AWS presents updates to existing services as well as new kinds of services this month of August.
IAAS
Most have heard of AWS’s import/export system Amazon Snowball, which allows 1 Petabyte of data per week from your on-site datacenter to the AWS cloud. Now, AWS is even better with the introduction of a Job Management API and an S3 Adaptor.
The new AWS Snowball Job Management API allows Snowball to integrate with the user’s backup or data transfer system. Meanwhile, the S3 Adapter allows you to access AWS Snowball as if it were an end point in your own data center. This makes it a handy tool for any S3-centric applications you may have.
AWS has also introduced Transit VPC. A networking construct, you can use this to link several VPCs together to a single VPC, even though they are in different locations or different accounts.
This makes network management easier and lowers the number of connections you need to make. Being virtual, it also does not require physical infrastructure. This is useful for building a private network spanning at least two AWS regions. Or, you can have several VPCs sharing the same data centers, clouds, and networks. Finally, you can have VPCs and AWS resources inside of them reside in multiple accounts.
Since it may not be practical to use an agent for Application Discovery, AWS has released an optional agentless discovery. If you have virtual machines running through VMware, you may use option to gather data on your applications without having to install an agent on each VM. Instead, you will attach an AWS appliance into your vCenter and it will discover the VMs for you.
SAAS
AWS has improved its Kinesis service by creating Amazon Kinesis Analytics. This feature lets you run continuous SQL queries on your data as it arrives. This way you can focus on analyzing data instead of worrying about the hardware and software to do so.
Amazon ECS is AWS’s own container service that can support Docker containers and lets you run apps on clusters of EC2 instances. To make this service even better, AWS has introduced three new features:
First, you now have application load balancing, which lets you apply high-performance load balancing using on content-based routing rules you define.
Second, you may assign an IAM role to an ECS task rather than an EC2 container instance. This way, you can have one IAM role working on one task and another role working on a different task, all in the same instance.
Third, you can now auto-scale your ECS service; you can scale up during times of high demand and scale down when demand drops.
AWS has announce that it is lowering the price for Amazon EBS by 47%. At the same time, AWS has raised provisioned IOPS per GB of storage. Provisioned IOPS lets you dictate the performance you want from your EBS volume. The bigger the volume, the more PIOPS you can use, up to 20,000 PIOPS.
AWS introduced greater flexibility for AWS IoT with just-in-time registration for device certificates. This eliminates the need to create a database to keep track of certificates and their matching devices. Instead you register the device with a certificate during their initial communication.
AWS has also introduced user pools to Amazon Cognito. User pools allow you to provide user sign-up and sign-in to mobile and web applications. You can manage user pools by choosing which fields each account should contain, such as name, address, contact number, and so on.
Amazon RDS now also supports SQL native backup/restore, including objects such as tables, indexes, stored procedures, and triggers. You can store these native backups in Amazon S3.
EC2 Run Command has been designed to notify you on the status of your command or a code block within command changes. You can then receive the reports through CloudWatch Events or even through Amazon SNS. As such you can create a run command that gathers metrics on your instances and save the data on S3. Your notification system then scans the results and notifies you if something is wrong.
AWS has announced that it is now supporting IPV6 for Amazon S3. Given that Amazon S3 is moving to a 128-bit per IP address, this means we will virtually never run out of IP addresses. 128-bit IP also means more flexibility and greater security.
You can now save on WorkSpaces by selecting to be charged by the hour. This works really well if you use the service sporadically, when travelling or working part-time. What’s more, all new WorkSpaces start with a root volume of free 80 Gb. This means more space for your applications and files. Admins may rebuild existing WorkSpaces to get this added feature.
Stay tuned for more updates from AWS next month !
The post Cloud Month in Review — August 2016 appeared first on PolarSeven Cloud Consulting.