AWS TechChat

In this monster episode of AWS TechChat, Shane and Tom (yes he is back) come at you with a raft of short sharp and important updates that occurred in the month of July in the year 2019.

They started the show with two Amazon CloudWatch updates. Amazon CloudWatch Anomaly Detection, which applies machine learning to continuously analyze a specific CloudWatch metrics determines a nominal baseline, and surfaces anomalies, all without user intervention before introducing you to Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights and as the sticker says, is a fully managed service to help monitor and troubleshoot containers. Both of these additions are not GA but get your hands dirty and have a play.

They then pivoted by introducing you to a new service, Amazon EventBridge, which is a serverless event bus that routes real-time data streams from your applications and services to targets like AWS Lambda. EventBridge facilitates event-driven application development by simplifying the process of ingesting and delivering events across your application architecture, and by providing built-in security and error handling. What's more, there are built-in integrations from the likes of ZenDesk, Pager Duty, and more.

On the Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) front, we spoke of four updates.

1. Amazon RDS for Oracle Supports Oracle Application Express (APEX) Version 19.1

2. Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL Serverless has gone GA.

3. Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL supports new minor versions.

4. Amazon RDS introduces Compatibility Checks for Upgrades from MySQL 5.7 to MySQL 8.0.

Another new feature - Amazon EC2 Instance Connect, introduces that ability to control Secure Shell (SSH) access to your instances using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies, plus with AWS CloudTrail events giving you a centralized way to audit your SSH connections.

Finally, Tom snuck in some last-minute updates around Amazon AppStream 2.0 and Amazon WorkSpaces. Amazon AppStream 2.0 adding in support for Windows Server 2016 and Windows Server 2019 base images. Amazon WorkSpaces is now allowing you to copy your Amazon WorkSpaces Images across AWS regions.

Speakers:

Shane Baldacchino - Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS

Tom McMeekin - Solutions Architect, AWS

Resources:

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

Amazon CloudWatch Anomaly Detection https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/07/introducing-amazon-cloudwatch-anomaly-detection-now-in-preview/

Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/05/cloudwatch-container-insights-for-eks-and-kubernetes-preview/

Amazon EventBridge https://aws.amazon.com/eventbridge/

Amazon RDS for Oracle Supports Oracle Application Express (APEX) Version 19.1 https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/06/amazon-rds-oracle-supports-oracle-application-express-version-191/

Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL Compatibility Supports Serverless https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/07/amazon-aurora-with-postgresql-compatibility-supports-serverless/

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL supports new minor versions https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/05/amazon-rds-postgresql-supports-minor-version-112/

Amazon RDS introduces Compatibility Checks https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/07/amazon_rds_introduces_compatibility_checks/

Introducing Amazon EC2 Instance Connect https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/06/introducing-amazon-ec2-instance-connect/

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) https://aws.amazon.com/iam/

AWS CloudTrail https://aws.amazon.com/cloudtrail/

Amazon AppStream 2.0 adds support for Windows Server 2016 and Windows Server 2019 https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/06/amazon-appstream-20-adds-support-for-windows-server-2016-and-windows-server-2019/

Amazon WorkSpaces now supports copying Images across AWS Regions https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/06/amazon_workspaces_now_supports_copying_images_across_aws_regions/

In this themed episode of AWS TechChat, Shane and Gabe talk about the modern relational database built for the cloud: Amazon Aurora. So prepare to SELECT some Amazon Aurora knowledge INTO your brain!

They start the episode with some level setting. Amazon Aurora is a fully-managed MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible database, purpose-built for the cloud. It has great performance, and it gives enterprise-grade reliability at 1/10th the cost of traditional options. It has a distributed, fault-tolerant, self-healing storage system that auto-scales up to 64TB.

Keeping it modern and real, they then discuss Amazon Aurora Serverless, which is an on-demand, auto-scaling configuration for Amazon Aurora where the database will automatically start up, shut down, and scale capacity up or down based on your app's needs. It enables you to run your database with all the benefits that serverless brings.

Finally, they close the show out with a discussion around Amazon Aurora Global Database, which is designed for globally distributed applications, allowing a single Amazon Aurora database to span multiple AWS regions. It replicates your data with no impact to database performance, enables fast local reads with low latency in each region, and provides disaster recovery from region-wide outages.

Resources:

• AWS Innovate 2019 Global Edition https://aws.amazon.com/events/aws-innovate/

• Amazon CloudFront https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/

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

• AWS Aurora https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/

• Amazon Aurora Serverless https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/serverless/

• Amazon Aurora Global Database https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/global-database/

In this episode of AWS TechChat, TechChat turns 50 and Shane and Pete come at you with a raft of short sharp and important updates that occurred in June, in the year 2019.

They started the show, introducing you to a new service that has gone GA - AWS IoT Events. AWS IoT Events is a new, fully managed IoT service that makes it easy to detect and respond to events from IoT sensors and applications without the traditional heavy lifting of building traditional IoT applications and brings a managed complex event detection service to our already buff IoT suit.

Sticking with IoT theme, we quickly announced BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) support has landed in Amazon FreeRTOS, and a new MQTT library is now generally available in Amazon FreeRTOS 201906.00. With this update, you can now securely connect Amazon FreeRTOS devices using BLE to AWS IoT via Android and iOS devices, and use the new MQTT library to create applications that are independent of the connectivity protocol.

We then spoke about two new features for Microsoft SQL. Always On Availability Groups have made their way to SQL Server 2017 Enterprise Edition and we let you know you can now restore a multi-file native SQL Server backup from Amazon S3 to an Amazon RDS SQL Server database instance.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) for Windows containers has gone GA so prepare your BSODs, only kidding. We now support Amazon ECS clusters running Windows Server 2019 containers, so if Windows containers are your thing, take a look at Amazon ECS.

