And here we are, in February of 2019 already… 1/12 of the year has already been and gone. This week it’s been a little quiet in the world of Amazon Web Services, but there’s still been several announcements and releases this week that will help those building and developing in the World of AWS. This article continues the weekly series we are 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. As always, 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. 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 ECS and Amazon ECR now have support for AWS PrivateLink
- Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL Now Supports T3 Instance Types
- AWS CodeBuild Now Supports Accessing Images from Private Docker Registry
AWS PrivateLink support in ECS and ECR
Kicking this off for this week is the announcement last Friday that Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Container Repository (ECR) now have support for AWS PrivateLink. For those who are not aware, “AWS PrivateLink is a networking technology designed to enable access to AWS services in a highly available and scalable manner, while keeping all the network traffic within the AWS network. When you create AWS PrivateLink endpoints for ECR and ECS, these service endpoints appear as elastic network interfaces with a private IP address in your VPC.”
Prior to this announcement, if you had EC2 instances that required access to an ECR repository or the ECS control plane, they needed to communicate with them across the public internet. While this isn’t a problem for most people, it does mean that some traffic previously had to leave your trusted network to gain access to some of your AWS services. With the addition of AWS PrivateLink support, your resources can now access these services via your PrivateLink resulting in a simplified networking solution. This capability will be particularly helpful for those organisations running outbound white listing on your internet connectivity. This new feature is available now in all ECS and ECR region. It’s important to note that AWS PrivateLink support in AWS Fargate is coming soon. If you’d like to know more about how to setup your AWS PrivateLink with ECS and/or ECR resources, you can visit the AWS Blog article available here.
Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL Now Supports T3 Instance Types
Next cab off the rank for this week is another announcement from last Friday when AWS announced that PostgreSQL now support running on T3 Instances. If your currently running PostgreSQL version 9.6.9 (or higher) or 10.4 (or higher) you can transition to the new instance type via the AWS Management Console. For those who might not be aware, the T3 instances where released last year and are the next generation of the burstable instance types. If you haven’t already taken a look or trailed at the T3 series, I recommend that you do as we have typically seen savings when compared to the T2 series.
The addition of the T3 support to Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL is available now in all regions other than US-GovCloud, Mumbai and Osaka. It’s also important to note that (quoting from the AWS RDS Pricing Page) “Amazon RDS T3 DB instances run in Unlimited mode, which means that you will be charged if your average CPU utilisation over a rolling 24-hour period exceeds the baseline of the instance. CPU Credits are charged at $0.075 per vCPU-Hour. The CPU Credit pricing is the same for all T3 instance sizes across all regions and is not covered by Reserved Instances.”
AWS CodeBuild Now Supports Accessing Images from Private Docker Registry
Previously when using AWS CodeBuild, you where only able to access Docker images from public DockerHub repositories or those stored in Amazon Elastic Container Repository (ECR). With this announcement, you can now leverage any private Docker repository either within your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) or on the public internet (note that if you want to access a repository within a VPC, you will need to configure the VPC setting within your CloudBuild Project).
This functionality leverages AWS Secrets Manager, where you can store the required credentials for accessing your private repository. This functionality is available in all CodeBuild region today. For instructions on how to get your CodeBuild project working with your private repository, visit the AWS CodeBuild documentation available here.
And that’s it for the AWS update for Friday the 1st of February 2019. Please keep an eye out for our weekly updates on the happenings within the AWS Eco-system and for the upcoming article on getting started with AWS WorkLink.