Welcome to this week’s Weekly News Roundup from the world of AWS and Technology. Some great new releases and updates this week, such as the retirement of EC2-Classic, Postman adding WSDL Support, S3 Access Points which will allows for greater flexibility in access policies for S3 and Amplify now supporting Sign-in with Apple.
AWS announces retirement of EC2-Classic
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/ec2-classic-is-retiring-heres-how-to-prepare/
AWS has announced that the older EC2-Classic method of setting up instances is retiring next year, with accounts with no EC2-Classic active resources having the feature turned off this October.
Postman announces support for WSDL
https://blog.postman.com/postman-now-supports-wsdl/
Postman, the popular API tool, now supports using WSDL (Web Services Description Language) files as an API Specification Format for API development.
AWS announces method for choosing which instance is terminated during scale-in
AWS has announced AutoScaling Groups now supports running a custom Lambda function to determine which instance should be terminated during scale-in, in addition to the standard ways such as OldestInstance. This gives customers more control over which instance is removed when scaling down the number of instances.
AWS announces new SageMaker Jumpstart models for Computer Vision
AWS has announced new Jumpstart models for Computer Vision workflows, including feature extraction, image identification and comparison, based on popular Models, with pre-trained models.
AWS announces s3 access point alias names to simplify s3 bucket references
AWS has announced S3 Access Points, allowing for an alias to be set up to allow different levels of access to S3 buckets based on policies, while still accessing the same bucket, reducing the need for large single access policy documents. So a single bucket can be set up, then if you have say 10 access patterns for different teams and use cases, each gets their own Access Point, with relevant policy limiting access, so you can tailor access to each team or use case.
AWS App2Container now supports complex multi-tier windows applications
AWS has released support in App2Container for more complex windows based applications, allowing for Multi-Tier applications to be transformed into containerised applications.
AWS announces support for third-party tool integration with SageMaker Pipelines
AWS has announced support for GitHub and Bitbucket integrations allowing SageMaker Pipelines to be triggered from the popular Git Hosting tools, as well as Jenkins. Models and Data can now be automatically processed and deployed based on a trigger from these tools. Previously CodeCommit was the main way for this trigger to happen. Now you can kick off a training, validation and deployment pipeline when a new version of the Model Code is checked in to GitHub for example.
AWS announces new Denver Local Zone
AWS has launched a new Local Zone in the Denver region. With this launch, AWS Local Zones are now generally available in Boston, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, and Philadelphia. With an additional 9 Local Zones launching in 2021 in Atlanta, Chicago, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, New York, Phoenix, Portland, and Seattle.
AWS launches new Application Recovery Controller for Route53
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-route-53-application-recovery-controller/
AWS has launched a new feature for Route53 to perform application recovery to a backup region in case of application issues detected with your main region.
Amazon Lex now supports UK Post Codes as a built-in slot type
Amazon Lex now supports adding a UK Post Code type to the slots for its Lex ChatBot. This allows users to accept UK Post Codes with validation and a standardised format.
AWS announces CDK Pipelines are now in General Availability
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/07/announcing-cdk-pipelines-ga-ci-cd-cdk-apps/
AWS has announced that the CDK Pipelines feature allowing for automatic CI/CD pipelines created from CDK to be created is now in General Availability after maturing out of Preview.
AWS Amplify now supports Sign-in with Apple
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/07/aws-amplify-now-supports-sign-in-with-apple/
AWS Amplify, the mobile and web app framework, now supports Sign-In with Apple, the service launched by Apple in IOS 13, allowing for Apple IDs to be used as a social sign-in mechanism, with enhanced privacy settings, such as not sharing email addresses with the Application.
Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager now supports CloudWatch Metrics
Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager now supports CloudWatch metrics for tracking Lifecycle events. As AWS says “You can use these metrics to see exactly how many Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) Snapshots and EBS-backed Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) are created, copied, shared and deleted each time a lifecycle policy is run. You can also create alarms to be triggered when resources are not created, copied or deleted by the policy, allowing you to take immediate action to diagnose and fix potential policy issues.”
Amazon Neptune Machine Learning edge predictions and automation are now generally available
Amazon Neptune ML is now Generally Available, allowing for Machine Learning prediction and other insights based on the data available in Amazon Neptune’s Graph Database
Amazon CloudWatch launches new Trimmed Mean Statistics
Amazon CloudWatch now supports new Trimmed Mean metrics that discard outliers of the Data to provide a more actionable mean statistic, without the noise of extreme outliers.
Amazon Neptune now supports OpenCypher Query Language
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/07/amazon-neptune-supports-opencypher/
Amazon Neptune now supports the popular open-source Graph Query Language OpenCypher, adding to the existing Query Language support for Gremlin, and W3C SPARQL.
AWS announces end of support for Internet Explorer 11 in the console
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/heads-up-aws-support-for-internet-explorer-11-is-ending/
AWS has announced their support for Internet Explorer 11 in the AWS Console is ending.
AWS Rekognition Custom Label Support and Examples helps customers learn how to set up custom labelling
AWS Rekognition has launched new quick start and tutorials on Custom Labelling, helping customers get started on using Custom Labelling to identify objects and scenes in Rekognition.
