Tag Archives: Week in Review

AWS Week in Review – March 28, 2022

Post Syndicated from Marcia Villalba original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-week-in-review-march-28-2022/

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

Welcome to another round up of the most significant AWS launches from the previous week. Among the most relevant news, we have improvements done in AWS Lambda, a new service for game developers, and we are back with the AWS Summits all around the world.

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

AWS Lambda Now Supports Up to 10 GB Ephemeral Storage – This new launch allows you to configure the temporary file system capacity (/tmp) of Lambda up to 10 GB! This is very useful for customers that are trying to use Lambda for ETL jobs, ML inference or other data-intensive workloads. Check Channy’s launch blog post to learn more about how to get started.

Amazon GameSparks – Last week we announced the launch of Amazon GameSparks in preview. Amazon GameSparks is a new serverless service that makes it easy for developers to create, test, and tune custom game features without thinking about the underlying servers or infrastructure. It comes with out-of-the-box features ideal for game backends and it is pre-integrated with the Unity game engine. Learn more in Tabitha’s blog post.

Amazon Connect Forecasting, Capacity Planning, and Scheduling – This set of ML-powered capabilities makes it easier for contact center managers to predict customer service workloads, determine ideal staffing levels, and schedule agents accordingly. These features are available in preview and you can learn more in Sajith’s blog post.

AWS Proton Support for Terraform Open Source – Last November we announced the preview for this feature, and now it is generally available in all the AWS Regions where Proton is available. Platform teams can now define Proton templates using Terraform modules. Read the What’s New post for more information.

Amazon Polly Now Offers Neural TTS Voices in Catalan and Mexican Spanish – Polly is a service that turns your text into lifelike speech. It has support for Neural TTS voices in many languages, and last week they added two more, in Mexican Spanish and in Catalan. You can read more in the What’s New post and listen to the Mexican voice in this audio.


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

Other AWS News

Podcast Charlas Técnicas de AWS – If you understand Spanish, this podcast is for you. Podcast Charlas Técnicas is one of the official AWS podcasts in Spanish. It has episodes every other week. The podcast is meant for builders, and it shares stories on how customers implemented and learned AWS and how to architect applications using AWS services. You can listen to all the episodes directly from your favorite podcast app or the podcast web page.

AWS Open Source News and Updates – Ricardo Sueiras, my colleague from the AWS Developer Relation team, runs this newsletter. It brings you all the latest open-source projects, posts and more. This week he shares the latest open source project, tools and also AWS and community blog posts related to open-source. Read edition #106 here.

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

Building a Tech-Enabled Biotech with Celsius Therapeutics on Tuesday March 29 at 10 PM UTC – My colleague Mark Birch hosts regular Clubhouse events, in which he talks with different startups. These companies share their journey and experience using AWS. Join the live event here.

The AWS Summits Are Back – Don’t forget to register for the AWS Summits in Brussels (on March 31), Paris (on April 12), San Francisco (on April 20-21), and London (on April 27). More summits are coming in the next weeks, and we’ll let you know in these weekly posts.

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

— Marcia

AWS Week in Review – March 21, 2022

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

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

Another week, another round up of the most significant AWS launches from the previous seven days! Among the news, we have new AWS Heroes and a cost reduction. Also, improvements for customers using AWS Lambda and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), and a new database-to-database connectivity option for Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS).

Last Week’s Launches
Here are some launches that caught my attention last week:

AWS Billing Conductor – This new tool provides customizable pricing and cost visibility for your end customers or business units and helps when you have specific showback and chargeback needs. To get started, see Getting Started with AWS Billing Conductor. And yes, you can call it “ABC.”

Cost Reduction for Amazon Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall – Starting from the beginning of March, we are introducing a new tiered pricing structure that reduces query processing fees as your query volume increases. We are also implementing internal optimizations to reduce the number of DNS queries for which you are charged without affecting the number of DNS queries that are inspected or introducing any other changes to your security posture. For more info, see the What’s New.

Share Test Events in the Lambda Console With Other Developers – You can now share the test events you create in the Lambda console with other team members and have a consistent set of test events across your team. This new capability is based on Amazon EventBridge schemas and is available in the AWS Regions where both Lambda and EventBridge are available. Have a look at the What’s New for more details.

Use containerd with Windows Worker Nodes Managed by Amazon EKS – containerd is a container runtime that manages the complete container lifecycle on its host system with an emphasis on simplicity, robustness, and portability. In this way, you can get on Windows similar performance, security, and stability benefits to those available for Linux worker nodes. Here’s the What’s New with more info.

