon and Global Optimism co-founded The Climate Pledge, a commitment to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040—10 years ahead of the Paris Agreement. That is why in Spain, Amazon and AWS currently have two operational renewable energy projects delivering clean energy into the Spanish grid to support the AWS Europe (Spain) Region and Amazon’s logistics network in the country.

Amazon and AWS have announced 14 more projects, currently in development, that will come online from 2022 to 2024. The 16 projects in Spain will add 1.5 gigawatts of renewable energy to the Spanish grid. This is enough to power over 850,000 average Spanish homes. Learn more about AWS sustainability in Spain.

AWS Customers in Spain
We have many amazing customers in Spain that are doing incredible things with AWS, for example:

LactApp is a Spanish start-up that was created out of the vision that every mother should have a breastfeeding and motherhood expert in their pocket. LactApp uses AWS services to build their video-on-demand capability that allows experts to upload their content and process the videos, and they make it available for their over 4,000 end users automatically.

Glovo is one of the biggest companies in the food delivery industry, born in Barcelona, Spain. The Glovo app is available in 25 countries with over 150,000 restaurants. Glovo receives over 2 TB of data daily from all the usage of their customers. Using AWS, Glovo built a data lake that allows them to store data securely and access it when they need it.

Madrid-based Savana helps healthcare providers unlock the value of their electronic medical records (EMRs) for research. They operate one of the largest artificial intelligence–enabled, multicentric research networks in the world, with over 180 hospitals across 15 countries. They use AWS to process billions of EMRs and data points to run machine learning algorithms to investigate disease prediction and treatment.

Available Now
The new Region in Spain is ready to support your business. You can find a detailed list of the services available in this Region on the AWS Regional Service List.

With this launch, AWS now spans 93 Availability Zones within 29 geographic Regions around the world. We have also announced plans for 18 more Availability Zones and six more AWS Regions in Australia, Canada, India, Israel, New Zealand, and Thailand.

For more information on our global infrastructure, upcoming Regions, and the custom hardware we use, visit the Global Infrastructure page.

— Marcia

AWS Week in Review – November 14, 2022

Post Syndicated from Steve Roberts original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-week-in-review-november-14-2022/

It’s now just two weeks to AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, and the pace is picking up, both here on the News Blog, and throughout AWS as everyone get ready for the big event! I hope you get the chance to join us, and have shared links and other information at the bottom of this post. First, though, let’s dive straight in to this week’s review of news and announcements from AWS.

Last Week’s Launches
As usual, let’s start with a summary of some launches from the last week that I want to remind you of:

New Switzerland Region – First and foremost, AWS has opened a new Region, this time in Switzerland. Check out Seb’s post here on the News Blog announcing the launch.

New AWS Resource Explorer – if you’ve ever spent time searching for specific resources in your AWS account, especially across Regions, be sure to take a look at the new AWS Resource Explorer, described in this post by Danilo. Once enabled, indexes of the resources in your account are built and maintained (you have control over which resources are indexed). Once the indexes are built, you can issue queries to more quickly arrive at the required resource without jumping between different Regions and service dashboards in the Management Console.

Amazon Lightsail domain registration and DNS autoconfiguration – Amazon Lightsail users can now take advantage of new support for registering domain names with automatic configuration of DNS records. Within the Lightsail console, you’re now able to create and register an Amazon Route 53 domain with just a few clicks. 

New models for Amazon SageMaker JumpStart – Two new state-of-the-art models have been released for Amazon SageMaker JumpStart. SageMaker JumpStart provides pretrained, open-source models covering a wide variety of problem types that help you get started with machine learning. The first new model, Bloom, can be used to complete sentences or generate long paragraphs of text in 46 different languages. The second model, Stable Diffusion, generates realistic images from given text. Find out more about the new models in this What’s New post.

Mac instances and macOS Ventura – Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) now has support for running the latest version of macOS, Ventura (13.0), for both EC2 x86 Mac and EC2 M1 Mac instances. These instances enable you to provision and run macOS environments in the AWS Cloud, for developers creating apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and Safari.

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

Other AWS News
Some other news items you may want to explore:

AWS Open Source News and Updates – This blog is published each week, and Installment 135 is now available, highlighting new open-source projects, tools, and demos from the AWS community.

Upcoming AWS Events
AWS re:Invent 2022 – As I noted at the top of this post, we’re now just two weeks away from the event! Join us live in Las Vegas November 28–December 2 for keynotes, opportunities for training and certification, and over 1,500 technical sessions. If you are joining us, be sure to check out the re:Invent 2022 Attendee Guides, each curated by an AWS Hero, AWS industry team, or AWS partner.

If you can’t join us live in Las Vegas, be sure to join us online to watch the keynotes and leadership sessions. My cohosts and I on the AWS on Air show will also be livestreaming daily from the event, chatting with service teams and special guests about all the launches and other announcements. You can find us on Twitch.tv (we’ll be on the front page throughout the event), the AWS channel on LinkedIn Live, Twitter.com/awsonair, and YouTube Live.

And one final update for the event – if you’re a .NET developer, be sure to check out the XNT track in the session catalog to find details on the seven breakouts, three chalk talks, and the workshop we have available for you at the conference!

Check back next Monday for our last week in review before the start of re:Invent!

— Steve

This post is part of our Week in Review series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS.

A New AWS Region Opens in Switzerland

Post Syndicated from Sébastien Stormacq original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/a-new-aws-region-opens-in-switzerland/

I am pleased to announce today the opening of our 28th AWS Region: Europe (Zurich), also known by its API name: eu-central-2.

An AWS Region allows you to deploy your most demanding workloads and replicate your applications and data across distinct groups of data centers called Availability Zones. This new Region has three fully redundant Availability Zones located in the vicinity of Zurich. It offers your customers low-latency access to your applications while meeting your data residency requirements.

Zurich

Regions and Availability Zones
AWS has the concept of a Region. Each Region is fully isolated from all other Regions. Within each Region, we have built Availability Zones. These Availability Zones are fully isolated partitions of our infrastructure that contain a cluster of data centers. Availability Zones are typically separated by multiple kilometers to mitigate the impact of disasters that could affect data centers. The distance between Availability Zones varies between Regions. The distance is large enough to avoid having data centers impacted by the same event at the same time but close enough to allow workloads with synchronous data replication. Availability Zones are linked by redundant, high-bandwidth, and low-latency network connections. Regions are linked by our custom-built, global, low-latency, private network with exabits per second of capacity in Europe.

Unlike other cloud providers, who often define a region as a single data center, the multiple Availability Zone design of every AWS Region offers advantages such as security, availability, performance, and scalability.

Instances and Services
The workloads deployed to this new Europe (Zurich) three-AZ Region can use C5, C5d, I3, I3en, M5, M5d, M6gd, R5, R5d, and T3 instances, and can use a long list of AWS services including Amazon API Gateway, AWS AppConfig, AWS Application Auto Scaling, Amazon Aurora, Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, AWS Config, AWS Certificate Manager, AWS CloudFormation, AWS CloudTrail, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon CloudWatch Events, Amazon CloudWatch Logs, AWS CodeDeploy, AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS), AWS Direct Connect, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS),Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR), Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), AWS Fargate,  Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon EMR, Amazon OpenSearch Service, Elastic Load Balancing, Elastic Load Balancing – Network (NLB), Amazon EventBridge, Amazon Simple Storage Service Glacier, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), AWS Lambda, AWS Marketplace, AWS Health Dashboard, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Aurora PostgreSQL, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Route 53, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), AWS Secrets Manager, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), AWS Step Functions, AWS Support API, Amazon Simple Workflow Service (Amazon SWF), AWS Systems Manager, AWS Trusted Advisor, VM Import/Export, AWS VPN, and AWS X-Ray.

Continuous Investments in Switzerland
AWS has a long history of presence in Switzerland. We have worked with Swiss customers and partners since the launch of AWS 16 years ago. The first Swiss office was opened in Zurich in April 2016 to host the growing local team of technical and business professionals dedicated to supporting Swiss customers. In 2017, the AWS network was expanded into Switzerland with the launch of an Amazon CloudFront edge location and an AWS Direct Connect location. To support this growth, a second AWS office was opened in Geneva.

AWS plans to invest up to 5.9 billion Swiss francs (approximately $5.9 billion) in the Europe (Zurich) Region from 2022–2036 as we build, maintain, operate, and develop data centers to support the projected growth in demand for AWS technologies by our customers.

According to an AWS Economic Impact Study (EIS), this investment will contribute 16.3 billion Swiss francs (approximately $16.3 billion) to the GDP of Switzerland during the same period. This includes the value added by AWS services to the IT sector in Switzerland, as well as the direct, indirect, and induced effects of AWS purchases from the Swiss data center supply chain. The study estimates that this investment will support an average of 2,500 full-time jobs annually at external businesses in the Swiss data supply chain from 2022–2036.

