In my last article (available here), I walked through a number of announcements that AWS made over the first couple of weeks in November. Continuing on from there this article covers the announcements from the second half of the month. This will hopefully set us up to tackle the wave of announcements that will come out during Re: Invent.
When we look at the announcements over the second half of November we can see a couple of recurring themes:
Developer Features
There where a number of new features that clearly make life easier for the developer community. The first set of announcements focused on support for new programing language versions. In recent weeks Lambda alone has received support for:
- Node.JS version 12 (Announcement article available here)
- Python 3.8 (Announcement article available here)
- Java 11 (Announcement article available here)
In addition, the Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) is now generally available in Java and C# in addition to TypeScript and Python (Article here). Rounding out the cool new things for developers was the release of a new chime SDK. This SDK makes it easy for developers to add Chime style functionality to their applications. while it’s unfortunately not available in Sydney, sample code is available here.
Infrastructure Management
The second big trend over November was improving deployment, management and monitoring capability. CloudFormation got a number of big updates including:
- Drift Detection Support in StackSets (Announcement article available here)
- Third-Party Resource Support (Announcement article available here)
- Improvements for GameLift (Announcement article available here)
- AWS Secrets Manager rotation for Redshift and DocumentDB (Announcement article available here)
Other feature releases that assist in managing your cloud environment include:
Amazon GuardDuty Supports Exporting Findings to an Amazon S3 Bucket
Amazon GuardDuty now supports exporting its findings to Amazon S3. You can aggregate your findings from across regions and member accounts into a single S3 bucket. The S3 bucket used can be in the same account in which GuardDuty is enabled, or in a different AWS account.
FireLens, a log router for Amazon ECS and AWS Fargate
Firelens is a container log router for ECS and Fargate that allow customers to leverage a range of log analytics and storage services. This saves customers having to implement workarounds if they wish to use solutions such as S3 storage. A sample workflow is available here, and the announcement article can be found here.
Use IAM to share your AWS resources with groups of AWS accounts in AWS Organizations
This one is really cool. You can now reference AWS Organization OU’s (Organizational Units) within IAM policies. This is done by using a new condition key called “aws:PrincipalOrgPaths” in your IAM policy. From there you can allow or deny access based on a principal’s membership within an OU.
Announcing Amazon CloudWatch ServiceLens
Amazon CloudWatch ServiceLens is a new feature that enables you to visualize and analyze the health, performance, and availability of your applications in a single place. CloudWatch ServiceLens ties together CloudWatch metrics and logs, as well as traces from AWS X-Ray to give you a complete view of your applications and their dependencies. This enables you to quickly pinpoint performance bottlenecks, isolate root causes of application issues, and determine users impacted.
New Services and Region Availability
Amazon Connect Now Supports Inbound and Outbound Audio with Customer Voice Stream
Amazon Connect Customer Voice Stream enables you to stream all audio to and from your end-customer in real-time. Now in addition to the audio coming from the customer, a second stream includes the audio the customer hears, which might include agent speech or audio played as prompt in a contact flow or from an Amazon Lex bot. When media streaming is enabled, audio is sent to an Amazon Kinesis Video Stream, third parties can access it to do things like real-time text transcription and sentiment analysis that would immediately alert if abusive speech is detected during a phone call. It is available now in any region that Amazon Connect is present.
QLDB comes to Sydney
This one is simple. Amazon QLDB (Amazon Quantum Ledger Database) is now available in the Sydney Region. For those who may not have head about it. Amazon QLDB is a fully managed ledger database that provides a transparent, immutable, and cryptographically verifiable transaction log owned by a central trusted authority. This announcement (available here) also announces it’s availability in Frankfurt, Singapore and Seoul.
Application Load Balancer simplifies deployments with support for weighted target groups
Application Load balancers now support weighted Target group routing. This is a really powerful feature as it enables things such as blue-green, canary and hybrid deployments. It even enables zero-downtime migrations between on-premises and cloud resources. We will be publishing a “How-To” in the coming days on how this can be achieved.
Summary
And that’s it for our review of the November Announcements from AWS. Our next series of articles will be covering the announcements and releases coming from AWS Re:Invent 2019 in Las Vegas. As always if you’d like to comment or contact us please find our details at www.kloud.com.au