AWS TechChat

In this episode of AWS TechChat we cover ‘Monday Night Live’, the first keynote of AWS re:Invent 2019 presented by Peter Desantis - VP of AWS Global Infrastructure and Customer Support, and it's all about infrastructure.

We start the show talking about HPC (High Performance Computing), the pain points around HPC that users faced in the past and how our investments in our network, with 100Gb networking, Nitro and EFA (Elastic Fabric Adapter) have been a game changer.

Formula 1 give us a lesson in CFD (Computation Fluid Dynamics) and how AWS is helping fans to stand on the edge of the seat with the 2021 car which reduces dirty air for the following car ensuring following cars don't take a huge down-force hit.

We talk about Machine Learning, P3dn, G4 and snuck in a tidbit for AWS Inferentia which was released today in the form of the Amazon EC2 Inf1 family.

To close out this episode, we cover AWS global network and introduce 10 new Amazon CloudFront edge locations before finishing on what we are doing on the sustainability front to run our business in the most environmentally friendly way possible.

Speakers:

Shane Baldacchino - Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS

Peter Stanski - Head of Solution Architecture, AWS

Resources:

High Performance Computing https://aws.amazon.com/hpc/

Amazon EC2 C5n Instances https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2018/11/introducing-amazon-ec2-c5n-instances/

Elastic Fabric Adapter https://aws.amazon.com/hpc/efa/

F1 Insights powered by AWS https://aws.amazon.com/f1insights/

New – EC2 P3dn GPU Instances https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-ec2-p3dn-gpu-instances-with-100-gbps-networking-local-nvme-storage-for-faster-machine-learning-p3-price-reduction/

Amazon EC2 G4 Instances https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/g4/

Inf1 Instances with AWS Inferentia Chips https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-ec2-update-inf1-instances-with-aws-inferentia-chips-for-high-performance-cost-effective-inferencing

Amazon CloudFront announces 10 new Edge locations https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/whats-new/

AWS & Sustainability https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/sustainability/

AWS Events:

AWS Builders Online Series https://aws.amazon.com/events/builders-online-series/

AWS Modern Application Development on-demand https://aws.amazon.com/events/application/modern-app-development/

AWS Innovate on-demand https://aws.amazon.com/events/aws-innovate/

AWS Events and Webinars https://aws.amazon.com/events/

re:Invent 2019 - AWS TechChat Public Service Annoucement by

In this round-up episode of AWS TechChat, Shane and Gabe come at you with raft of short sharp and important updates that occurred in October and November in the year 2019.

The show starts with a fun announcement - Amazon WordPress plugin. It combines our plugins around Amazon Polly and Amazon Translate, now provides a workflow to configure an Amazon CloudFront distribution. It is available to download from the WordPress Plugin Directory.

Coming up next, something rather huge in the world of AWS - Savings Plans. They introduce the latest cost-savings plans, discuss how it compares to Reserved Instances (RI), talk about the two variations - Compute and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance and show you how to get started a savings plan.

Amazon CloudWatch has now launched cross-accoun

t and cross-region dashboard giving you an aggregated and single pane of view across multiple AWS accounts allowing you to display what matters to you.

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) on VMware has now gone GA, allowing you to run a database engine on your own hardware while the Amazon RDS service automates the time-consuming administration tasks.

It would not be an update show without Container updates! Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) now has container-scanning feature allowing you to detect CVE’s. Kubernetes has integration with Amazon EC2 Spot Instances and Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) now has Cloud Development Kit (CDK) support.

Lastly, to close out the show, they continue with more updates with Amazon GuardDuty. Amazon GuardDuty introduces three new threat detections, two around Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) - S3BlockPublicAccessDisabled and S3ServerAccessLoggingDisabled. Last one focus on EC2/MetaDataDNSRebind which informs you that an EC2 instance metadata exfiltration.