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL databases can now connect and retrieve data from MySQL databases – You can connect your RDS PostgreSQL databases to Amazon Aurora MySQL-compatible, MySQL, and MariaDB databases. This capability works by adding support to mysql_fdw, an extension that implements a Foreign Data Wrapper (FDW) for MySQL. Foreign Data Wrappers are libraries that PostgreSQL databases can use to communicate with an external data source. Find more info in the What’s New.

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

Other AWS News
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!

More Than 400 Points of Presence for Amazon CloudFront – Impressive growth here, doubling the Points of Presence we had in October 2019. This number includes edge locations and mid-tier caches in AWS Regions. Do you know that edge locations are connected to the AWS Regions through the AWS network backbone? It’s a fully redundant, multiple 100GbE parallel fiber that circles the globe and links with tens of thousands of networks for improved origin fetches and dynamic content acceleration.

AWS Open Source News and Updates – A newsletter curated by my colleague Ricardo where he brings you the latest open-source projects, posts, events, and much more. This week he is also sharing a short list of some of the open-source roles currently open across Amazon and AWS, covering a broad range of open-source technologies. Read edition #105 here.

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

The AWS Summits Are Back – Don’t forget to register to the AWS Summits in Brussels (on March 31) and Paris (on April 12). More summits are coming in the next weeks, and we’ll let you know in this weekly posts.

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

— Danilo

AWS Week in Review – March 14, 2022

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

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

Welcome to the March 14 AWS Week in Review post, and Happy Pi Day! I hope you managed to catch some of our livestreamed Pi day celebration of the 16th birthday of Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). I certainly had a lot of fun in the event, along with my co-hosts – check out the end of this post for some interesting facts and fun from the day.

First, let’s dive right into the news items and launches from the last week that caught my attention.

Last Week’s Launches
New X2idn and X2iedn EC2 Instance Types – Customers with memory-intensive workloads and a requirement for high networking bandwidth may be interested in the newly announced X2idn and X2iedn instance types, which are built on the AWS Nitro system. Featuring third-generation Intel Xeon Scalable (Ice Lake) processors, these instance types can yield up to 50 percent higher compute price performance and up to 45 percent higher SAP Application Performance Standard (SAPS) performance than comparable X1 instances. If you’re curious about the suffixes on those instance type names, they specify processor and other information. In this case, the i suffix indicates that the instances are using an Intel processor, e means it’s a memory-optimized instance family, d indicates local NVMe-based SSDs physically connected to the host server, and n means the instance types support higher network bandwidth up to 100 Gbps. You can find out more about the new instance types in this news blog post.

Amazon DynamoDB released two updates – First, an increase in the default service quotas raises the number of tables allowed by default from 256 to 2500 tables. This will help customers working with large numbers of tables. At the same time the service also increased the allowed number of concurrent table management operations, from 50 to 500. Table management operations are those that create, update, or delete tables. The second update relates to PartiQL a SQL-compatible query language you can use to query, insert, update, or delete DynamoDB table data. You can now specify a limit on the number of items processed. You’ll find this useful when you know you only need to process a certain number of items, helping reduce the cost and duration of requests.

If you’re coding against Amazon ECS‘s API, you may want to take a look at the change to UpdateService that now enables you to update load balancers, service registries, tag propagation, and ECS managed tags for a service. Previously, you would have had to delete and recreate the service to make changes to these resources for a service. Now you can do it all with one call, making it a hassle-free and less disruptive, more efficient experience. Take a look at the What’s New post for more details.

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

Other AWS News
If you’re analyzing time series data, take a look at this new book on building forecasting models and detecting anomalies in your data. It’s authored by Michael Hoarau, an AI/ML Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS.

March 8 was International Women’s Day and we published a post featuring several women, including fellow news blogger and published author Antje Barth, chatting about their experiences working in Developer Relations at AWS.

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

.NET Application Modernization Webinar (March 23) – Sign up today to learn about .NET modernization, what it is, and why you might want to modernize. The webinar will include a deep dive focusing on the AWS Microservice Extractor for .NET.

AWS Summit Brussels is fast approaching on March 31st. Register here.

Pi Day Fun & Facts
As this post is published, we’re coming to the end of our livestreamed Pi Day event celebrating the 16th birthday of S3 – how time flies! Here are some interesting facts & fun snippets from the event:

  • In the keynote, we learned S3 currently stores over 200 trillion objects, and serves over 100 million requests per second!
  • S3‘s Intelligent Tiering has saved customers over $250 million to date.
  • Did you know that S3, having reached 16 years of age, is now eligible for a Washington State drivers license? Or that it can now buy a lottery ticket, get a passport, or – check this – it can pilot a hang glider!
  • We asked each of our guests on the livestream, and the team of AWS news bloggers, to nominate their favorite pie. The winner? It’s a tie between apple and pecan pie!

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

— Steve