Well, it’s Friday, March 1st, 2 months into 2019 which means Its time again for my weekly update on all things AWS. The last couple of weeks have been a little quiet when it comes to Amazon Web Services product announcements, but there are still a few interesting things to cover off this week. Numerous announcements have been made in the Database space as well as an update to Amazon Worklink and Amazon FXs for windows. It’s 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 takeaways from this week are:
- Amazon RDS for Oracle Now Supports Amazon S3 Integration
- Amazon Aurora Serverless Publishes Logs to Amazon CloudWatch
- Amazon Athena Now Supports Resource Tagging
- Amazon WorkLink now works with Android phones
- Amazon FSx for Windows File Server Now Supports On-Premises Access to File Systems and Supports Access Across AWS VPCs, Accounts, and Regions
Amazon RDS for Oracle Now Supports Amazon S3 Integration
First off in this week’s rundown is the announcement coming out of the Amazon RDS team the Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports Amazon S3 Integration. This is going to be a really handy feature for those people running Oracle workloads on AWS as it allows for the ingress and egress of data between S3 and your RDS instance. Quoting from the official feature announcement (available here) “With Amazon S3 Integration, you can now use the RDS Oracle DB instance to transfer files to or from Amazon S3 using new RDS Oracle procedures.” This new capability allows for organizations to rethink their current backup and restoration strategies. RMAN or Oracle Data Pump exports can now be stored in other regions in either S3 or S3 glacier. The AWS user guide on configuring the new S3 integration feature can be found here
Amazon Aurora Serverless Publishes Logs to Amazon CloudWatch
And while we’re on the topic of new features coming to database workloads, the Aurora Serverless team announced on Monday that Amazon Aurora Servers can now publish logs to Amazon CloudWatch. Anybody who’s ever spent any time with me will know that I’m a huge advocate for Serverless architecture. So, it should come as no surprise that Aurora Serverless is my go-to relational database solution.
For those who are not aware, Aurora Serverless is a Relational Database solution that allows you to pay for database storage, plus the database capacity and I/O your database consumes only while it is active. Capacity is measured in Aurora Capacity Unit’s (ACU’s) which equates to approximately 2GB of memory with corresponding CPU and networking. At the time of writing, an Aurora Capacity unit is $0.10 per ACU hour when running in the Sydney region.
With this announcement, users gain the ability to configure Amazon Aurora Serverless to publish general logs, slow query logs, audit logs and error logs to Amazon CloudWatch Logs. This means that we can now configure event-based triggers for notification and operational activities. Watch out for a future blog article where I take a look at configuring events in CloudWatch to alert on unwanted changes. For those who want to get starting with publishing their own logs to CloudWatch, you can take a look at the product announcement here or the Aurora Serverless Documentation here.
Amazon Athena Now Supports Resource Tagging
Moving from Databases to Analytics, there was another announcement on Monday (Monday was a good day for new features) that Amazon Athena now supports resource tagging. Taken from the official announcement (available here) “Athena Workgroup is a new resource type that can be used to separate query execution and query history between Users, Teams, or Applications running under the same AWS account. With the latest release, you can assign metadata to Athena Workgroups in the form of tags”. A solid tagging taxonomy is one of the key cornerstones in accurately and efficiently monitoring, reporting on and managing resources within your AWS environment. I recommend taking a look at AWS’s tagging strategies answers page here for those wanting to review or improve their tagging policies.
Amazon WorkLink now works with Android phones
A few weeks ago, AWS released a new product call Amazon Worklink. It’s a fully managed service that lets you provide your employees with secure, easy access to your internal corporate websites and web apps using their mobile phones. As a part of the initial release, they provided support for Apple iOS devices with an app available on the iOS App Store. This week marks the release and support for the Android mobile platform with the application now available on the Google Play Store. Now both leading mobile platforms are supported, Worklink is a useful solution for providing users secure access to internal resources.
Amazon FSx for Windows File Server Now Supports On-Premises Access to File Systems and Supports Access Across AWS VPCs, Accounts, and Regions
And finally, for this week’s update is that Amazon FSx for Windows File Server now supports On-Premises access to File Systems and supports access across AWS VPCs, Accounts, and Regions. This addition to the Amazon FSx for Windows File Server product opens up the possible use cases. Quoting from the official announcement (available here) “With on-premises access, you can easily migrate your on-premises data sets to Amazon FSx. In addition, you can use it for hosting user shares accessible by on-premises end-users and use Amazon FSx for backup and disaster recovery solutions. With inter-VPC, inter-account, and inter-Region access, you can share your file data sets across multiple applications, internal organizations, or environments spanning multiple VPCs, accounts, or Regions.” For a more detailed look at Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, please take a look at a recent blog article by our own Jason Wood available here.
And that’s it for the AWS update for Friday the 1st of March 2019. Please keep an eye out for our weekly updates on the happenings within the AWS eco-system. We post updates every Friday as well as detailed tutorials and deep dives on products throughout the week. If there something you’d like to see on the Kloud Blog, please feel free to drop a comment below.