Servicing our Swiss Customers
More than 10,000 Swiss customers use AWS services today. Organizations such as Fisch Asset Management, Helvetia, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETH Zürich), Richemont, Swiss Broadcasting Corporation (RSI), Swiss Post, Swisscom, and Swisstopo, just to name a few, use AWS. Private and public sector organizations in Switzerland use AWS to accelerate their time to market, reduce costs associated with IT operations, and scale their businesses globally.

Global luxury group Richemont, owners of prestigious brands like Cartier, Montblanc, IWC Schaffhausen, and Van Cleef & Arpels, moved its entire enterprise IT infrastructure, including 120 SAP instances, to AWS. AWS, with its depth and breadth of services, enables Richemont to provide their customers with new digital experiences faster, including personalized storefronts and styling services, video chat consultations featuring fashion shows customized to the shoppers’ tastes, and tailored offers for early access to new items before they hit stores.

Swisscom, Switzerland’s leading telecoms company and one of its leading IT companies, is using AWS’s proven and broad infrastructure and cloud capabilities to power its 5G network, increase operational efficiency, and fuel innovation. Swisscom is pursuing a cloud-first strategy and will use AWS to increase IT agility, drive operational efficiencies, and accelerate time to market for new information and communications technology (ICT) features and services.

With AWS infrastructure, Swiss startups have been able to quickly scale their businesses and compete globally. Ava, a digital women’s health startup (acquired by FemTec Health) with offices in Zurich, San Francisco, Makati, and Belgrade, is all in on AWS. They created the Ava Fertility Tracker as a daily companion for women, which provides women with real-time, personalized information about fertility, pregnancy, and general health. The Ava bracelet is now sold in 36 countries worldwide and has been running on AWS since the first sales day.

Extending Reach through AWS Partner Network
Switzerland-based AWS Partner Network (APN) Partners also welcomed the news of the launch of the Europe (Zurich) Region.

The APN includes tens of thousands of independent software vendors (ISVs) and systems integrators (SIs) around the world. AWS SIs, consulting partners, and ISVs help enterprise and public sector customers migrate to AWS, deploy mission-critical applications, and provide a full range of services for your cloud environments. We have more than 150 partners ready to help you in Switzerland, one third of them have their headquarters in the country.

Promoting a Diverse Community of Professionals
In December 2020, Amazon announced that it will help 29 million people around the world grow their technological skills with free cloud computing skills training by 2025. Switzerland is part of this global effort. Since 2019, AWS and our AWS training partner Digicomp have delivered training and certification programs to individual learners, customers, and AWS Partners to rapidly build cloud skills and close the skills gap.

Several universities in Switzerland have delivered AWS Academy courses as part of their curriculum, including FHNW (Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz), Fachhochschule Luzern, and Technische Berufsschule Zürich. To date, 32 Swiss institutions participated in the AWS Academy program, and 16 of them offered classes in 2022.

In March 2022, AWS launched AWS re/Start in Switzerland in collaboration with Powerhouse Lausanne, a training provider that promotes digital equality and diversity in Switzerland. A second cohort of AWS re/Start began in October 2022 in collaboration with the non profit Powercoders, which is focused on teaching IT skills specifically to refugees and helping them transition into the Swiss labor market.

Available Today
With the launch of the Europe (Zurich) Region, AWS is further expanding its infrastructure offering, empowering you with the flexibility to run applications on the most secure and reliable cloud infrastructure while maintaining local data residency and providing the lowest possible latency for Swiss end-users. The new Region is available today on the AWS Management Console and for your API calls.		 Europe (Zurich) Region

Go and deploy your workloads on eu-central-2 today!

— seb

AWS Week in Review – October 31, 2022

Post Syndicated from Antje Barth original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-week-in-review-october-31-2022/

No tricks, just treats in this weekly roundup of news and announcements. Let’s switch our AWS Management Console into dark mode and dive right into it.

Last Week’s Launches
Here are some launches that got my attention during the previous week:

AWS Local Zones in Hamburg and Warsaw now generally available – AWS Local Zones help you run latency-sensitive applications closer to end users. The AWS Local Zones in Hamburg, Germany, and Warsaw, Poland, are the first Local Zones in Europe. AWS Local Zones are now generally available in 20 metro areas globally, with announced plans to launch 33 additional Local Zones in metro areas around the world. See the full list of available and announced AWS Local Zones, and learn how to get started.

Amazon SageMaker multi-model endpoint (MME) now supports GPU instances – MME is a managed capability of SageMaker Inference that lets you deploy thousands of models on a single endpoint. MMEs can now run multiple models on a GPU core, share GPU instances behind an endpoint across multiple models, and dynamically load and unload models based on the incoming traffic. This can help you reduce costs and achieve better price performance. Learn how to run multiple deep learning models on GPU with Amazon SageMaker multi-model endpoints.

Amazon EC2 now lets you replace the root Amazon EBS volume for a running instance – You can now use the Replace Root Volume for patching features in Amazon EC2 to replace your instance root volume using an updated AMI without needing to stop the instance. This makes patching of the guest operating system and applications easier, while retraining the instance store data, networking, and IAM configuration. Check out the documentation to learn more.

AWS Fault Injection Simulator now supports network connectivity disruption – AWS Fault Injection Simulator (FIS) is a managed service for running controlled fault injection experiments on AWS. AWS FIS now has a new action type to disrupt network connectivity and validate that your applications are resilient to a total or partial loss of connectivity. To learn more, visit Network Actions in the AWS FIS user guide.

Amazon SageMaker Automatic Model Tuning now supports Grid Search – SageMaker Automatic Model Tuning helps you find the hyperparameter values that result in the best-performing model for a chosen metric. Until now, you could choose between random, Bayesian, and hyperband search strategies. Grid search now lets you cover every combination of the specified hyperparameter values for use cases in which you need reproducible tuning results. Learn how Amazon SageMaker Automatic Model Tuning now supports grid search.

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 may find interesting:

Celebrating over 20 years of AI/ML innovation – On October 25, we hosted the AWS AI/ML Innovation Day. Bratin Saha and other leaders in the field shared the great strides we have made in the past and discussed what’s next in the world of ML. You can watch the recording here.

AWS open-source news and updates – My colleague Ricardo Sueiras writes this weekly open-source newsletter in which he highlights new open-source projects, tools, and demos from the AWS Community. Read edition #133 here.

Upcoming AWS Events
Check your calendars and sign up for these AWS events:

AWS re:Invent is only 4 weeks away! Join us live in Las Vegas from November 28–December 2 for keynote announcements, training and certification opportunities, access to 1,500+ technical sessions, and much more. Seats are still available to reserve, and walk-ups are available onsite. You can also join us online to watch live keynotes and leadership sessions.

If you are into machine learning like me, check out the ML attendee guide. AWS Machine Learning Hero Vinicius Caridá put together recommended sessions and tips and tricks for building your agenda. We also have attendee guides on additional topics and industries.

On November 2, there is a virtual event for building modern .NET applications on AWS. You can register for free.

On November 11–12, AWS User Groups in India are hosting the AWS Community Day India 2022, with success stories, use cases, and much more from industry leaders. Sign up for free to join this virtual event.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Week in Review!

— Antje

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

AWS Week in Review – October 24, 2022

Post Syndicated from Channy Yun original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-week-in-review-october-24-2022/

Last week, we announced plans to launch the AWS Asia Pacific (Bangkok) Region, which will become our third AWS Region in Southeast Asia. This Region will have three Availability Zones and will give AWS customers in Thailand the ability to run workloads and store data that must remain in-country.

In the Works – AWS Region in Thailand
With this big news, AWS announced a 190 billion baht (US 5 billion dollars) investment to drive Thailand’s digital future over the next 15 years. It includes capital expenditures on the construction of data centers, operational expenses related to ongoing utilities and facility costs, and the purchase of goods and services from Regional businesses.

Since we first opened an office in Bangkok in 2015, AWS has launched 10 Amazon CloudFront edge locations, a highly secure and programmable content delivery network (CDN) in Bangkok. In 2020, we launched AWS Outposts, 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 in Thailand. This year, we also plan the upcoming launch of an AWS Local Zone in Bangkok, which will enable customers to deliver applications that require single-digit millisecond latency to end users in Thailand.

Photo courtesy of Conor McNamara, Managing Director, ASEAN at AWS

The new AWS Region in Thailand is also part of our broader, multifaceted investment in the country, covering our local team, partners, skills, and the localization of services, including Amazon Transcribe, Amazon Translate, and Amazon Connect.

Many Thailand customers have chosen AWS to run their workloads to accelerate innovation, increase agility, and drive cost savings, such as 2C2P, CP All Plc., Digital Economy Promotion Agency, Energy Response Co. Ltd. (ENRES), PTT Global Public Company Limited (PTT), Siam Cement Group (SCG), Sukhothai Thammathirat Open University, The Stock Exchange of Thailand, Papyrus Studio, and more.

For example, Dr. Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com, introduced the story of Papyrus Studio, a large film studio and one of the first customers in Thailand.

