Tag Archives: Week in Review

AWS Week in Review – April 11, 2022

Post Syndicated from Channy Yun original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-week-in-review-april-11-2022/

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!

As spring arrives in the Northern Hemisphere, tulips, sunshine, and cherry blossoms finally appear to be in bloom—surely signs of warmer days to come in North America, Asia, and Europe. I hope you enjoy the spring and, in the Southern Hemisphere, fall season with your family.

Let’s look the second edition of the AWS Week in Review for the month of April!

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

New Amazon EC2 Single Page Instance Launching Console – As Jeff introduced, the Amazon EC2 console introduces the new and improved launch experience—a quicker and easier way to launch an instance. The new design provides a single page layout, allowing you to view all your settings in one location. You no longer need to navigate back and forth between steps to ensure your configuration is correct. The new design also introduces a summary panel that provides an overview and helps navigate the page. Quickly get started by following the simple steps and see the EC2 documentation to learn more.

Unified Settings in the AWS Management Console – New Unified Settings will persist across devices, browsers, and services. It supports settings called default language, Region, visual theme such as either light or dark mode, and favorites bar with either the service icon and full name or only the service icon. You can access Unified Settings by signing in to the AWS Management Console, navigating to the account menu, and selecting Settings in all AWS Regions.

AWS Lambda Function URLs – This is really big news! AWS Lambda Function URLs is a new feature that makes it easier to invoke functions through an HTTPS endpoint as a built-in capability of the AWS Lambda service. You can add Function URLs to new and existing functions easily from the Lambda console. Function URLs are ideal for getting started with building web services on Lambda or for common tasks like building webhooks. To get started quickly and learn more, see Alex’s blog post.

Amazon CloudWatch Metrics Insights is Now Generally Available – As a fast, flexible, SQL-based query engine, Amazon CloudWatch Metrics Insights enables you to identify trends and patterns across millions of operational metrics in real time and helps you use these insights to reduce time to resolution. With Metrics Insights, you can gain better visibility on your infrastructure and large-scale application performance with flexible querying and on-the-fly metric aggregations. To get started, select the All metrics link under Metrics on the left navigation panel of the CloudWatch console and browse to the Query tab. To learn more, see the Metrics Insights documentation.

AWS Amplify Studio’s New File Storage and File Management – This new feature makes it easy to store and serve user-generated content (such as photos and videos) from web or mobile apps. With Amplify Studio, you can easily create an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket, configure file access levels, integrate storage client libraries into your web or mobile app, and manage files in Studio’s drag-and-drop file explorer. Get started by reading Nikhil’s blog post on how to provision Storage directly from your Amplify Studio.

You can either select Upload files or drag and drop files onto your browser

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 featured news items about open-source and community support at AWS in the last week:

Amazon Athena ACID Transactions Powered by Apache Iceberg – We announced the general availability of Amazon Athena ACID transactions, a new capability that adds insert, update, delete, and time travel operations to Athena’s SQL data manipulation language (DML). Built on the Apache Iceberg table format, Athena ACID transactions are optimized for Amazon S3 storage, support seamless schema evolution, and ensure atomic operations across other services and engines that support the Iceberg table format. To learn more, see Using Amazon Athena Transactions and Using Iceberg Tables in the Athena User Guide.

Amazon OpenSearch Service Now Supports OpenSearch 1.2 – We launched support for OpenSearch 1.0 on Amazon OpenSearch Service in September 2021 and for OpenSearch 1.1 in January 2022. The support included features of OpenSearch 1.2 such as transforms, data streams, notebooks, cross-cluster replication, and improvements to anomaly detection and alerting.

Amazon EKS Now Supports Kubernetes 1.22 – Customers can start taking advantage of the numerous enhancements and new generally available APIs in Kubernetes 1.22. In line with the Kubernetes community support for Kubernetes versions, Amazon EKS is committed to supporting at least four production-ready versions of Kubernetes at any given time. You can learn about how to upgrade your EKS version in our blog posts Amazon EKS now supports Kubernetes 1.22 and Planning Kubernetes Upgrades with Amazon EKS.

The New AWS Community Builders Directory – You can find over 800 AWS Community Builders in the global directory. Community Builders are technical enthusiasts and emerging thought leaders who are passionate about sharing knowledge and connecting with the technical community. You can contact all Community Builders in the directory to engage the AWS Community in your Region. To see created and shared content by them, check them out on dev.to.

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

AWS Summits in the Asia-Pacific Are Back – I am happy to announce newly scheduled AWS Summits Online in the Asia-Pacific Regions such as Korea (on May 10–11), ASEAN (on May 18), and Australia & New Zealand (on May 18–19). More in-person summits in May are coming in Madrid (on May 4), Stockholm (on May 11), Berlin (on May 11–12), Tel Aviv (on May 18), and Atlanta (on May 18–19). Find an AWS Summit near you!

AWS Online Tech Talks for April – These talks cover a range of topics and expertise levels and features technical deep dives, demonstrations, customer examples, and live Q&A with AWS experts. Over 20 virtual or on-demand seminars have been scheduled from April 18–29. You can also find archived on-demand videos from previous AWS Online Tech Talks.

