DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS… oh wait, wrong cloud. Regardless of who said those words, this week has been a busy one for our friends over at Amazon Web Services with a host of new products and features that are sure to delight the developers among us. 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. This is 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. It’s 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:
- AWS X-Ray SDK for .NET Core is Now Generally Available
- Amazon SNS Message Filtering Adds Support for Multiple String Values in Blacklist Matching
- Develop and Test AWS Step Functions Workflows Locally
- Amazon DynamoDB Local Adds Support for Transactional APIs, On-Demand Capacity Mode, and 20 GSIs
- Amazon Corretto is Now Generally Available
AWS X-Ray SDK for .NET Core is Now Generally Available
For those who aren’t aware or who haven’t had the chance to leverage it yet, AWS X-Ray is an analysis and debugging tool that helps developers analyse and debug production, distributed applications, such as those built using a microservices architecture. At its core, it helps developers and support staff maintain a level of visibility of individual requests as they traverse multiple interconnected micro services resulting in quicker analysis and faster issue resolution. This week release brings X-Ray integration to .NET Core functions and services. As stated in the announcement article (available here) ” You can use AWS X-Ray to view a map of your applications and its services in development and in production. Your applications can be simple three-tier applications to complex micro services consisting of thousands of services such as built using AWS Lambda.
You can get the AWS X-Ray SDK for .NET Core from the X-Ray GitHub repository
Amazon SNS Message Filtering Adds Support for Multiple String Values in Blacklist Matching
Next on the list is the addition of support for multiple string values in blacklist matching within Amazon Simple Notification Service. Amazon SNS message filtering allows you to leverage AWS SNS to perform messaging filtering across your pub/sub solution without having to handle the logic within your applications infrastructure, reducing operational complexity and cost. To date, you’ve been able to match messages based on string white and black listing as well as string prefix and numerical matching. This new addition adds the ability to use multiple string values within your blacklisting operators further increasing the flexibility of the SNS message filtering service. This new addition should allow more customers to transition their existing EC2 or Lambda hosted filtering logic into AWS SNS, further reducing their operational footprint. Further information on the new feature release can be found here and detailed instruction on getting started with messaging filtering is available within the SNS developer guide.
Develop and Test AWS Step Functions Workflows Locally
One of the issues with migrating logic and application features into AWS native services is that you are then required to conduct all of your development and testing activities while connected to the cloud. Well, with the announcement made earlier this week AWS Step functions can now be developed and tested on your local development machine through the use of the new AWS Step Functions local. Quoting from the official feature announcement (available here) “AWS Step Functions Local is a downloadable version of Step Functions that lets you develop and test applications using a version of Step Functions running in your own development environment. Using the service locally rather than over the Internet can be faster in some situations, save on Step Functions state transitions, and allow you to easily enforce sandbox restrictions.” This means that I can finally work on my step functions when I’m flying around the country. It’s available now for anybody to get started with in both JAR and Docker versions ready for download. I hope to have an article out shortly with my first impressions of the tool set.
Amazon DynamoDB Local Adds Support for Transactional APIs, On-Demand Capacity Mode, and 20 GSIs
But that’s not all for development of cloud resources on a local machine…. Not at all. AWS have also announced and update to DynamoDB Local with the addition of several new features including:
- Transactional API’s
- On-Demand Capacity Mode
- As many as 20 Global Secondary Indexes per table.
DynamoDB Local has been around for a while now and has been a part of my development toolkit for almost as long. With the addition of these new features, I can now test and validate additional aspects of my DynamoDB tables without having to interrupt my workflow and test it in a cloud environment. This includes simulating On-Demand behaviours and GSI focused operations. You can be sure I’m going to be giving this a good run through in the coming weeks and will post an update with my experience. For those who want to get started for themselves, the link is available on the Setting up DynamoDB Local page.
Amazon Corretto is Now Generally Available
And finally, for this week’s roundup, is yet another developer update with the announcement that AWS Corretto has reached General Availability after being in preview since its original announcement back in November of last year. In case you didn’t hear the original announcement, Amazon Corretto is a no-cost, multiplatform, production-ready distribution of the Open Java Development Kit (OpenJDK). As stated in the official announcement (available here), there are far to many updates to be listed in a single article sufficed to say that it’s been updated to OpenJDK version 8u202 and that a more comprehensive list of platforms is now supported, including Amazon Linux 2 and an official Docker image. AWS also note that they are currently working on Corretto 11 corresponding to OpenJDK 11 and will release it in time for testing before April of this year.
And that’s it for the AWS update for Friday the 8th of February 2019. Please keep an eye out for our weekly updates on the happenings within the AWS eco-system and for the continuation of my upcoming blog. Further articles will include my expereinces testing out the new updates to DynamoDB Local and Step Functions Local.