“Customer stories like Papyrus Studio inspire us at AWS. The cloud can allow a small company to rapidly scale and compete globally. It also provides new opportunities to create, innovate, and identify business opportunities that just aren’t possible with conventional infrastructure.”

For more information on how to enable AWS and get support in Thailand, contact our AWS Thailand team.

Last Week’s Launches
My favorite news of last week was to launch dark mode as a beta feature in the AWS Management Console. In Unified Settings, you can choose between three settings for visual mode: Browser default, Light, and Dark. Browser default applies the default dark or light setting of the browser, dark applies the new built-in dark mode, and light maintains the current look and feel of the AWS console. Choose your favorite!

Here are some launches that caught my eye for web, mobile, and IoT application developers:

New AWS Amplify Library for Swift – We announce the general availability of Amplify Library for Swift (previously Amplify iOS). Developers can use Amplify Library for Swift via the Swift Package Manager to build apps for iOS and macOS (currently in beta) platforms with Auth, Storage, Geo, and more features.

The Amplify Library for Swift is open source on GitHub, and we deeply appreciate the feedback we have gotten from the community. To learn more, see Introducing the AWS Amplify Library for Swift in the AWS Front-End Web & Mobile Blog or Amplify Library for Swift documentation.

New Amazon IVS Chat SDKs – Amazon Interactive Video Service (Amazon IVS) now provides SDKs for stream chat with support for web, Android, and iOS. The Amazon IVS stream chat SDKs support common functions for chat room resource management, sending and receiving messages, and managing chat room participants.

Amazon IVS is a managed, live-video streaming service using the broadcast SDKs or standard streaming software such as Open Broadcaster Software (OBS). The service provides cross-platform player SDKs for playback of Amazon IVS streams you need to make low-latency live video available to any viewer around the world. Also, it offers Chat Client Messaging SDK. For more information, see Getting Started with Amazon IVS Chat in the AWS documentation.

New AWS Parameters and Secrets Lambda Extension – This is new extension for AWS Lambda developers to retrieve parameters from AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store and secrets from AWS Secrets Manager. Lambda function developers can leverage this extension to improve their application performance as it decreases the latency and the cost of retrieving parameters and secrets.

Previously, you had to initialize either the core library of a service or the entire service SDK inside a Lambda function for retrieving secrets and parameters. Now you can simply use the extension. To learn more, see AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store documentation and AWS Secrets Manager documentation.

New FreeRTOS Long Term Support Version – We announce the second release of FreeRTOS Long Term Support (LTS) – FreeRTOS 202210.00 LTS. FreeRTOS LTS offers a more stable foundation than standard releases as manufacturers deploy and later update devices in the field. This release includes new and upgraded libraries such as AWS IoT Fleet Provisioning, Cellular LTE-M Interface, coreMQTT, and FreeRTOS-Plus-TCP.

All libraries included in this FreeRTOS LTS version will receive security and critical bug fixes until October 2024. With an LTS release, you can continue to maintain your existing FreeRTOS code base and avoid any potential disruptions resulting from FreeRTOS version upgrades. To learn more, see the FreeRTOS announcement.

Here is some news on performance improvement and increasing capacity:

Up to 10X Improving Amazon Aurora Snapshot Exporting Speed – Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition for MySQL 5.7 and 8.0 now speed up to 10x faster snapshot exports to Amazon S3. The performance improvement is automatically applied to all types of database snapshot exports, including manual snapshots, automated system snapshots, and snapshots created by the AWS Backup service. For more information, see Exporting DB cluster snapshot data to Amazon S3 in the Amazon Aurora documentation.

3X Increasing Amazon RDS Read Capacity – Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for MySQL, MariaDB, and PostgreSQL now supports 15 read replicas per instance, including up to 5 cross-Region read replicas, delivering up to 3x the previous read capacity. For more information, see Working with read replicas in the Amazon RDS documentation.

2X Increasing AWS Snowball Edge Compute Capacity – The AWS Snowball Edge Compute Optimized device doubled the compute capacity up to 104 vCPUs, doubled the memory capacity up to 416GB RAM, and is now fully SSD with 28TB NVMe storage. The updated device is ideal when you need dense compute resources to run complex workloads such as machine learning inference or video analytics at the rugged, mobile edge such as trucks, aircraft or ships.  You can get started by ordering a Snowball Edge device on the AWS Snow Family console.

2X Increasing Amazon SQS FIFO Default Quota – Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) announces the increase of default quota up to 6,000 transactions per second per API action. It is double the previous 3,000 throughput quota for a high throughput mode for FIFO (first in, first out) queues in all AWS Regions where Amazon SQS FIFO queue is available. For a detailed breakdown of default throughput quotas per Region, see Quotas related to messages in the Amazon SQS documentation.

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 other news items that you may find interesting:

22 New or Updated Open Datasets on AWS – We released 22 new or updated datasets, including Amazonia-1 imagery, Bitcoin and Ethereum data, and elevation data over the Arctic and Antarctica. The full list of publicly available datasets is on the Registry of Open Data on AWS and is now also discoverable on AWS Data Exchange.

Sustainability with AWS Partners (ft. AWS On Air) – This episode covers a broad discipline of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues across all regions, organization types, and industries. AWS Sustainability & Climate Tech provides a comprehensive portfolio of AWS Partner solutions built on AWS that address climate change events and the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).

AWS Open Source News and Updates #131 – This newsletter covers latest open-source projects such as Amazon EMR Toolkit for VS Code, a VS Code Extension to make it easier to develop Spark jobs on EMR and AWS CDK For Discourse, sample codes that demonstrates how to create a full environment for Discourse, etc. Remember to check out the Open source at AWS keep up to date with all our activity in open source by following us on @AWSOpen.

Upcoming AWS Events
Check your calendars and sign up for these AWS events:

AWS re:Invent 2022 Attendee Guide – Browse re:Invent 2022 attendee guides, curated by AWS Heroes, AWS industry teams, and AWS Partners. Each guide contains recommended sessions, tips and tricks for building your agenda, and other useful resources. Also, seat reservations for all sessions are now open for all re:Invent attendees. You can still register for AWS re:Invent either offline or online.

AWS AI/ML Innovation Day on October 25 – Join us for this year’s AWS AI/ML Innovation Day, where you’ll hear from Bratin Saha and other leaders in the field about the great strides AI/ML has made in the past and the promises awaiting us in the future.

AWS Container Day at Kubecon 2022 on October 25–28 – Come join us at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2022, where we’ll be hosting AWS Container Day Featuring Kubernetes on October 25 and educational sessions at our booth on October 26–28. Throughout the event, our sessions focus on security, cost optimization, GitOps/multi-cluster management, hybrid and edge compute, and more.

You can browse all upcoming in-person, and virtual events.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Week in Review!

— Channy

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

AWS Local Zones Expansion: Taipei and Delhi

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-local-zones-expansion-taipei-and-delhi/

In late 2019 I told you about the AWS Local Zone in Los Angeles, California. In that post I described Local Zones as a new type of AWS infrastructure deployment that brings select AWS services very close to a particular geographic area. A year after that launch, I announced our plans to add 3 more Local Zones in 2020, and 12 more in 2021. Right now, we are working to bring Local Zones to 33 cities in 27 countries including 6 in Latin America.

Applications hosted in a Local Zone benefit from very low (single-digit millisecond) latency access to EC2 instances and other AWS services. Local Zones also give AWS customers additional choices regarding data residency, giving them the ability to store and process sensitive data (often financial or personal in nature) in-country.

Going Global
Today I am happy to announce the launch of Local Zones in Taipei (Taiwan) and Delhi (India). Like the existing Local Zones in the US, you start by enabling them in the AWS Management Console:

After you do this, you can launch Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, create Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes,and make use of other services including Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). The new Local Zones include T3, C5, M5, R5, and G4dn instances in select sizes, along with General Purpose SSD (gp2) EBS volumes.

Local Zones in Action
AWS customers are working to put Local Zones to use. Here are a few use cases:

AdvaHealth Solutions – This digital health care & life sciences company supports radiology, oncology, ophthalmology and other medical imaging applications with AdvaPACS, a cloud-native image archive. The new Local Zones will allow them to deliver diagnostic image data with low latency in order to improve the point-of-care experience for patients and health care providers across Asia, and will also support expansion into new markets.

M2P Fintech specializes in building financial infrastructure and is an API infrastructure platform for Banking, Lending and Payments products. More than 600 Fintechs, 100 Banks & 100 Financial Institutions across MENA and APAC regions rely on M2P’s platform to power their own branded products including category leaders across ride-hailing, food delivery, and credit cards. M2P uses Local Zones instead of bearing the burden of setting up their own data centers and to meet local requirements for data processing and storage.

NaranjaX – This financial services company is the primary credit card issuer in Argentina. They are engaged in a digital transformation with the target of delivering an improved financial solution to their commercial customers, and believe that using Local Zones will give these customers a strategic advantage.

