Welcome to this week’s Weekly News Roundup from the world of AWS and Technology. Some great new releases and updates this week, including VSCode on the web, S3 events can now trigger a Glue Crawler update, .Net Porting Assistant can now port MVC, WCF and OWIN apps, Workspaces API can now create images, CloudFront is now an option in the AWS Pricing Calculator and more.
VS Code.dev launches in-browser code editor
https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2021/10/20/vscode-dev
Visual studio launches a lightweight in-browser version of VS to allow for local development no matter of developers location or low tier computing specifications. Projects can be accessed directly from the local machine allowing cloud-based storage to be utilised to its full advantage.
AWS Launches Distributed Load Testing v2.0
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/10/distributed-load-testing-aws-v2-0-0/
AWS has released a new version of their reference architecture and Distributed Load Testing solution to load test applications at scale. Version 2 supports historic data to be viewed from previous test runs including testing configuration, data and results. Existing VPCs can now be utilised to load test from within the network hosting the application, and pull container images directly from ECR.
AWS Glue Crawlers now supports S3 Event Notifications
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/10/aws-glue-crawlers-amazon-s3-notifications/
AWS Glue Crawlers allows for schemas to be discovered and defined by scanning data across a data set, and populating the data directly into Glue Catalog. Up until now, Glue scans for data across either an entire S3 bucket to identify new files which have been identified since the last periodic scan, and update the Catalog to match. Now, AWS Glue is able to update the Data Catalog by utilising S3 Events to dynamically receive notifications on new, altered and deleted data within the S3 bucket.
AWS Porting Assistant for .net adds support for WCF, OWIN, and System.Web.Mvc application assessment and porting
AWS Porting Assistant for .NET adds support for applications developed with System.Web.Mnc. WFC and OWIN for porting those applications over to be hosted on AWS.
FreeRTOS adds support for symmetric multiprocessing
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/10/freertos-symmetric-multiprocessing/
FreeRTOS, the Real-time operating system for microcontrollers adds support in the kernel for Symmetric Multiprocessing, allowing for tasks to be scheduled across multiple identical processor cores.
Amazon KeySpaces announces support for TTL Data Expiration
Amazon Key Spaces (Apache for Cassandra), is a fully managed, highly available and scalable Apache Cassandra database. AWS has implemented functionality to allow data expiration/retention to be automatically removed based on Time to Live (TTL) settings. TTL settings can be specified based on insert and update commands, or at the default value at the table level.
Amazon Workspaces API Receives Image Creation Capabilities
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/10/amazon-workspaces-api-updated-images-aws-drivers/
Amazon Workspaces is a desktop virtualisation service that allows for windows machines to be accessed directly through the browser. Previously, image management including updating the image was a manual step required to roll out patched images to the Workspace environment. Now, engineers can automate this functionality by utilising the Workspaces Image Creation API.
PostgreSQL 14 RC 1 Released to RDS Database Preview Environment
PostgreSQL Version 14, RC 1 has been released to Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment (DPE). DPE allows for new versions of PostgreSQL to be beta-tested before full release to production environments, this environment is for development and testing only.
AWS Data Exchange for RedShift Released
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-data-exchange-for-amazon-redshift/
AWS Data Exchange simplifies finding, subscribing and using third party data in the cloud. Using the Data Exchange API, third party data can be extracted and loaded directly into S3. This data can then be analysed using a wide variety of analytics of machine learning AWS Servies. Now, Exchange data can be loaded into and analysed by Redshift to simplify analytics with SQL Query support.
CloudFront Released to AWS Pricing Calculator
Estimating CloudFront usage and pricing has always lacked functionality from AWS to simplify the process and gather ballpark figures of the associated CloudFront cost. AWS has announced CloudFront is now available within the AWS Pricing Calculator to estimate cost based on the region where data is stored.
AWS Enhanced System Manager Fleet Manager Reporting
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/10/aws-systems-manager-advanced-filtering-instances/
AWS System Manager (SSM) Fleet Manager provides a centralised view of all EC2 instances within an AWS Region, and this new update adds filtering options to allow you to manage different instance types easier and generate reporting based on specific filtering to provide targeted reporting.
Amazon adds security and critical updates to Amazon Corretto
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/10/amazon-corretto-october-updates/
AWS has released quarterly security and critical updates for Amazon Corretto Long-Term Supported (LTS) versions for the OpenJDK compatible release.
AWS Systems Manager OpsCenter adds support for bulk editing OpsItems
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/10/bulk-editing-aws-systems-manager-opscenter/
AWS Systems Manager OpsCenter has added support for the bulk editing of OpsItems allowing you to perform actions against multiple operational work items (OpsItems) at the same time
Amazon Chime SDK adds support for business logic to be run against incoming messages
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/10/amazon-chime-sdk-messaging-channel-flows/
Amazon Chime SDK has been updated to allow the execution of business logic on in-flight messages before they are delivered to members of a messaging channel with channel flows. Using channel flows allows you to remove data before the messages are delivered, allowing for the removal of data such as IDs, Phone Numbers or profanity.
AWS Panorama Appliance launches into General Availability for Computer Vision at the edge
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/computer-vision-at-the-edge-with-aws-panorama/
AWS has launched the Panorama Appliance, allowing for computer vision tasks to be performed on a device where you need it to be physically located. The Appliance is designed to deploy in your network allowing for analysis of images provided by on-premise cameras.
Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics launches support for encryption with KMS Keys
Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics allows you to use Canary scripts to monitor your endpoints and APIs from the outside in with simple scripts that run on a schedule. The data used by these scripts can now be encrypted by using KMS keys
Amazon QuickSight launches improvements to tables and pivot tables
Amazon QuickSight, the data visualisation application has added new enhancements to tables and pivot tables, with enhancements such as design patterns, customisable borders and colours, hyperlinks on table visuals, images within table cells and content alignment and wrapping.
AWS Security Hub adds cross-region support
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/10/aws-security-hub-cross-region-security-posture/
AWS Security Hub has added support for cross-region aggregation of Security findings allowing you to monitor and manage all security findings in one place rather than having to look at each region individually.
AWS Fault Injector now supports Spot Interruption
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/10/aws-fault-injection-simulator-spot-interruptions/
AWS fault Injector now supports simulation of Spot Interruptions, allowing you to see what would happen to your application if a Spot Instance went away while you were using it, allowing you to figure out how to deal with this situation if it ever happened in your production workload
Amazon Chime SDK adds Video Blur
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/10/amazon-chime-sdk-video-blur/
The Amazon Chime SDK has added support for Video Blur, which runs locally on the user’s browser, allowing for the user’s background to be obscured while using the video processing APIs in the Chime SDK
AWS Amplify adds resumable file uploads
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/10/aws-amplify-javascript-file-uploads-storage/
AWS Amplify has added support to their javascript file upload for resumable file uploads to better support uploads when there are interruptions in the network connection
Amazon RDS Proxy now supports MySQL version 8.0
Amazon RDS Proxy, the service for proxying connections to Amazon RDS, reducing the number of open connections required by reusing connections has released support for MySQL version 8.0
