Rounding out the month we have more developments in AWS.
Tag Newly-Created EC2 Instances and EBS Volumes
AWS has announced four new features for tagging EC2 Instances and EBS volumes:
- Tag on creation – you may now specify tags as you create a resource, whether EC2 instances or EBS volumes. You may even set separate tags for every volume and instance.
- Enforce tag usage – By creating IAM usage policies you can enforce the use of certain tags on EC2 and EBS resources.
- Resource Level permissions – CreateTags, DeleteTags, RunInstances, and CreateVolume now support resource-level permissions. This way, users have more control over tag keys and values as well as users and groups that can tag on creation.
- Enforced Volume Encryption – Given that RunInstances and CreateVolume now have resource-level permissions, you may now create IAM policies dictating the use of encryption for new EBS boot or data volumes.
Amazon Redshift Data Compression Up 400%
AWS has just upgraded Amazon Redshift with four new improvements. Based on these improvements, you may reduce the data sets by up to four times.
- Zstandard Compression Algorithm – affords high compression ratio, reducing disk space by 65%. Zstandard can also be applied to many data types: SMALLINT, INTEGER, BIGINT, DECIMAL, REAL, DOUBLE PRECISION, BOOLEAN, CHAR, VARCHAR, DATE, TIMESTAMP and TIMESTAMPTZ.
- Improved Automation of Compression – Better automation of compression by commands such as CREATE TABLE AS, CREATE TABLE or ALTER TABLE ADD COLUMN. Amazon Redshift automatically selects a default compression for the columns, done only when it is estimated to reduce disk space without lowering performance. This will provide up to 40% reduction in disk space.
- Enhanced Analyze Compression Command – this can better determine opportunities to compress data and drive performance.
- Optimized internal on-disk data structure – provides an average of 7% reduction in disk space usage.
AWS Gives Host-based Routing Support for Load Balancers
AWS had previously introduced Application Load Balancers, which can be used to route HTTP and HTTPS traffic depending on the path element of the request’s URL. Now, AWS has expanded this feature by allowing you to route incoming traffic based on the domain name in the host header.
This means that you can send requests to api.standard.com to one group and requests to mobile.standard.com to another distinct group.
With this new feature, customers no longer have to launch fleets of proxy servers for the sole purpose of routing based on hosts. This simplifies your architecture and lowering your operating costs. Now that you have the ability to direct the route by host and path, you may also build and scale applications made up of several microservices running within any AWS EC2 container service containers.
Amazon Athena Now Queries Encrypted Data
Amazon Athena, AWS’s newest service launched in November 2016, is a serverless query service that lets you access structured and unstructured data sets in S3 using SQL.
Amazon Athena’s Query Editor allows you to write Hive-compliant DDL query. You may do the same using SQL clients by downloading the Athena JDBC driver. The JDBC driver also allows you to run queries from the BI tools you prefer.
As an enhancement to Amazon Athena, you may now use the service to query encrypted data. It also allows you to encrypt the data that you queried. This way, Athena can support customers who require encryption for their S3 data.
Also included in the update are a few more enhancements: a new JDBC driver version with new encryption features, the ability to add, replace, and change columns using ALTER TABLE, and support for querying LZO-compressed data.
You may read more about this feature in the user guide.
AWS continues to grow and its clients along with it. our cloud experts here in PolarSeven.
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