Pluto XR is the developer of the PlutoSphere OS that enables gamers, developers and operators to live stream XR applications to any XR device. In order to deliver a high quality streaming experience, they run their application as close to their end users as possible. The new Local Zones will allow them to serve millions of users in new metro areas

Riot Games is an American video game developer, publisher and entertainment company based in Los Angeles, California. Their games deliver an optimal player experience through ultra low latency for their MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) League of Legends and their first-person tactical shooter VALORANT. By deploying their games into Local Zones, Riot is able to serve players at low latency without the need for operating on-premises compute.

Zenga Media is one of the largest media-tech companies in India. They provide live streaming and over-the-top distribution of entertainment content to millions of users globally, while using cloud-based video editing and sharing to process content destined for TV shows, sports broadcasts, news, and movies. They will use Local Zones to provide local connectivity to their editors and customers, thereby speeding processing and delivering a superior video streaming experience to customers.

Local Zones Resources
Here are a few resources to help you learn more about designing, building, and using Local Zones:

I am always interested in hearing about how our customers are making use of Local Zones. Leave me a comment or track me down online and let me know what you are working on!

— Jeff;

AWS Week in Review – September 5, 2022

Post Syndicated from Danilo Poccia original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-week-in-review-september-5-2022/

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

As a new week begins, let’s quickly look back at the most significant AWS news from the previous seven days.

Last Week’s Launches
Here are the launches that got my attention last week:

AWS announces open-sourced credentials-fetcher to simplify Microsoft AD access from Linux containers. You can find more in the What’s New post.

AWS Step Functions now has 14 new intrinsic functions that help you process data more efficiently and make it easier to perform data processing tasks such as array manipulation, JSON object manipulation, and math functions within your workflows without having to invoke downstream services or add Task states.

AWS SAM CLI esbuild support is now generally available. You can now use esbuild in the SAM CLI build workflow for your JavaScript applications.

Amazon QuickSight launches a new user interface for dataset management that replaces the existing popup dialog modal with a full-page experience, providing a clearer breakdown of dataset management categories.

AWS GameKit adds Unity support. With this release for Unity, you can integrate cloud-based game features into Win64, MacOS, Android, or iOS games from both the Unreal and Unity engines with just a few clicks.

AWS and VMware announce VMware Cloud on AWS integration with Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP. Read more in Veliswa‘s blog post.

The AWS Region in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is now open. More info in Marcia‘s blog post.

View of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates

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

Other AWS News
A few more blog posts you might have missed:

Easy analytics and cost-optimization with Amazon Redshift Serverless – Four different use cases of Redshift Serverless are discussed in this post.

Building cost-effective AWS Step Functions workflows – In this blog post, Ben explains the difference between Standard and Express Workflows, including costs, migrating from Standard to Express, and some interesting ways of using both together.

How to subscribe to the new Security Hub Announcements topic for Amazon SNS – You can now receive updates about new Security Hub services and features, newly supported standards and controls, and other Security Hub changes.

Deploying AWS Lambda functions using AWS Controllers for Kubernetes (ACK) – With the ACK service controller for AWS Lambda, you can provision and manage Lambda functions with kubectl and custom resources.

For AWS open-source news and updates, here’s the latest newsletter curated by Ricardo to bring you the most recent updates on open-source projects, posts, events, and more.

Upcoming AWS Events
Depending on where you are on this planet, there are many opportunities to meet and learn:

AWS Summits – Come together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. Registration is open for the following in-person AWS Summits: Ottawa (September 8), New Delhi (September 9), Mexico City (September 21–22), Bogotá (October 4), and Singapore (October 6).

AWS Community Days – AWS Community Day events are community-led conferences to share and learn with one another. In September, the AWS community in the US will run events in the Bay Area, California (September 9) and Arlington, Virginia (September 30). In Europe, Community Day events will be held in October. Join us in Amersfoort, Netherlands (October 3), Warsaw, Poland (October 14), and Dresden, Germany (October 19).

That’s all from me for this week. Come back next Monday for another Week in Review!

— Danilo

Now Open–AWS Region in the United Arab Emirates (UAE)

Post Syndicated from Marcia Villalba original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-open-aws-region-in-the-united-arab-emirates-uae/

View of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab EmiratesThe AWS Region in the United Arab Emirates is now open. The official name is Middle East (UAE), and the API name is me-central-1. You can start using it today to deploy workloads and store your data in the United Arab Emirates. The AWS Middle East (UAE) Region is the second Region in the Middle East, joining the AWS Middle East (Bahrain) Region.

The Middle East (UAE) Region has three Availability Zones that you can use to reliably spread your applications across multiple data centers. Each Availability Zone is a fully isolated partition of AWS infrastructure that contains one or more data centers.

Availability Zones are in separate and distinct geographic locations with enough distance to reduce the risk of a single event affecting the availability of the Region but near enough for business continuity for applications that require rapid failover and synchronous replication. This gives you the ability to operate production applications that are more highly available, more fault-tolerant, and more scalable than would be possible from a single data center.

Instances and Services
Applications running in this three-AZ Region can use C5, C5d, C6g, M5, M5d, M6g, M6gd, R5, R5d, R6g, I3, I3en, T3, and T4g instances, and can use a long list of AWS services including: Amazon API Gateway, Amazon Aurora, AWS AppConfig, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon CloudWatch Logs, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR), Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon EMR, Amazon OpenSearch Service, Amazon EventBridge, Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Route 53, Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Simple Workflow Service (Amazon SWF), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), AWS Application Auto Scaling, AWS Certificate Manager, AWS CloudFormation, AWS CloudTrail, AWS CodeDeploy, AWS Config, AWS Database Migration Service, AWS Direct Connect, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), AWS Lambda, AWS Marketplace, AWS Health Dashboard, AWS Secrets Manager, AWS Step Functions, AWS Support API, AWS Systems Manager, AWS Trusted Advisor, VM Import/Export, AWS VPN, and AWS X-Ray.

AWS in the Middle East
In addition to the two Regions—Bahrain and UAE—the Middle East has two AWS Direct Connect locations, allowing customers to establish private connectivity between AWS and their data centers and offices, as well as two Amazon CloudFront edge locations, one in Dubai and another in Fujairah. The UAE Region also offers low-latency connections to other AWS Regions in the area, as shown in the following chart:

Chart showing Latency (ms) from AWS Middle East UAE Region. To AWS Europe (Ireland) Region 127 ms. To Amman, Jordan 38 ms. To Jeddah, Saudi Arabia 34 ms. To Dammam, Saudi Arabia 30 ms. To Kuwait City, Kuwait 23 ms. To AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region 23 ms. To Riyadh, Saudi Arabia 19 ms. To Muscat, Oman 8 ms. To AWS Middle East (Bahrain) Region 8 ms.

Since 2017, AWS has established offices in Dubai and Bahrain along with a broad network of partners. We continue to build our teams in the Middle East by adding account managers, solutions architects, business developers, and professional services consultants to help customers of all sizes build or move their workloads to the cloud. Visit the Amazon career page to check out the roles we are hiring for.

In addition to Infrastructure, AWS continues to make investments in education initiatives, training, and start-up enablement to support UAE’s digital transformation and economic development plans.

  • AWS Activate – This global program provides start-ups with credits, training, and support so they can build their business on AWS.
  • AWS Training and Certification – This program helps developers build cloud skills using digital or classroom training and to validate those skills by earning an industry-recognized credential.
  • AWS Educate and AWS Academy – These programs provide higher education institutions, educators, and students with cloud computing courses and certifications.

AWS Customers in the Middle East
We have many amazing customers in the Middle East that are doing incredible things with AWS, for example:

The Ministry of Health and Prevention (MoHAP) implements the health care policy in the UAE. MoHAP is working with AWS to modernize their patient experience. With AWS, MoHAP can connect 100 percent of care providers—public and private—to further enhance their data strategy to support predictive and population health programs.

GEMS Education is one of the largest private K–12 operators in the world. Using AWS services like artificial intelligence and machine learning, GEMS developed an all-in-one integrated ED Tech platform called LearnOS. This platform supports teachers and creates personalized learning experiences. For example, with the use of Amazon Rekognition, they reduced 93 percent of the time spent in marking attendance. They also developed an automated quiz generation and assessment platform using Amazon EC2 and Amazon SageMaker. In addition, the algorithms can predict student year-end performance with up to 95 percent accuracy and recommend personalized reading materials.

YAP is a fast-growing regional financial super app that focuses on improving the digital banking experience. It functions as an independent app with no physical branches, making it the first of its kind in the UAE. AWS has helped fuel YAP’s growth and enabled them to scale to become a leading regional FinTech, giving them the elasticity to control costs as their user base has grown to over 130,000 users. With AWS, YAP can scale fast as they launch new markets, reducing the time to build and deploy complete infrastructure from months to weeks.

