Welcome to this week’s AWS and Tech news roundup. Some great new releases this week, including MemoryDB for Redis, new M6i instances, Python 3.9 support for Lambda and a range of new features for AWS Glue Databrew.
AWS announces Amazon MemoryDB for Redis
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/08/amazon-memorydb-redis/
AWS has announced a new managed database service with Redis compatibility, providing a way to create a fully in-memory database with caching and providing more functionality to stop having to deal with manual changes to Elasticache and provide better failover support.
AWS launches new M6i instances, the next generation intel powered EC2 instances
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/08/amazon-ec2-m6i-instances/
AWS has launched the next generation in the memory optimised instance family following on from M5, as the M6i instance type. Powered by Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Code name Ice Lake) with 15% better compute price performance over M5, they also come with always-on memory encryption.
AWS Lambda now supports Python 3.9
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/08/aws-lambda-adds-support-python-3-9/
AWS has released Python 3.9 support for Lambda, bringing the latest python versions to Lambda
AWS EC2 VM Import/Export now supports VMs with Unified Extensible Firmware Interface boot
AWS has announced support for importing and exporting for Virtual Machines that run with UEFI boot into EC2 instances using VM Import/Export.
AWS Glue now supports Spark 3.1
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/08/spark-3-1-runtime-aws-glue-3-0/
AWS Glue has now released version 3.0 of AWS Glue, including support for Apache Spark 3.1, with a range of improvements, including UI updates.
AWS Billing Cost Categories now includes split charges
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/08/cost-categories-split-charge-rules-allocation/
AWS Billing Cost Categories now allows for the allocation of costs to multiple Cost Category values, allowing for split allocation between departments of shared costs.
Amazon Sagemaker notebook now supports Amazon Linux 2
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/08/amazon-sagemaker-notebook-amazon-linux-2/
Amazon Sagemaker has launched support for Amazon Linux 2 for Sagemaker Notebooks, allowing for the latest version of Amazon’s CentOS-based Operating System to be used for launching Jupyter notebook instances.
Amazon Redshift launches spatial performance functions
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/08/redshift-spatial-performance-spatial-functions/
Amazon Redshift has launched support for spatial query performance enhancements to improve the processing of spatial data, including functions for Line Interpolation, vertice reversing, sphere length calculation and more. Improvements of up to 100x in some cases for geometry calculations can be achieved.
AWS Transfer Family adds external IP address access and increases the limit of servers in an account and region
AWS Transfer family, the FTPS/FTP server solution now supports assigning a client-side accessible IP address for clients accessing behind a firewall or NAT router to connect. The limit of servers per region/account is also raised from 10 to 50.
AWS releases Windows Server 2019 bundles with Office 2019 for Workspaces
AWS has released new bundles with the windows desktop experience of windows server 2019 with a 64-bit installation of Office 2019 for Amazon Workspaces.
Amazon CodeGuru adds new visualisation capabilities
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/08/codeguru-extends-capability-application-profile/
Amazon CodeGuru has added new visualisations to the CodeGuru Profiler for comparing different profilings of your code over time ranges to help identify potential performance improvements.
AWS Systems Manager adds Report Generation for Managed Instances
AWS Systems Manager adds new reporting functionality for Managed Instances in fleets, allowing you to view and download alerts, statuses and details of your managed instances for local viewing and analysis.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk adds capacity rebalancing
AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports capacity rebalancing, which is the ability to replace spot instances automatically when they are about to be interrupted by scaling the autoscaling group to replace it with a new instance.
Amazon RDS adds automatic minor version upgrading to SQL Server for RDS
Amazon RDS has added auto minor version upgrade support to managed SQL Server instances in RDS allowing for the auto-patching of RDS instances running SQL Server, similar to MySQL and Postgres.
Amazon EC2 inf1 instances now support TensorFlow 2
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/08/amazon-ec2-inf1-instances-supports-tensorflow-2/
Amazon has launched support on their EC2 inference instances for the Tensorflow 2 framework.
AWS Glue Databrew Lake Formation now supports recipe jobs for creating AWS Glue Data Catalog S3 tables
AWS Glue DataBrew now supports writing prepared data from recipes into AWS Lake Formation based S3 tables using Glue DataCatalog, allowing for faster and easier creation of new Lake Formation tables with existing access permissions and security.
Amazon Redshift cross-account data sharing now Generally Available
Amazon Redshift has released the cross-account data sharing from preview into general availability.
AWS Glue Databrew supports new numerical format transformations
AWS Glue Databrew has launched additional support for numerical transformations such as setting decimal precision, changing thousands separators and abbreviation of large values, using the Glue Databrew visual data preparation tool.
