Weekly News Roundup 2nd July 2021

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Welcome to this week’s Weekly News Roundup from the world of AWS and Technology.  Some great new releases and updates this week, including the launch of GitHub copilot, and Appstream launching in the London Region. Also, AWS has provided their writeup of the AWS services used in Prime Day 2021, which provides an interesting look into how Amazon use the AWS product set.

AWS Launches AppStream in London

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/06/amazon-appstream-is-now-available-in-the-aws-europe-london-region/

AWS has added the capability to now deploy AppStream instances in London (eu-west-2) allowing for a fully managed, application virtualisation locally within the UK.

GitHub launches Copilot in Technical Preview

https://copilot.github.com/

GitHub has launched Copilot into Technical Preview, an AI-Powered tool for generating code based on your comments and initial function names. The tool can generate full functions and code sections based on your general comments or on just the name of a function.

AWS acquires Wickr

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-welcomes-wickr-to-the-team/

AWS has acquired Wickr, a security-focused communication company, who provide advances security features across messaging, voice and video calling, file sharing and collaboration.

Read about the Prime Day 2021 AWS Usage

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/prime-day-2021-two-chart-topping-days/

AWS has provided an overview of the usage they experienced on Prime Day 2021 with some eye-opening stats on their usage of AWS services, such as CloudFront serving 290 million HTTP requests a minute, DynamoDB processing 89.2 million requests per second and EBS transferring 614 petabytes of data per day over 11.1 trillion requests per day.

AWS launches 4 new SAM Templates for Machine Learning

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/06/aws-sam-launches-machine-learning-inference-templates-for-aws-lambda/

AWS has launched 4 new SAM Templates for building upon for popular machine learning frameworks, TensorFlow, PyTorch, XGBoost, and Scikit-Learn. The templates generate a fully serverless workflow with an initial model for handwritten digit classification, which can then be customised as required.

Amazon Connect releases API for configuring Quick Connects

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/06/amazon-connect-launches-api-configure-quick-connects-programmatically/

Amazon connect, the contact centre solution now supports an API for creating Quick Connects, to allow for agents to make pre-configured destination transfers for agents

CloudWatch supports 14 new Metric Math functions

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/06/cloudwatch-adds-new-metric-math-functions/

CloudWatch has added an addition 14 Metric Math functions to allow for greater control over alerting on metrics, with some useful new features, including the DAY function, which allows you to have different thresholds for the same metric depending on if it’s a weekday or weekend.

AWS launches new features for inf1 instances for Machine Learning Inference

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/06/amazon-ec2-inf1-instances-new-features-improved-performance-and-lower-prices/

AWS has launched new features and performance and cost improvements for Inferentia instances, which are used for Machine Learning Inference (The process of predicting a result from new input).

Amazon Connect now supports Apple Business Chat

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/06/amazon-connect-chat-now-supports-apple-business-chat-generally-available/

Amazon Connect now supports Apple Business Chat, which allows Apple users to chat with your agents using the Apple Messages app on their phone, providing a native experience for Apple users.

AWS launches new Text Transformations for Web Application Firewall

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/06/aws-waf-adds-15-new-text-transformations/

AWS WAF has launched 15 new text transformations, including UTF8_TO_UNICODE, for ensuring your URLs and Query Parameters are not being interfered with and are within expected values. These can be used with other WAF rules and chained together.

AWS launches support for additional MFX mezzanine intermediate output formats

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/06/support-for-additional-mfx-mezzanine-output-formats-available-with-aws-elemental-mediaconvert/

AWS has launched support for additional output formats on Elemental Mediaconvert for intermediate lightly encoded formats, for improved workflows. The AVC-Intra, VC3, and XAVC mezzanine formats are supported with the MXF container.

AWS launches support for HDR10+ HEVC output formats

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/06/support-for-hdr10plus-for-hevc-outputs-available-with-aws-elemental-mediaconvert/

AWS launches support for HDR10+ HEVC output formats for HDR10+ enabled displays.

AWS launches free text search for nodes in the Session Manager console

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/06/aws-systems-manager-supports-free-text-search-for-node-in-session-manager-console/

Within the Session Manager console, you can now search for instances or other nodes with free text, rather than having to know the specific instance name, or instance ID, making finding the node you want to connect to a lot easier.

AWS now supports SASL/PLAIN authentication for Lambda functions triggered from self-managed Apache Kafka instances

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/06/aws-lambda-now-supports-sasl-plain-authentication-for-functions-triggered-from-self-managed-apache-kafka/

Lambda functions triggered from Apache Kafka can now use the SASL/PLAIN authentication method, a simple username/password authentication method typically used with TLS instead of the SASL/SCRAM method for authentication.

AWS releases new Tag Tamer solution for improving your Tags across all of your resources

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/06/new-aws-solutions-implementation-tag-tamer/

AWS has released a new solution for managing Tags across your entire account. When you start to have a lot of different resources, supported by different teams and processes, keeping your Tagging up to date and consistent, to ensure you keep the benefits of tagging, such as cost tracking and decommissioning can be a challenge. AWS’s new solution aims to make this process simpler.

AWS releases new framework-specific Deep Learning AMIs

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/06/aws-introduces-framework-specific-deep-learning-amis-backwards-compatible-images/

AWS has released some new specific Deep Learning AMIs for frameworks such as PyTorch 1.9.0 and TensorFlow 2.5.0. These AMIs are a single version of the frameworks, ensuring compatibility with your deep learning code, without unexpected major or minor version upgrades.

AWS releases Bottlerocket OS AMI to General Availability

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/06/the-bottlerocket-ami-for-amazon-ecs-is-now-generally-available/

AWS has released an AMI of their Bottlerocket OS, designed for running containers with minimal underlying Operating System. Based on Linux, the new OS is hardened, immutable and lightweight, allowing for quicker development and more secure deployment.

AWS Glue Databrew adds 14 new advanced data types for data preparation

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/06/aws-glue-databrew-adds-for-support-14-new-advanced-data-types-for-data-preparation/

AWS Glue Databrew has added 14 new advanced data types that can recognise specific types of data such as Email, Credit Card Number, Gender, IP Address and more, allowing easier identification of data. Glue Databrew will also mark up columns that contain Personally Identifiable Information (PII) so you can process those columns further (such as masking the Credit Card field) to protect customer data.

AWS Amplify now has full CI/CD capabilities

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/07/aws-amplify-launches-new-full-stack-ci-cd-capabilities/

AWS has updated Amplify to have full stack CI/CD capabilities, further enhancing the solution to provide greater DevOps capabilities.

AWS Amplify now supports Lambda Environment Variables and Secrets

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/07/aws-amplify-cli-adds-support-for-storing-environment-variables-and-secrets-accessed-by-aws-lambda-functions/

AWS has updated Amplify to be able to access environment variables and secrets in Lambda to allow for the separation of variables and business logic by storing values such as API Keys in a secure manner.