Available Now
The new Middle East (UAE) Region is ready to support your business. You can find a detailed list of the services available in this Region on the AWS Regional Service List.

With this launch, AWS now spans 87 Availability Zones within 27 geographic Regions around the world. We also have announced plans for 21 more Availability Zones and seven more AWS Regions in Australia, Canada, India, Israel, New Zealand, Spain, and Switzerland.

For more information on our global infrastructure, upcoming Regions, and the custom hardware we use, visit the Global Infrastructure page.

— Marcia

AWS Week in Review – August 29, 2022

Post Syndicated from Antje Barth original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-week-in-review-august-29-2022/

I’ve just returned from data and machine learning (ML) conferences in Los Angeles and San Francisco, California. It’s been great to chat with customers and developers about the latest technology trends and use cases. This past week has also been packed with launches at AWS.

Last Week’s Launches
Here are some launches that got my attention during the previous week:

Amazon QuickSight announces fine-grained visual embedding. You can now embed individual visuals from QuickSight dashboards in applications and portals to provide key insights to users where they’re needed most. Check out Donnie’s blog post to learn more, and tune into this week’s The Official AWS Podcast episode.

Sample Web App with a Visual

Sample Web App with a Visual

Amazon SageMaker Automatic Model Tuning is now available in the Europe (Milan), Africa (Cape Town), Asia Pacific (Osaka), and Asia Pacific (Jakarta) Regions. In addition, SageMaker Automatic Model Tuning now reuses SageMaker Training instances to reduce start-up overheads by 20x. In scenarios where you have a large number of hyperparameter evaluations, the reuse of training instances can cumulatively save 2 hours for every 50 sequential evaluations.

Amazon RDS now supports setting up connectivity between your RDS database and EC2 compute instance in one click. Amazon RDS automatically sets up your VPC and related network settings during database creation to enable a secure connection between the EC2 instance and the RDS database.

In addition, Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports managed Oracle Data Guard Switchover and Automated Backups for replicas. With the Oracle Data Guard Switchover feature, you can reverse the roles between the primary database and one of its standby databases (replicas) with no data loss and a brief outage. You can also now create Automated Backups and manual DB snapshots of an RDS for Oracle replica, which reduces the time spent taking backups following a role transition.

Amazon Forecast now supports what-if analyses. Amazon Forecast is a fully managed service that uses ML algorithms to deliver highly accurate time series forecasts.  You can now use what-if analyses to quantify the potential impact of business scenarios on your demand forecasts.

AWS Asia Pacific (Jakarta) Region now supports additional AWS services and EC2 instance types – Amazon SageMaker, AWS Application Migration Service, AWS Glue, Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA), and Amazon EC2 X2idn and X2iedn instances are now available in the Asia Pacific (Jakarta) Region.

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, blog posts, and fun code competitions you may find interesting:

Scaling AI and Machine Learning Workloads with Ray on AWS – This past week, I attended Ray Summit in San Francisco, California, and had great conversations with the community. Check out this blog post to learn more about AWS contributions to the scalability and operational efficiency of Ray on AWS.

Ray on AWS

New AWS Heroes – It’s great to see both new and familiar faces joining the AWS Heroes program, a worldwide initiative that acknowledges individuals who have truly gone above and beyond to share knowledge in technical communities. Get to know them in the blog post!

DFL Bundesliga Data Shootout – DFL Deutsche Fußball Liga launched a code competition, powered by AWS: the Bundesliga Data Shootout. The task: Develop a computer vision model to classify events on the pitch. Join the competition as an individual or in a team and win prizes.

Become an AWS GameDay World Champion – AWS GameDay is an interactive, team-based learning experience designed to put your AWS skills to the test by solving real-world problems in a gamified, risk-free environment. Developers of all skill levels can get in on the action, to compete for worldwide glory, as well as a chance to claim the top prize: an all-expenses-paid trip to AWS re:Invent Las Vegas 2022!

Learn more about the AWS Impact Accelerator for Black Founders from one of the inaugural members of the program in this blog post. The AWS Impact Accelerator is a series of programs designed to help high-potential, pre-seed start-ups led by underrepresented founders succeed.

Upcoming AWS Events
Check your calendars and sign up for these AWS events:

AWS SummitAWS Global Summits – AWS Global Summits are free events that bring the cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS.

Registration is open for the following in-person AWS Summits that might be close to you in August and September: Canberra (August 31), Ottawa (September 8), New Delhi (September 9), and Mexico City (September 21–22), Bogotá (October 4), and Singapore (October 6).

AWS Community DayAWS Community Days – AWS Community Day events are community-led conferences that deliver a peer-to-peer learning experience, providing developers with a venue for them to acquire AWS knowledge in their preferred way: from one another.

In September, the AWS community will host events in the Bay Area, California (September 9) and in Arlington, Virginia (September 30). In October, you can join Community Days in Amersfoort, Netherlands (October 3), in Warsaw, Poland (October 14), and in Dresden, Germany (October 19).

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Week in Review! And maybe I’ll see you at the AWS Community Day here in the Bay Area!

– Antje

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

Understand resiliency patterns and trade-offs to architect efficiently in the cloud

Post Syndicated from Haresh Nandwani original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/understand-resiliency-patterns-and-trade-offs-to-architect-efficiently-in-the-cloud/

This post was originally published in June 2022 and is now updated with more information on efficiently architecting resilient patterns in the cloud.

Architecting workloads for resilience on the cloud often need to evaluate multiple factors before they can decide the most optimal architecture for their workloads.

Example Corp has multiple applications with varying criticality, and each of their applications have different needs in terms of resiliency, complexity, and cost. They have many choices to architect their workloads for resiliency and cost, but which option suits their needs best? What should they consider when choosing the patterns most appropriate for the needs of their applications?

To help answer these questions, we’ll discuss the five resilience patterns in Figure 1 and the trade-offs to consider when implementing them: 1) design complexity, 2) cost to implement, 3) operational effort, 4) effort to secure, and 5) environmental impact. This will help you achieve varying levels of resiliency and make decisions about the most appropriate architecture for your needs. Our intent is to provide a high-level approach to structure conversations on trade-offs associated with each of these patterns. For a deeper dive on each pattern, please navigate to the Further reading section at the end of this post.

Note: these patterns are not mutually exclusive; you may decide to implement a combination of one of more patterns.

Resilience patterns and trade-offs

Figure 1. Resilience patterns and trade-offs

What is resiliency? Why does it matter?

The AWS Well-Architected Framework defines resilience as having “the capability to recover when stressed by load (more requests for service), attacks (either accidental through a bug, or deliberate through intention), and failure of any component in the workload’s components.”

To meet your business’ resilience requirements, consider the following core factors as you design your workloads:

  • Design complexity – An increase in system complexity typically increases the emergent behaviors of that system. Each individual workload component has to be resilient, and you’ll need to eliminate single points of failure across people, process, and technology elements. Customers should consider their resilience requirements and decide if increasing system complexity is an effective approach, or if keeping the system simple and using a disaster recovery (DR) plan is be more appropriate.
  • Cost to implement – Costs often significantly increase when you implement higher resilience because there are new software and infrastructure components to operate. It’s important for such costs to be offset by the potential costs of future loss.
  • Operational effort – Deploying and supporting highly resilient systems requires complex operational processes and advanced technical skills. For example, customers might need to improve their operational processes using the Operational Readiness Review (ORR) approach. Before you decide to implement higher resilience, evaluate your operational competency to confirm you have the required level of process maturity and skillsets.
  • Effort to secure – Security complexity is less directly correlated with resilience. However, there are generally more components to secure for highly resilient systems. Using security best practices for cloud deployments can achieve security objectives without adding significant complexity even with a higher deployment footprint.
  • Environmental impact – An increased deployment footprint for resilient systems may increase your consumption of cloud resources. However, you can use trade-offs, like approximate computing and deliberately implementing slower response times to reduce resource consumption. The AWS Well-Architected Sustainability Pillar describes these patterns and provides guidance on sustainability best practices.

Pattern 1 (P1): Multi-AZ

P1 is a cloud-based architecture pattern (Figure 2) that introduces Availability Zones (AZs) into your architecture to increase your system’s resilience. The P1 pattern uses a Multi-AZ architecture where applications operate in multiple AZs within a single AWS Region. This allows your application to withstand AZ-level impacts.

As shown in Figure 2, Example Corp deploys their internal employee applications using the P1 pattern. These applications are low business impact and therefore have lower requirements for resiliency.

Example Corp deploys their low-business-impact applications as a single Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance managed by an Auto Scaling group. Amazon EC2 uses health checks to automatically detect faults. If an AZ fails, Amazon EC2 prompts an Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group to recreate their application in another unaffected AZ.

Multi-AZ deployment pattern (P1)

Figure 2. Multi-AZ deployment pattern (P1)

Trade-offs

P1 is low in several categories and mitigates a disruption to the AZ hosting the application, but this comes at the expense of application recovery. If an AZ is down, it will disrupt end users’ access to the application while the new resources are being re-provisioned in a new AZ. This is known as bi-modal behavior.