Speakers:

Shane Baldacchino - Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS

Gabe Hollombe - Senior Technical Evangelist, APAC, AWS

Resources:

AWS for WordPress plugin now available https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/10/aws-for-wordpress-plugin-now-available-and-with-new-amazon-cloudfront-workflow/

Introducing Savings Plans - https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/11/introducing-savings-plans/

Amazon CloudWatch launches cross-account cross-region dashboards https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/11/amazon-cloudwatch-launches-cross-account-cross-region-dashboards/

Amazon RDS on VMware is now generally available - https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/10/amazon-rds-on-vmware-is-now-generally-available/

The Node Termination Handler https://github.com/aws/aws-node-termination-handler

Amazon GuardDuty Adds Three New Threat Detections - https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/10/amazon-guardduty-adds-three-new-threat-detections/

AWS Events:

AWS Builders Online Series on-demand https://resources.awscloud.com/aws-builders-online-series

AWS Modern Application Development on-demand https://aws.amazon.com/events/application/modern-app-development/

AWS Innovate on-demand https://aws.amazon.com/events/aws-innovate/

AWS re:Invent https://reinvent.awsevents.com/

AWS Events and Webinars https://aws.amazon.com/events/

In this event-driven themed episode of AWS TechChat, Shane and Pete started the show talking about event-driven architectures. The event-driven architecture is an architectural pattern that orchestrates behavior around the production, detection, and consumption of events as well as the responses they evoke.

They then moved on to AWS Lambda, which is the product that made the event-driven architecture pattern popular. AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that runs your code in response to events, which is why it is suited for event-driven architectures and as we learned, has 24 event sources that can invoke an AWS Lambda function.

Getting into the meat of the show, they pivoted to Single-Page Apps (SPA) and Event Forking, which are two patterns that are commonly used to exploit the benefits that event-driven architecture brings.

Let us not forget the AWS Event Forking Pipeline, a suite of open-source nested applications based on the AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM), which you can deploy directly from the AWS Event Fork Pipelines suite.

Lastly, they realized event-driven architecture is a bit of a paradigm shift in thinking, so they covered the skills needed and how you can get started on the event-driven architectures journey.

Speakers:

Shane Baldacchino - Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS

Peter Stanski - Head of Solution Architecture, AWS

Resources:

Amazon CloudFront Pricing https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/

Amazon CloudFront Key Features https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/features/

AWS Global Infrastructure https://infrastructure.aws

AWS Lambda https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/

Amazon SNS Subscription Filter Policies https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sns/latest/dg/sns-subscription-filter-policies.html

Nested Applications https://docs.aws.amazon.com/serverless-application-model/latest/developerguide/serverless-sam-template-nested-applications.html

AWS Serverless Application Model https://aws.amazon.com/serverless/sam/

AWS Event Fork Pipelines suite https://serverlessrepo.aws.amazon.com/applications?query=aws-event-fork-pipelines

Amazon Simple Notification Service https://aws.amazon.com/sns/

Getting Started with AWS Lambda https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/getting-started/

AWS Events:

AWSome Day Online Series https://aws.amazon.com/events/awsome-day/awsome-day-online/

AWS Modern Application Development on-demand https://aws.amazon.com/events/application/modern-app-development/

AWS Innovate on-demand https://aws.amazon.com/events/aws-innovate/

AWS re:Invent https://reinvent.awsevents.com/

AWS Events and Webinars https://aws.amazon.com/events/

In this round-up episode of AWS TechChat, Shane and Tom come at you with raft of short sharp and important updates that occurred in September and October in the year 2019.

They started the show with an announcement around Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) Single Region Replication, with this feature you can now automatically and asynchronously replicate newly uploaded S3 objects to a destination bucket in the same AWS Region. Just remember you need to enable versioning.

There is now a new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance, G4 Instances with NVIDIA T4 Tensor Core GPUs, which are the Most Cost-effective GPU Platform for Machine Learning Inference and Graphics Intensive Applications. You can find them in limited regions.

Limits are changing on Amazon EC2. We have made them easier with vCPU based on demand limits. Much easier to manage. All you need to do is remember you have two limits post-October 21. One limit that governs the usage of standard instance families (A,C,D,H,I,M,R,T, and Z) and the default limit is 1152 vCPU. The other limit for the specialized instance families of F, G, P, and X instances that is 128vCPU.

Check out the NoSQL Workbench for Amazon DynamoDB, a great new tool designed to help simplify working with Amazon DynamoDB, and the Amazon DynamoDBMapper class in the Java SDK has been updated to support optimistic locking.

Private EndPoints and API Gateway, it is now a thing. You can now associate one or more VPC Endpoints to a private API, and Amazon API Gateway will create and manage Amazon Route 53 alias records necessary for easily invoking the Private APIs.

Finally, they closed the show out with two things Shane like - Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio Code with the former now providing IntelliSense for Amazon ECS.