AWS Solutions-Focused Immersion Days – This is a series of events that are designed to educate you about AWS products and services and help you develop the skills needed to build, deploy, and operate your infrastructure and applications in the cloud. Hands on labs provide you with an immersive experience in the AWS console. Join us to learn how to build on AWS.

To find more about AWS events and webinars, explore the all AWS Events page.

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

— Channy

AWS Week in Review – April 4, 2022

Post Syndicated from Sébastien Stormacq original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-week-in-review-april-4-2022/

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 April 4 edition of the AWS Week in Review. This week, alongside the main launches, I also captured a couple of new capabilities, such as a new API to manage your AWS accounts within AWS Organizations, an easier process to update your AWS Lambda layers, and a new behavior of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

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

Sustainability Pillar is now available in the Well Architect Tool – The Well Architected Tool is a central place for cloud architecture best practices and guidance. The Sustainability Pillar was announced at the re:Invent 2021 conference. It helps you to learn, measure, and improve your workloads using environmental best practices for cloud computing.

Close an AWS Member Account with an API Call – This feature was launched with little fanfare, but it is a big deal for those of you managing large numbers of AWS accounts through Organizations.  The Twitter community first spotted the change, noticing a commit in the AWS SDK for Go. See the official blog post announcement for more information!

The Lambda Console Now Allows Updates a Lambda Layer in All or a Subset of Functions – Lambda layers provide a convenient way to package libraries and other dependencies that you can use with your Lambda functions. Using layers reduces the size of uploaded deployment archives and makes it faster to deploy your code. Previously, it was challenging to identify and update all the functions that used a specific layer version. With this release, the Lambda console displays a list of all the functions using a given layer and allows you to select multiple functions to be updated with a newer layer version. It eliminates the need to update one function at a time or utilize an external script to perform the update on multiple functions.

Amazon EC2 Launched Automatic Recovery on Hardware Failure by Default – This new feature makes it easier to recover your instance when it becomes unreachable. Automatic recovery improves instance availability by recovering the instance if it becomes impaired due to an underlying hardware issue. Automatic recovery migrates the instance to another hardware during an instance reboot while retaining its instance ID, private IP addresses, Elastic IP addresses, and all instance metadata. You can choose to disable automatic recovery for your instance if you wish.

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

Other AWS News
Beside launches, here are other news worthy items and a blog that caught my attention:

New AWS podcast for Sub-Saharan AWS communities – There are AWS podcasts in many different languages: English, French, Italian, German, three in Spanish, and Russian just to name a few. This week, my colleague Veliswa launched an English podcast aimed at highlighting the Sub-Saharian AWS communities and customers. You can listen to it using any good podcast application (including but not only Spotify and Apple).

100th episode of Le Podcast AWS en Français – This week also marked the publication of the 100th episode of the AWS French Podcast. Since its start in 2019, the podcast has seen 250k downloads. Thank you for listening.

AWS Open Source News and Updates – My colleague Ricardo writes this weekly open-source newsletter. In the 106th edition, I noticed two pieces of information important for the Java community:

First, we released Amazon Corretto 18. This version supports the latest Java feature release OpenJDK 18, and is available on Linux, Windows, and macOS. OpenJDK 18 offers a new internet-address resolution capability, a Simple Web Server, an updated Vector API, a new @snippet Tag for JavaDoc, a new implementation of Core Reflection, a change to UTF-8 as the default character set (charset) of the standard Java APIs, a second iteration of the foreign memory API, advancements in pattern matching for switch statements, and the deprecation of finalization.

Second, we published a blog post showing how to reduce Lambda cold start time by deploying your Java-based Lambda function on Quarkus. Quarkus was created by Java Champion Emmanuel Bernard. It is an open-source native Java stack tailored for GraalVM and OpenJDK HotSpot, crafted from the best of breed Java libraries and standards. It is designed to have an extremely low memory footprint and fast startup time. And yes, Quarkus runs on Corretto too.

A Cloud Guru Answers a Common Question – Nearly every week, people ask me what AWS certification they should take. A Cloud Guru walks through the decision in Which AWS certification is right for me?

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

The AWS Summit season has started – The Brussels Summit was last week, and the next ones are Paris, San Francisco, and London, in that order. I will be delivering the closing keynote at the Paris Summit and will be around the Formula1 GameDay area in London. Be sure to stop by and say “Hi!” if you’re around. You can sign up to receive a notification when registration opens for a Summit in your area. If you can’t attend a Summit in person this year, we will have an online Summit for EMEA in June (at European time, but all sessions will stay available on-demand until September).

.NET Enterprise Developer Day EMEA registrations are open – .NET Enterprise Developer Day EMEA 2022 is a free, one-day virtual conference providing enterprise developers with the most relevant information to swiftly and efficiently migrate and modernize their .NET applications and workloads on AWS. It will happen online on April 26, 2022.

re:Mars conference registrations are open – Mars stands for Machine learning, Automation, Robotics, and Space. You will learn from recognized thought leaders and technical experts who are building the future of AI/ML. It will happen in Las Vegas, Nevada, between June 21 and 24, 2022.

re:Inforce conference registrations are open – Security is our first priority at AWS, and it deserves its own two-day conference to reinforce your AWS security posture. You’ll hear the latest from industry-leading speakers in security, compliance, identity, and privacy. It will happen in Boston, Massachusetts, on July 26 and 27, 2022.

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

— seb

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