Pattern 2 (P2): Multi-AZ with static stability

P2 uses multiple instances across multiple AZs within a Region to increase resilience. The pattern uses static stability to prevent bimodal behavior. Statically stable systems remain stable and operate in one mode, irrespective of changes to their operating environment. A key benefit of a statically stable system on AWS is it reduces complexity of recovery during a disruption thanks to pre-provisioned resource capacity. Any resources needed to maintain operations during a disruption, such as the loss of resources in an AZ, already exist and AWS service control planes do not need to be available for recovery to be successful. To learn more about static stability, data planes and control planes read the builder’s library article Static stability using Availability Zones.

As shown in Figure 3, Example Corp has a customer-facing website that has a lower tolerance for downtime. Any time the website is down, it could result in lost revenue. Because of this, the website requires two EC2 instances that are provisioned within two AZs. Using health checks, when the AZ becomes impaired, the website continues to operate as the Elastic Load Balancer diverts traffic away from the impacted AZ. For more on using health checks, see the Implementing health checks article in The Amazon Builder’s Library.

Multi-AZ with static stability pattern (P2)

Figure 3. Multi-AZ with static stability pattern (P2)

Trade-offs

P2 mitigates an AZ disruption without downtime to application clients but must be weighed against cost concerns. P1 is less expensive from an infrastructure cost perspective, as it provisions less compute capacity and relies on launching new instances in case of a failure. However, P1’s bimodal behavior can affect your customers during large-scale events.

Implementing P2 requires your application to support distributed operation across multiple instances. If your application can support this pattern, you can deploy your workload to all available AZs (usually 3 or more) across the Region. This will reduce costs associated with over-provisioning because you only have to provision 150% of your capacity across three AZs compared with the 200% in two AZs (as mentioned in our earlier example).

Pattern 3 (P3): Application portfolio distribution

P3 uses a Multi-Region pattern to increase functional resilience, as demonstrated in Figure 4. It distributes different critical applications in multiple Regions.

Example Corp provides banking services, like credit balance checks, to consumers on multiple digital channels. These services are available to consumers via a mobile application, contact center, and web-based applications. Each digital channel is deployed to a separate Region, which mitigates against a regional service disruption.

For example, a Region with the customers’ mobile application may have a disruption that causes the mobile app to be unavailable, but customers can still access banking services via online banking deployed in an alternate Region. Regional service disruptions are rare, but implementing a pattern like this ensures your users retain access to business-critical services during disruptions.

Application portfolio distribution pattern (P3)

Figure 4. Application portfolio distribution pattern (P3)

Trade-offs

P3 mitigates the possibility of a regional service disruption impacting a multitude of systems at the same time. Operating an application portfolio that spans multiple Regions requires significant operational planning and management. Isolated functional elements may depend on common downstream systems and data sources that are deployed in a single Region. Therefore, Region-wide events may still cause disruption, but the impact surface area should be reduced.

Pattern 4 (P4): Multi-AZ deployment (multi-Region DR)

Example Corp operates several business-critical services that have a very low tolerance for disruption, such as the ability for consumers to make bank payments. Example Corp reviewed the four common patterns for DR (as defined in Disaster Recovery of Workloads on AWS: Recovery in the Cloud) and decided to use the following sub-patterns for their multi-Region applications:

  • Pilot Light – This pattern works for applications that require RTO/RPO of 10s of minutes. Data is actively replicated and application infrastructure is pre-provisioned in the DR Region. Cost optimization is a key driver here, as the application infrastructure is kept switched-off and only switched-on during the restore event.
  • Warm Standby – This pattern improves restore times significantly compared with pilot light by keeping your applications running in the DR Region but with a reduced capacity. Application infrastructure will be scaled up during a DR event, but this can typically be automated with minimal manual effort. This pattern can achieve RTO/RPO of minutes if implemented correctly.

Trade-offs

P4 mitigates a disruption to a regional service while reducing mitigation costs. Regional DR patterns increase deployment complexity as infrastructure changes need to be synchronized across Regions. Testing resilience is also significantly more complex and include simulating regional disruptions. Using Infrastructure as Code to automate deployments can help alleviate these issues.

Pattern 5 (P5): Multi-Region active-active

Example Corp’s core banking and Customer Relationship Management applications have zero tolerance for disruption. They use the P5 pattern for deploying these applications because it has an RTO of real-time and an RPO of near-zero data loss. They run their workload simultaneously in multiple Regions, allowing them to serve traffic from all Regions simultaneously. This pattern not only mitigates against regional disruptions but also addresses their zero tolerance requirements (Figure 5).

Multi-Region active-active pattern (P5)

Figure 5. Multi-Region active-active pattern (P5)

Trade-offs

P5 mitigates the disruption of a regional service, and invests additional costs and complexity to deliver a RTO of near zero. Multi-active deployments are generally complex, as they include multiple applications that collaborate to deliver required business services. If you implement this pattern, you’ll need to consider the fact that you’re introducing asynchronous replication for data across Regions and the impact that has on data consistency.

Operating this pattern requires a very high level of process maturity, so we recommend customers gradually build towards this pattern by starting with the deployment patterns described earlier.

Conclusion

In this blog post, we introduced five resilience patterns and trade-offs to consider when implementing them. In an effort to help you find the most efficient architecture for your use case, we demonstrated how Example Corp evaluated these options and how they applied them to their business needs.

Further reading

Looking for more architecture content?

AWS Architecture Center provides reference architecture diagrams, vetted architecture solutions, Well-Architected best practices, patterns, icons, and more!

Amazon Cognito launches support for in-Region integration with Amazon SES and Amazon SNS

Post Syndicated from Amit Jha original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/amazon-cognito-launches-support-for-in-region-integration-with-amazon-ses-and-amazon-sns/

We are pleased to announce that in all AWS Regions that support Amazon Cognito, you can now integrate Amazon Cognito with Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) and Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) in the same Region. By integrating these services in the same Region, you can more easily achieve lower latency, and remove cross-Region dependencies in your architecture. Amazon Cognito lets you add authentication, authorization, and user management to your web and mobile apps. Amazon Cognito scales to millions of users and supports sign-in with social identity providers such as Apple, Facebook, Google, and Amazon, and enterprise identity providers that support SAML 2.0 and OpenID Connect (OIDC).

Amazon Cognito launched new console experience in 2021 that makes it even easier for you to manage Amazon Cognito user pools and add sign-in and sign-up functionality to your applications. The new console has now been further enhanced to configure the in-Region Amazon SES options as shown in Figure 1, and Amazon SNS options as shown in Figure 2. Also you can configure the same via Amazon Cognito APIs. Thus you can update your in-Region Amazon SES, Amazon SNS configuration options through the console, API, or CLI. You can use Amazon Cognito in a Region that suits your business requirements and sustainability goals, and extend your Amazon Cognito architecture to additional Regions.

Figure 1: Amazon SES Region drop-down selection with new options

Figure 1: Amazon SES Region drop-down selection with new options

Figure 2: Amazon SNS Region selection drop-down selection with new options

Figure 2: Amazon SNS Region selection drop-down selection with new options

In-Region integration with Amazon SES and Amazon SNS is currently available in all Regions where Amazon SES, Amazon SNS and Amazon Cognito are available. For up to date information, see the AWS Regional Services List. To learn more, see What is Amazon Cognito?.

Frequently asked questions (FAQs)

What Region will Amazon Cognito console default to when I configure Amazon SES and Amazon SNS Regions?

When creating new user pools, the Amazon Cognito console auto-populates the Region to in-Region, but you still have to select the identity. Existing user pools with cross-Region Amazon SES or Amazon SNS integration will not be affected.

Can I update an existing user pool to integrate with Amazon SES or Amazon SNS in the same Region?

Yes, you can change your configuration so that Amazon Cognito integrates with either Amazon SES or Amazon SNS, or both, in the same Region.

What Regions can I use with Amazon Cognito for Amazon SNS and Amazon SES?

For most up-to date mapping of Regions to use, see the table in SMS message settings for Amazon Cognito user pools.

Why should I change from cross-Region to same-Region Amazon SES or Amazon SNS?

Amazon Cognito is designed to scale to millions of users. Your users expect prompt delivery of their messages for multi-factor authentication and account setup. Using Amazon SES and Amazon SNS in the same Region as your user pool improves performance by reducing the round-trip time of the call that Amazon Cognito makes to Amazon SES or Amazon SNS.

What are the key benefits of using in-Region integration?

Availability: Availability is improved as you no longer will have cross-Region dependency for Amazon SES or Amazon SNS.

Latency: Transit time for API requests is most efficient within a single AWS Region.

Usability: Billing, logging, and setup are more transparent when you consolidate resources in the same Region.

Which version of Amazon Cognito user pools console does this change apply to?

This change applies to current version of the new Amazon Cognito user pool console experience. Also this change applies to current version of Amazon Cognito APIs.