Speakers:

Shane Baldacchino - Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS

Tom McMeekin - Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS

Resources:

Amazon S3 introduces Same-Region Replication - https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/09/amazon-s3-introduces-same-region-replication/

Amazon EC2 Instance History https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/ec2-instance-history/

Amazon ECS adds support for G4 Instance type https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/10/amazon-ecs-adds-support-g4-instance-type/

vCPU-based On-Demand Instance Limits are Now Available in Amazon EC2 https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/09/vcpu-based-on-demand-instance-limits-are-now-available-in-amazon-ec2/

AWS Limit Monitor Now Supports vCPU-Based On-Demand Instance Limit Monitoring - https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/09/aws-limit-monitor-now-supports-vcpu-based-on-demand-instance-limit-monitoring/

NoSQL Workbench for Amazon DynamoDB https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developerguide/workbench.html

DynamoDBMapper now supports optimistic locking for Amazon DynamoDB transactional API calls - https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/10/dynamodbmapper-now-supports-optimistic-locking-for-amazon-dynamodb-transactional-api-calls/

Amazon API Gateway Simplifies Invoking Private APIs - https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/09/amazon-api-gateway-simplifies-invoking-private-apis/

Amazon VPC console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/vpc/

Amazon Elastic Container Service now supports IntelliSense in Visual Studio Code - https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/10/amazon-elastic-container-service-now-supports-intellisense-in-visual-studio-code/

AWS Events:

AWSome Day Online Series https://aws.amazon.com/events/awsome-day/awsome-day-online/

AWS Modern Application Development on-demand https://aws.amazon.com/events/application/modern-app-development/

AWS Innovate on-demand https://aws.amazon.com/events/aws-innovate/

AWS re:Invent https://reinvent.awsevents.com/

AWS Events and Webinars https://aws.amazon.com/events/

In this messaging themed episode of AWS TechChat, Pete is back, and more so in person.

They started the show reminiscing about messaging history, going back, looking at where we came from and how we arrived at the position we are today. More importantly, why do we use messaging and the benefits you can derive in decoupling your architecture.

They then pivot to event streams, which cover both Amazon Kinesis and Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka, (Amazon MSK). They are both designed to process or analyze streaming data for specialized needs.

Next, they moved to a more traditional message bus - Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) and Amazon MQ (Managed message broker service for ActiveMQ), both a durable pull-based messaging platform. Amazon SQS being lightweight and tightly integrated to the AWS Cloud platform and Amazon MQ supporting a variety of protocols making it a great choice for existing applications that use industry-standard protocols.

Finally, they talked about push-based messaging with Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) and the Message Broker for AWS IoT. Both publish/subscribe (pub/sub) platform that enables you to build fan out architectures with hundreds of thousands to millions of subscribers.

You now have more than a hammer to build your applications, Maslow would be proud.

Speakers:

Shane Baldacchino - Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS

Peter Stanski - Head of Solution Architecture, AWS

Resources:

Amazon CloudFront announces new Edge location in Shenzhen, China https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/09/amazon-cloudfront-shenzhen-launch/

What is Pub/Sub Messaging? https://aws.amazon.com/pub-sub-messaging/

Amazon Kinesis Data Streams https://aws.amazon.com/kinesis/data-streams/

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) https://aws.amazon.com/msk/

Apache ZooKeeper https://docs.aws.amazon.com/emr/latest/ReleaseGuide/emr-zookeeper.html

Amazon Simple Queue Service https://aws.amazon.com/sqs/

Amazon Simple Queue Service Released https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon_simple_q/

Amazon MQ https://aws.amazon.com/amazon-mq/

Amazon Simple Notification Service https://aws.amazon.com/sns/

MQTT - AWS IoT https://docs.aws.amazon.com/iot/latest/developerguide/mqtt.html

Message Broker for AWS IoT https://docs.aws.amazon.com/iot/latest/developerguide/iot-message-broker.html

AWS Events:

AWS re:Invent https://reinvent.awsevents.com/

AWSome Day Online Series https://aws.amazon.com/events/awsome-day/awsome-day-online/

AWS Modern Application Development Online Event https://aws.amazon.com/events/application/modern-app-development/

AWS Innovate on-demand https://aws.amazon.com/events/aws-innovate/

In this round-up episode of AWS TechChat, Shane and Dean come at you with raft of short sharp and important updates that occurred in August and September in the year 2019.

