Well, for a lot of people (myself included) we have now finished our first week back at work for 2019 and the teams over at Amazon Web Services are already hard at work releasing new products, services and even a couple of price reductions to help start off the 2019 year. This article forms the first of a weekly series we will be doing this year to help customers with a brief overview of the happenings within the AWS world over the last week to try and help surface some of the more important announcements. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list of all the updates and changes to the AWS eco-system, but simply a summary of changes that might have an impact on the business and trends we at Kloud are seeing within the industry. As always, if you would like to talk to somebody about how you might be able to leverage some of these new technologies and services, please feel free to reach out using the contact link at the top of the page.
The key take away’s from this week are:
- Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB Compatbility)
- Amazon Neptune is now available in Asia Pacific (Sydney)
- AWS Step Functions now support resource tagging
- AWS Fargate Price Reductions
First cab off the rank are product announcements, and the talk of the town this week is the release of Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB Compatibility). The AWS Product page states that “Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) is a fast, scalable, highly available, and fully managed document database service that supports MongoDB workloads.” more details are available here and as always their is a fantastic blog article written by Jeff Barr available on the aws blog https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-documentdb-with-mongodb-compatibility-fast-scalable-and-highly-available/
While on the topic of product announcements, it was also announced that a number of new AWS services and products have recently gained compliance eligibility. While some of these have been around for a while, most of them are recently released or announced products and will be launching with this capability enabling customer to leverage them in complaint environments from day 1. The list of services and their associated compliance eligibility is outlined below:
- Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) [HIPAA, PCI, ISO, SOC 2]
- Amazon FSx [HIPAA, PCI, ISO]
- Amazon Route 53 Resolver [ISO]
- AWS Amplify [HIPAA, ISO]
- AWS DataSync [HIPAA, PCI, ISO]
- AWS Elemental MediaConnect [HIPAA, PCI, ISO]
- AWS Global Accelerator [PCI, ISO]
- AWS License Manager [ISO]
- AWS RoboMaker [HIPAA, PCI, ISO]
- AWS Transfer for SFTP [HIPAA, PCI, ISO]
A little closer to home and on Wednesday it was announced that Amazon Neptune is now available in the Asia Pacific (Sydney) region. For those who don’t remember, Amazon Neptune was announced at AWS Re:Invent 2017 and is a fast, reliable, fully managed graph database service that makes it easy to build and run applications that work with highly connected datasets and supports the popular graph models Property Graph and W3C’s RDF. You can start working with Amazon Neptune today and prices (for an db.r4.large instance) start at $0.42 USD per Hour.
And finally in the realm of product announcements we have that AWS Step Functions now support Resource Tagging. AWS Step Functions is a workflow automation service that lets you quickly connect and coordinate multiple AWS services and applications. By using tags with Step Functions, you can define and associate labels with your Step Functions state machines, which make it easier to manage, search for, and filter resources. Further information can be found in the Step Functions Developer guide here
Next in line are Price reductions and the news in this space is super exciting with AWS Fargate getting price reductions of up to 50%. Quoting from the AWS Compute Blog article written by Nathan Peck, “Effective January 7th, 2019 Fargate pricing per vCPU per second is being reduced by 20%, and pricing per GB of memory per second is being reduced by 65%. Depending on the ratio of CPU to memory that you’re allocating for your containers, you could see an overall price reduction of anywhere from 35% to 50%.” More information is available here https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/aws-fargate-price-reduction-up-to-50/ and the below table show how much you can expect to save on a variety of Fargate instance sizes:
| vCPU | GB Memory | Effective Price Cut |
| 0.25 | 0.5 | -35.00% |
| 0.25 | 2 | -50.00% |
| 0.5 | 1 | -35.00% |
| 0.5 | 4 | -50.00% |
| 1 | 2 | -35.00% |
| 1 | 8 | -50.00% |
| 2 | 4 | -35.00% |
| 2 | 12 | -47.00% |
| 2 | 16 | -50.00% |
| 4 | 8 | -35.00% |
| 4 | 16 | -42.50% |
| 4 | 30 | -49.30% |
And that’s it for the update for the first week back of 2019. Please keep an eye out for our weekly updates on the happenings within the AWS eco-system and also for our up-coming blog series on developing and deploying a serverless SPA environments on AWS using Static Site Generators.