Will my current cross-Region integration change?

No. Your AWS resources are your own and will not be changed. If you want to make use of the new in-Region integration, you must update your user pool configuration to integrate with Amazon SES or Amazon SNS in the same AWS Region.

Will I be placed in the SMS sandbox if I change my Amazon SNS Region?

The SMS sandbox status is Region dependent, so whether or not your user pool is in the SMS sandbox depends on the SNS Region you configure in your user pool. When your account is in the SMS sandbox, Amazon Cognito can send SMS text messages only to verified phone numbers and not to all of your users. When you move to a new Region, verified phone numbers will also need to be re-verified. For more information, see SMS message settings for Amazon Cognito user pools.

To find info about whether your user pool is configured in an SNS Region that is in the SMS sandbox, you can view the SmsConfigurationFailure field in DescribeUserPool API.

Which API parameters can developers use to make the in-Region changes?

Amazon SES: verified Amazon SES identities from the new Regions will be allowed through SourceArn parameters in the AWS::Cognito::UserPool EmailConfiguration type, and in the AWS::Cognito:: RiskConfiguration NotifyConfiguration type.

Amazon SNS: There is now a new parameter called SnsRegionM in the SmsConfiguration type in the following APIs:

Will my automation scripts break due to this change?

This change to support in-Region integration will not break your automation scripts. If future updates include changing the default Region value to in-Region, we plan to inform all Amazon Cognito customers about this change with sufficient time to transition to the new default Region value.

Can I revert to my original Region integration if I run into an issue?

Yes, the ability to use Amazon SES or Amazon SNS resources in a different AWS Region is still supported.

Next steps

If your Amazon Cognito user pool is currently configured to make cross-Region calls to Amazon SES or Amazon SNS, you can update your configuration through the console, API, or CLI.

If you have any questions or issues, you can start a new thread on AWS re:Post, contact AWS Support, or your technical account manager (TAM).

Want more AWS Security news? Follow us on Twitter.

Amit Jha

Amit Jha

Amit is a Developer Advocate with focus on Security/Identity. Amit has 18+ years of industry experience as a software developer & Architect. Prior to his current role, he served multiple roles at Microsoft for 11+ years helping large enterprises with Software architecture and custom development consulting.

Now Open – AWS Asia Pacific (Jakarta) Region

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-open-aws-asia-pacific-jakarta-region/

The AWS Region in Jakarta, Indonesia, is now open and you can start using it today. The official name is Asia Pacific (Jakarta) and the API name is ap-southeast-3. The AWS Asia Pacific (Jakarta) Region is the tenth active AWS Region in Asia Pacific and mainland China along with Beijing, Hong Kong, Mumbai, Ningxia, Osaka, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, and, Tokyo. With this launch, AWS now spans 84 Availability Zones within 26 geographic regions around the world. We have also announced plans for 24 more Availability Zones and eight more AWS Regions in Australia, Canada, India, Israel, New Zealand, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates.

Instances and Services
Applications running in this 3-AZ region can use C5, C5d, I3, I3en, M5, M5d, R5, R5d, and T3 instances, and can use a long list of AWS services including Amazon API Gateway, Application Auto Scaling, AWS Certificate Manager (ACM), AWS CloudFormation, Amazon CloudFront, AWS CloudTrail, Amazon CloudWatch, CloudWatch Events, Amazon CloudWatch Logs, AWS CodeDeploy, AWS Config, AWS Database Migration Service, AWS Direct Connect, Amazon DynamoDB, EC2 Auto Scaling, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Container Registry, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Application Load Balancers (Classic, Network, and Application), Amazon EMR, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon Elasticsearch Service, Amazon Glacier, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, AWS Key Management Service (KMS), AWS Lambda, AWS Marketplace, AWS Organizations, AWS Personal Health Dashboard, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), Amazon Aurora, Amazon Route 53 (including Private DNS for VPCs), Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Simple Workflow Service (SWF), AWS Step Functions, AWS Support API, AWS Systems Manager, AWS Trusted Advisor, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), and VM Import/Export.

Using the Asia Pacific (Jakarta) Region
As is the case with all of the newer AWS Regions, you need to explicitly enable this one in order to be able to create and manage resources within it. To learn how to do this, read Using the Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) Region in my post, Now Open – AWS Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) Region.

Connectivity, Edge Locations, and Latency
Jakarta is already home to a Amazon CloudFront edge location that was opened earlier this year, along with two brand-new AWS Direct Connect locations. In addition to this in-country infrastructure, there are more than sixty other edge locations and multiple regional edge caches in Asia, as detailed on the AWS Global Infrastructure page.

The region offers low-latency connections to other AWS regions in the area. Here are the latest numbers:

Many AWS services give you options to replicate your data across multiple AWS regions. You can replicate S3 buckets to multiple destinations (and use Multi-Region Access Points so your users access the closest one), copy EC2 AMIs between regions, set up cross-region Amazon Aurora Read Replicas, replicate container images, and more. You can set up Amazon DynamoDB Global Tables that span any desired regions, and you can set up inter-region VPC peering. To learn more about how to build applications that span regions, be sure to check out our Multi-Region Application Architecture solution.

AWS in Indonesia
With this launch we are making a long-term commitment to growing our business in Indonesia, and expect to create an average of 24,700 jobs annually over the next 15 years. This includes the direct AWS supply chain (construction, facility maintenance, electricity, and telecommunications) along with the growth that this drives in the broader Indonesian economy.

We have been investing in Southeast Asia and Indonesia for many years. The first AWS office in Jakarta opened in 2018 to help support our customers, and now employs developer advocates, solutions architects, account managers, and partner managers, with hiring for other roles now underway.

Back in 2019 we announced a goal to train and empower hundreds of thousands of Indonesians with proficiency in cloud services by 2025. In collaboration with the Indonesian government and with the help of both AWS partners and educational institutions, we have already trained over 200,000 people. We are doing this through multiple routes and programs including:

Laptops for Builders – This is a free program that teaches high school and vocational student in Bahasa, Indonesia about cloud fundamentals.

Scholarship Programs – Working closely with tech-education startup Dicoding, we are offering a free scholarship program for up to 100,000 cloud and back-end developers.

AWS Training & Certification – Attendees are gaining new skills and certifications in areas such as AWS Cloud fundamentals, big data, security, and machine learning, with several training options available.

AWS Customers in Indonesia
We have many amazing customers in Indonesia! Here are a few success stories:

Traveloka is a lifestyle superapp with a focus on Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Australia. They offer customers in those countries an end-to-end solution that spans travel, local services, and financial services, all powered by AWS. The company was born in the cloud, and counts on AWS to let them build apps quickly and with high scalability. The Traveloka app has been downloaded over 60 million times, making it the most popular travel and lifestyle booking app in Southeast Asia.

Halodoc is an Indonesian digital health startup. They are currently running a digital reservation program to help Indonesian citizens to book and receive their COVID-19 vaccinations, while also providing the government with easier monitoring and evaluation of the vaccine rollout. During the pandemic, they have also helped to provide testing and telemedicine services, all powered by a digital platform that runs on AWS and that allows them to scale in real-time according to market demand.

Under the national movement of Learning Freedom (“Merdeka Belajar”), the Indonesian government is working to allow students to access educational resources from anywhere and at any time. Simak Online allows 300,000 students from 430 schools across Jakarta to access their learning materials and assignments, complete homework, take examples, and participate in online forum discussions. Previously hosted on-premises, Simak Online moved to AWS shortly before COVID-19 broke out in Indonesia. Before the move, they could support exams at just 50 schools simultaneously. Thanks to AWS, they can now scale up and down as needed and can support the national movement and allow students to learn online and on-demand.

A translated version of this post is available on the AWS Indonesia Blog.

— Jeff;

In The Works – AWS Canada West (Calgary) Region

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in-the-works-aws-canada-west-calgary-region/

We launched the Canada (Central) Region in 2016 and added a third Availability Zone in 2020. Since that launch, tens of thousands of AWS customers have used AWS services in Canada to accelerate innovation, increase agility, and to drive cost savings. This includes enterprises such as Air Canada, BMO Financial Group, NHL, Porter Airlines, and Lululemon, as well as startups with global reach such as Benevity, D2L, and Hootsuite. AWS is also used by Athabasca University, Humber College, the Vancouver General Hospital, and the Canada Border Services Agency, to name a few.

Hello, Calgary
I am happy to announce that we will be opening an AWS region in Calgary, Canada in late 2023 or early 2024. This three-AZ region will reduce latency for end-users in Western Canada and will also support the development of advanced, distributed solutions that span multiple AWS regions. It will also provide additional flexibility for AWS customers that need to store and process data within Canada’s borders.

As part of our commitment to running our business in the most environmentally friendly way possible, we are also investing in renewable energy projects in Canada. We currently have two projects underway, both in Alberta: an 80 MW solar farm (announced in April 2021) and a 375 MW solar farm (announced in June 2021). Together, these projects will contribute more than one million MWh to the power grid when they come online in 2022.