They start the show with an announcement - support for multiple TLS certificates on Network Load Balancers using Server Name Indication (SNI). You can now host multiple secure applications, each with its own TLS certificate, on a single load balancer listener.

Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB) is now GA, and it is a fully managed ledger database that provides a transparent, immutable, and cryptographically verifiable transaction log ‎owned by a central trusted authority.

They then spoke about the recently announced AWS Solution that uses Amazon Comprehend and Amazon Elasticsearch (ES) Service for indexing and analyzing unstructured text. This reference implementation in the form of AWS CloudFormation (CFN) deploys a cost-effective, end-to-end solution for extracting meaningful insights from unstructured data. Also, it has a tasty Kibana dashboard to provide visualizations.

Updates for Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Flow logs - In addition to existing fields, you can now choose to add in additional meta-data that will help provide more meaningful conclusions.

Finally, to close out the show we covered two updates for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). Amazon EKS now allows you to assign IAM permissions to Kubernetes service accounts. This update gives you fine-grained, pod level access-control when running clusters with multiple co-located services. Secondly, we just released 1.14.6 for Amazon EKS. Please check out the EKS support policy as we only support the last three (1.12, 1.13 & 1.14) EKS releases.

Speakers:

Shane Baldacchino - Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS

Dean Samuels – Lead Architect, ASEAN, AWS

Resources:

Amazon CloudFront announces its first Edge location in Portugal - https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/09/amazon-cloudfront-lisbon-portugal/

Amazon CloudFront announces new Edge location in Israel - https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/08/cloudfront-israel/

Amazon CloudFront expands presence in the Middle East with first Edge location in Bahrain - https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2018/08/cloudfront-bahrain-launch/

Network Load Balancers now support multiple TLS certificates using Server Name Indication (SNI) - https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/09/elastic-load-balancing-network-load-balancers-now-supports-multiple-tls-certificates-using-server-name-indication/

Additional Metadata to Amazon VPC Flow Logs - https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/09/now-add-additional-metadata-to-amazon-vpc-flow-logs/

General Availability of Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB) - https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/09/announcing-general-availability-qldb/

Analyzing Text with Amazon Elasticsearch Service and Amazon Comprehend - https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/09/introducing-analyzing-text-with-amazon-elasticsearch-service-and-amazon-comprehend/

Amazon EKS now supports Kubernetes version 1.14 https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/09/amazon-eks-now-supports-kubernetes-version-1-14/

AWS Events:

AWSome Day Online series https://aws.amazon.com/events/awsome-day/awsome-day-online/

AWS Modern Application Development Online Event https://aws.amazon.com/events/application/modern-app-development/

AWS Data Analytics Online Series on-demand https://aws.amazon.com/events/data-analytics-series/

AWS Builders Online Series on-demand https://aws.amazon.com/events/builders-online-series/

AWS Innovate on-demand https://aws.amazon.com/events/aws-innovate/

AWS re:Invent https://reinvent.awsevents.com/

In this themed episode of AWS TechChat, Shane brings along a special guest, AWS Solution Architect and Container expert - Mitch Beaumont.

We started the show reminiscing about container history, going way back looking at where we came from and how we arrived at the position we are today and gave a quick overview of our container offerings - Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), and AWS Fargate.

I then posed a fictitious question about container orchestration - what options are available and the pros and cons of each platform.

We looked at our container roadmap, so pop that into your favorite search engine (https://github.com/aws/containers-roadmap) to get an understanding of what has shipped, what is coming soon and what we are working on.

They say, if you are not keeping score it’s just practice, so Mitch ran us through the approaches we need to take as we make the shift through to containers around observability and monitoring before talking through deployment and operational patterns.

Lastly, to close out the show, we once again touched base with Firecracker. Firecraker provides hardware-level isolation with the convenience of containers and underpins many of the container and serverless offerings on AWS. It is open-source so feel free to download it, kick the tires and have a play.