Lastly, with Amazon API Gateway custom domains, you can now enforce a minimum Transport Layer Security (TLS) version and cipher suites through a security policy allowing you to further improve security for your customers.

Resources:

• AWS IoT Events

https://aws.amazon.com/iot-events/

• Amazon FreeRTOS Bluetooth Low Energy

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/iot/perform-ota-firmware-updates-on-espressif-esp32-devices-using-amazon-freertos-bluetooth-low-energy-mqtt-proxy/

• Amazon RDS SQL Server

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/05/amazon-rds-for-sql-server-now-supports-always-on-availability-groups-for-sql-server-2017/

• Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) for Windows containers

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECS/latest/developerguide/ECS_Windows.html

• Amazon API Gateway – TLS

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/06/amazon-api-gateway-adds-configurable-transport-layer-security-version-custom-domains/

In this episode of AWS TechChat, Shane and Pete take it up a notch in a thought-provoking episode. They discuss some key AWS feature releases that are fundamentally changing the approach of how customers wire up those more complex AWS account structures and talk to you about some modern approaches more mature customers are adopting.

We started the show with AWS RAM (Resource Access Manager) which is a simple and secure way to share resources across AWS Accounts, worth taking a look if you use VPC Peering or hybrid DNS resolvers today.

They then pivoted to AWS CDK (Cloud Development Kit) which is a software development framework, with the artifact being AWS CloudFormation, yet another tool to help you move to No-Ops and focus on improving developer productivity. AWS CDK offers a higher-level object-oriented abstraction to define AWS resources imperatively.

And lastly out with the old and in with the new (and it’s not Pete). Node JS 6 is EOL (End-of-Life) for AWS Lambda, and we announce the arrival of Node JS 10 touting significant performance and functionality improvements.

In this monster episode of AWS TechChat, Shane and Pete (yes he’s alive and back) come at you with a raft of short sharp and important updates that occurred in May 2019.

They started the show with a price cut for Amazon Connect because everyone likes price cuts, and Amazon Connect is now 26% cheaper in two US regions.

Next, they cover additional cloud-formation support for both AWS Transfer for SFTP and AWS Backup, allowing you automate the usage of these services.

Moving on they talked through Amazon CloudWatch percentiles, as it has introduced support for percentiles on metric filters which are particularly useful when applied to metrics that exhibit large variances.

AWS Ground Station has gone GA (General Availability). So prepare your satellites. There are no long-term commitments, you pay only for antenna time, and you gain the ability to rapidly scale your satellite communications on-demand when your business needs it.

Shane then kept it real by talking about AWS Step Functions Callbacks. Callback patterns automate workflows for applications with human activities and custom integrations with third-party services, and now it's native.

Lastly, to close out the show, they covered three new EKS updates that address monitoring updates, through to additional functionality and reduced administrative effort.

We like to hear what you like and perhaps what you don’t like, keep the feedback coming and don’t be shy, send us an email at [email protected]

In this AWS TechChat - Application Security Edition, Shane chats with Gabe about all things application security, providing a crash course for the builder in all of us.

They start the show with some level setting to set the scene, introducing the Top 10 OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) before moving on to CVE's (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures). They then move up the stack to Layer 7 and speak about AWS WAF, which is our web application firewall that helps protect your web applications from common web exploits and how you can use AWS WAF to mitigate against OWASP Top 10 risks as well as how you can leverage managed rule sets for common COTS (Commercial off-the-shelf) applications.

Lastly, introducing Amazon Inspector - an automated security assessment service that helps shine a light on the security and compliance of applications deployed on Amazon EC2 by detecting CVE's and instance drift again CIS standards.

Join Shane and Dr. Pete as they get their inner geek on and cover a few significant announcements that occurred last month that help the modern builders.

They cover some quick announcements around Amazon EC2. Amazon EC2 T3a instances are now a thing, and what’s more, our A1 instances are finding their way into Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS with the latter being in preview.

They then set the scene around containers, romanticized about the past and how they differ from Virtual Machines before introducing AWS AppMesh. AWS AppMesh is a service mesh that provides application-level networking to make it easy for your services to communicate with each other, before rounding out the show by introducing the AWS Toolkit for VS Code which provides an integrated one-stop experience for developing and debugging serverless applications in AWS Lambda and AWS SAM.

Join Shane and Dr. Pete as they close our two-part series on getting started on AWS. In this episode they build on part 1 by extending the foundational concepts, allowing the student to become the master.

They cover ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) via Amazon Elasticsearch Service allowing you to keep score on your website by visualizing logs, spotting trends and finding that needle in the haystack. They then pivot to collaboration and helping reduce feedback cycles and bring your team closer together via Amazon Chime before briefly touching on Managed Active Directory and why you should run it on AWS. Lastly, they talk about Amazon WorkSpaces, your VDI experience in the cloud allowing you to build desktop systems at scale from general purpose, to GPU backed instances and pay for them by the hour.

Join Dr. Pete and Shane as they cover the core concepts on how you can get a website and email service up and running on AWS. In part 1 of this two-part series, they lay a technical foundation and cover domain registration, and DNS in general with Amazon Route 53, an awesome awesome DNS service. They then speak about web-hosting and touched on the various options you have in AWS before transitioning to MX records and Amazon WorkMail for email hosting.

Join Dr. Pete and Shane as they cover the latest AWS Tech Round-Up. In this episode, they touch on topics relevant to all gamuts of IT. They start the show with a deep dive of AWS Step Functions Local and AWS Step Functions support for Tag Based Permissions. They then pivot to ALB (Application Load Balancer) announcement as ALB now supports ARR (Advanced Request Routing). They wrap up the episode with an introduction to AWS Deep Learning Containers.