This region is part of a planned investment of CAD $4.3 billion over the next 15 years, including data center construction, ongoing utilities and facilities costs, and purchases of goods & services from regional businesses. Our Economic Impact Study (EIS) estimates that the spending on infrastructure and construction over the next 15 years will increase Canada’s GDP by about CAD $4.9 billion, along with direct and indirect economic benefits including nearly 1,000 new full-time equivalent jobs in Canada.

And Then There Were Nine
With this announcement we now have a total of nine regions (Australia, Canada, India, Indonesia, Israel, New Zealand, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates) in the works. As always, you can find the full list of operational and planned regions on the AWS Global Infrastructure page.

— Jeff;

En construction : la Région AWS Canada Ouest (Calgary)

Nous avons inauguré la Région Canada (Centre) en 2016 et ajouté une troisième Zone de disponibilité en 2020. Depuis ce lancement, des dizaines de milliers de clients d’AWS ont utilisé les services d’AWS au Canada pour accélérer l’innovation, améliorer leur agilité et réaliser des économies. Cela inclut des entreprises telles qu’Air Canada, BMO Groupe financier, la LNH, Porter Airlines et Lululemon, en plus d’entreprises en démarrage à portée mondiale telles que Benevity, D2L et Hootsuite. AWS est également utilisé par l’Université Athabasca, le Collège Humber, l’Hôpital général de Vancouver et l’Agence des services frontaliers du Canada, pour ne citer que quelques exemples.

Bonjour Calgary
Je suis heureux d’annoncer que nous allons ouvrir une Région AWS à Calgary, au Canada, à la fin de 2023 ou au début de 2024. Cette Région à trois ZD réduira la latence pour les utilisateurs finaux de l’Ouest canadien et permettra aussi de soutenir le développement de solutions avancées et distribuées couvrant plusieurs Régions AWS. De plus, elle fournira une flexibilité supplémentaire aux clients d’AWS ayant besoin de stocker et traiter des données à l’intérieur des frontières canadiennes.

Dans le cadre de notre engagement à gérer notre entreprise de la manière la plus respectueuse de l’environnement possible, nous investissons également dans des projets d’énergie renouvelable au Canada. Nous avons actuellement deux projets en cours, tous deux situés en Alberta : une ferme solaire de 80 MW (annoncée en avril 2021) et une ferme solaire de 375 MW (annoncée en juin 2021). Lorsqu’ils seront opérationnels en 2022, ces projets apporteront conjointement plus de 1 million de MWh au réseau électrique.

Cette Région fait partie d’un investissement prévu de 4,3 milliards de dollars CAD au cours des 15 prochaines années, comprenant la construction de centres de données, les dépenses opérationnelles liées aux services publics et aux installations, ainsi que les achats de biens et de services auprès d’entreprises régionales. Notre étude d’impact économique (EIE) estime que les dépenses en matière d’infrastructure et de construction au cours des 15 prochaines années augmenteront le PIB du Canada d’environ 4,9 milliards de dollars CAD, en plus des retombées économiques directes et indirectes, dont près de 1 000 nouveaux emplois équivalents temps plein au Canada.

Et en voilà une neuvième
Avec cette annonce, nous avons maintenant un total de neuf Régions en cours de réalisation (Australie, Canada, Inde, Indonésie, Israël, Nouvelle-Zélande, Espagne, Suisse et les Émirats arabes unis). Comme toujours, vous trouverez la liste complète des Régions opérationnelles et planifiées en consultant la page de l’infrastructure mondiale d’AWS.

— Jeff;

AWS Local Zones Are Now Open in Las Vegas, New York City, and Portland

Post Syndicated from Sébastien Stormacq original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-local-zones-are-now-open-in-las-vegas-new-york-city-and-portland/

Today, we are opening three new AWS Local Zones in Las Vegas, New York City (located in New Jersey), and Portland metro areas. We are now at a total of 14 Local Zones in 13 cities since Jeff Barr announced the first Local Zone in Los Angeles in December 2019. These three new Local Zones join the ones in full operation in Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, and Philadelphia.

Local Zones are one of the ways we bring select AWS services much closer to large populations and geographic areas where major industries come together. By having this proximity, you can deploy latency-sensitive workloads such as real-time gaming platforms, financial transaction processing, media and entertainment content creation, or ad services. Using Local Zones for migrations or hybrid strategies are two additional use cases allowing you to migrate your applications to a nearby AWS Local Zone while still meeting the low-latency requirements of hybrid deployments.

Local Zones support the deployment of workloads using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon FSx for Windows File Server and Amazon FSx for Lustre, Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). Local Zones provide a high-bandwidth, secure connection between local workloads and those running in the parent AWS Region, while offering the full range of services found in a Region through the same APIs, console and tool sets. This page lists the exact AWS services and features available in each Local Zone.

Local Zones are easy to use and can be enabled in only three clicks! This article will help you learn how to provision infrastructure in a Local Zone, which is very similar to creating infrastructure in an Availability Zone. Once enabled, Local Zones appear as additional Availability Zones in your AWS Management Console or AWS Command Line Interface (CLI).

Local Zones in Action
Examples of workloads that our customers run in Local Zones include:

Dish Wireless is building the US-telecom’s first cloud-native 5G network. They are unleashing 5G connectivity with better speed, better security, and better latency. DISH is leveraging AWS Regions, AWS Local Zones, and AWS Outposts to extend AWS infrastructure and services to wherever they – or their customers – need it.

Integral Ad Science (IAS) is a global leader in digital media quality. Every millisecond counts when it comes to delivering actionable insights for its advertiser and publisher customers. Leveraging AWS Regions and AWS Local Zones, IAS ensures rapid response times in milliseconds when analyzing data and delivering insights.

Esports Engine (a Vindex company) is a turnkey esports solutions company working with gaming publishers, rights holders, brands, and teams to provide production, broadcast, tournament, and program design. Their graphic-intensive streaming content is live-fed from the locations where the games are recorded and then broadcast from the studios to viewers. AWS Local Zones replace their previous on-premises data centers to reduce the need for support for the physical data center buildings.

Proof Trading is a financial services company looking forward to taking advantage of AWS Local Zones to bring trading workloads closer to the major trading venues located in Chicago and New Jersey. Our industry blog has a detailed article that provides more context on trading-related workloads.

Ubitus is a cloud gaming technology leader. They deploy latency-sensitive game servers all over the world to be closer to gamers. An important part of having a great gaming experience is to have consistent low-latency game plays. AWS Local Zones are a game changer for them. Now, they can easily deploy and test clusters of game servers in many cities across the US, ensuring that more customers get a consistent experience regardless of where they are located.

What’s Next?
In 2019 when we launched our first Local Zone at AWS re:Invent 2019, we said we were just getting started. In addition to today’s announcement, we are working on opening three additional Local Zones in Atlanta, Phoenix, and Seattle by the end of the year, and we keep expanding. If you would like to express your interest in a particular location, please let us know by filling out the AWS Local Zones Interest form.

We are also listening to your feedback on additional services that we should add to Local Zones, such as more EC2 instance types to give you even more flexibility.

Build and deploy your workload on a Local Zone today.

— seb

In the Works – AWS Region in Tel Aviv, Israel

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in-the-works-aws-region-in-tel-aviv-israel/

We launched three AWS Regions (Italy, South Africa, and Japan) in the last 12 months, and are working on regions in Australia, Indonesia, Spain, India, Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates.

Tel Aviv, Israel in the Works
Today I am happy to announce that the AWS Israel (Tel Aviv) Region is in the works and will open in the first half of 2023. This region will have three Availability Zones and will give AWS customers in Israel the ability to run workloads and store data that must remain in-country.

There are 81 Availability Zones within 25 AWS Regions in operation today, with 21 more Availability Zones and seven announced regions (including this one) underway.

As is always the case with an AWS Region, each of the Availability Zones will be a fully isolated part of the AWS infrastructure. The AZs in this region will be connected together via high-bandwidth, low-latency network connections over dedicated, fully redundant metro fiber. This connectivity supports applications that need synchronous replication between AZs 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 AZs.

AWS in Israel
I first visited Israel in 2013 and have been back several (but definitely not enough) times since then. I have spoken at several AWS Summits and visited many of early customers in the area. Today, AWS has the following resources on the ground in Israel:

Israel is also home to Annapurna Labs, an Amazon.com subsidiary that is responsible for developing much of the innovative hardware that powers AWS.

In addition, the government of Israel announced that it has selected AWS as the primary cloud provider for the Nimbus Project. As part of this project, government ministries and subsidiaries in Israel will use cloud computing to power a digital transformation and to provide new digital services for the citizens of Israel.

Stay Tuned
We’ll announce the opening of the AWS Israel (Tel Aviv) Region in a forthcoming blog post, so be sure to stay tuned!

— Jeff;