Speakers:

Shane Baldacchino - Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS

Mitch Beaumont - Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS

Resources:

What is a Container? https://aws.amazon.com/containers/

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) https://aws.amazon.com/ecs/

AWS Fargate https://aws.amazon.com/fargate/

AWS Container Roadmap https://github.com/aws/containers-roadmap

Elastic Network Interfaces https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-eni.html

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) https://aws.amazon.com/eks/

Amazon VPC CNI Plugin for Kubernetes Upgrades https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/latest/userguide/cni-upgrades.html

Elastic Load Balancing https://aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/

Amazon CloudWatch https://aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/

Centralized Container Logging with Fluent Bit https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/centralized-container-logging-fluent-bit/

Amazon ECS and AWS Fargate FireLens https://github.com/aws/containers-roadmap/tree/master/preview-programs/firelens

Firecracker https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker

AWS Container DevSecOps Workshop https://container-devsecops.awssecworkshops.com/

APAC Online Event:

AWSome Day Online series https://aws.amazon.com/events/awsome-day/awsome-day-online/

AWS Data Analytics & Machine Learning Online Series https://aws.amazon.com/events/data-analytics-series/

AWS Builders Online Series on-demand https://aws.amazon.com/events/builders-online-series/

AWS Innovate on-demand aws.amazon.com/events/aws-innovate/

In this round-up episode of AWS TechChat, Shane and Pete come at you with raft of short sharp and important updates that occurred in August in the year 2019.

However, before doing this they took a look at the SDLC or the Software Development Lifecycle through the lens of AWS Lambda, our favorite server-less compute engine. We discussed trade-offs; in other words, what you are getting and what you are losing with AWS Lambda. We talked through the AWS Lambda support policy, 12-factor apps and worked through three options in which you can manage deprecation of runtimes.

We then pivoted to updates, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (ECS) now supports multiple load balancers. You can now attach multiple target groups to your Amazon ECS services that are running on either Amazon EC2 or AWS Fargate. This update is quite huge and a big win for customers.

AWS Lake Formation is now Generally Available, and it is a new managed service to help you build a secure data lake in days. It allows you to Identify, ingest, clean, and transform data, enforce security policies across multiple services and gain and manage new insights.

Before closing the show off with a raft of Amazon EC2 Updates, 7 to be exact, some general updates, some around spot fleet and another around capacity optimization strategy for Amazon EC2 Spot instances.

Speakers:

Shane Baldacchino - Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS

Peter Stanski - Head of Solution Architecture, AWS

Resources:

Achieve 3x better Spark performance with EMR 5.25.0 https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/08/achieve-3x-better-spark-performance-with-emr-5250/

Amazon CloudFront announces new Edge location in Israel https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/08/cloudfront-israel/

AWS Lambda Runtime Support Policy https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/runtime-support-policy.html

Amazon ECS services now support multiple load balancer target groups https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/07/amazon-ecs-services-now-support-multiple-load-balancer-target-groups/

AWS Lake Formation – Now Generally Available https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-lake-formation-now-generally-available/

APAC Online Event:

AWS Builders Online Series https://aws.amazon.com/events/builders-online-series/

AWS Innovate on-demand https://aws.amazon.com/events/aws-innovate/

In this hour-long themed episode of AWS TechChat, Shane and Dean reminisce about their past and cover topics that are important to the budding systems engineer, systems administrator and network engineer.

We started the show by announcing a new region, Bahrain, the first in the Middle East taking our region count to 22.

On the Automation front, we spoke about methods and mechanisms you can use to automate the administration of your AWS environment via the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell, AWS CloudFormation, and now AWS Cloud Development Kit has gone GA.

We kept it real with a bit of QA, comparing on-premises via AWS, and Shane did not quite stump Dean, almost.

We then spoke about networking by introducing concepts and explaining ways in which you can deal with hybrid workloads at both the network layer and via DNS.

Lastly, we closed the show out with a conversation on what is the minimum kit to on-premises for most organizations before talking about Cloud migration options into AWS.

Speakers:

Shane Baldacchino - Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS

Dean Samuels - Solutions Architect Manager, AWS

Resources:

Announcing the new AWS Middle East (Bahrain) Region - https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/07/announcing-the-new-aws-middle-east--bahrain--region-/

AWS Command Line Interface https://aws.amazon.com/cli/

AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell https://aws.amazon.com/powershell/

AWS CloudFormation https://aws.amazon.com/cloudformation/

AWS Cloud Development Kit https://aws.amazon.com/cdk/

Lambda@Edge https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/edge/

AWS VPN https://aws.amazon.com/vpn/

Amazon EC2 https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/

AWS Server Migration Service https://aws.amazon.com/server-migration-service/

AWS Database Migration Service https://aws.amazon.com/dms/

APAC Online Event:

AWS Builders Online Series https://aws.amazon.com/events/builders-online-series/

AWS Innovate on-demand https://aws.amazon.com/events/aws-innovate/