AWS Podcast Series

In this episode of AWS TechChat, we take a journey into Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Mac instances. I interview two Amazon EC2 Mac Specialists, Muhammad and Scott, who help us deep dive into the depths of Amazon EC2 and supporting services and features.

We start the show by setting foundations as we talk about the single tenancy model and how that relates to billing. We then discuss the differences between instances and hosts and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) storage as well as building a CI/CD pipeline with Amazon EC2 MAC for your build servers.

We wrap that all up with some use cases we’ve heard and by looking at where customers should start their Amazon EC2 Mac journey.

Speakers:
Shai Perednik - Senior Solutions Architect, AWS
Muhammad Mansoor - Senior Solutions Architect, AWS
Scott Malki - Senior EC2/Graviton Specialist, AWS

AWS Events:

• AWS Builders Online Series
  
• AWS Innovate – AI/ML Edition
• AWS Events and Webinars

Resources:

• Use Amazon EC2 Mac Instances to Build & Test macOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, and watchOS Apps

In this episode of AWS TechChat, we take a journey into Amazon Managed Blockchain and Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB). I interview a blockchain specialist - Forrest, who help us deep dive into the depths of blockchain technologies and terminologies.

We start the show by setting foundations, diving into cryptocurrencies, tokenization, and smart contracts before walking through the difference between layer 1, layer 2, and sidechains.

We then pivot the discussion to private and public blockchain, Hyperledger as well as Ethereum. We close out this segment by answering some of the frequently asked questions - “Is there only one blockchain? Why do we need multiple blockchains?”

We also discuss about blockchain versus databases and how to decide between Amazon Managed Blockchain and Amazon QLDB.

Finally, we wrap up the show with some exciting use cases and share how you should start your blockchain journey.

Speakers:
Shai Perednik - Sr. Solutions Architect, AWS
Forrest Colyer - Blockchain Specialist Solutions Architect, AWS

AWS Events:

• AWS Innovate – Data Edition 
• AWS Events and Webinars

Customer stories:

• How Contura Energy built a letter of credit application on Amazon Managed Blockchain 
• Enterprise solutions with blockchain: Use cases from Nestlé, Sony Music, and Workday 
• Nestlé brings supply chain transparency with Amazon Managed Blockchain 
• Amazon Managed Blockchain Customers 

Resources:

• Getting started with the Amazon QLDB console 
• Get Started Creating a Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain Network Using Amazon Managed Blockchain 
• Deploy an Ethereum node on Amazon Managed Blockchain 
• Building a serverless blockchain application with Amazon Managed Blockchain 
• Integrate Amazon Managed Blockchain identities with Amazon Cognito 
• Tracking activity in Amazon Managed Blockchain with Amazon CloudWatch Logs 
• Automating Hyperledger Fabric chaincode deployment on Amazon Managed Blockchain using AWS CodePipeline 
  

In this episode of AWS TechChat, we take a journey out to Edge Computing and give you an in-depth look into a new product - CloudFront Functions. I interview 2 special guests from our CloudFront service team, David Brown and Raji Sundararajan who give us an update on the major features release.

We start the show by setting down a foundation of Edge Computing, discussing how it changes modern architectures, and talking through some of the shortcomings customers faced with Lambda@Edge before introducing CloudFront Functions.

CloudFront Functions is a feature of Amazon CloudFront, which enables you to run lightweight JavaScript code with low latency at any scale. It can manipulate the requests and responses that flow through Amazon CloudFront, perform basic authentication and authorization, generate HTTP responses at the edge, and more.

Before closing off, I am representing our customer and spend half of the show in a Q&A session with Raji and David to cover topics like patterns, anti-patterns, performance, and the developer experience.

Speakers:
Shane Baldacchino - Edge Specialist Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS
David Brown - Sr. Product Manager, Cloudfront Service Team, AWS
Raji Sundararajan - Software Development Manager, CloudFront Service Team, AWS

AWS Events:

• AWS Summit Online Australia & New Zealand 
• AWS Summit Online ASEAN 
• AWS Events and Webinars 

Resources:

• AWS for the Edge 
• Amazon CloudFront 
• Introducing CloudFront Functions 

In this episode of AWS TechChat, we start with an introduction of containers and explain the many terms we often hear about them.

We then pivot and discuss why the industry is adopting containers, its benefits, and how you can get started by either using your local machine, single board computer, or an Amazon technology. From images through to Docker files, this episode will help you get started on your containers journey.

We dive into orchestration, talk about when to use containers and serverless, and close off the show with containers development tools and show you how you would deploy and manage them in AWS.

Speakers:
Shane Baldacchino - Edge Specialist Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS
Shai Perednik - Solutions Architect, AWS

AWS Events:

• AWS Summit Online Australia & New Zealand 
• AWS Summit Online ASEAN
• AWS Events and Webinars

Resources:

• AWS glossary - AWS General Reference
• Glossary | Docker Documentation
• Amazon ECS vs Amazon EKS: making sense of AWS container services
• New for AWS Lambda – Container Image Support | AWS News Blog
• Developing an application based on multiple microservices using AWS
• AWS Copilot is now generally available | Containers
• Amazon ECS developer tools overview - Amazon Elastic Container Service
• Tutorial: Creating a Cluster with an EC2 Task Using the Amazon ECS CLI
• The eksctl command line utility - Amazon EKS

In this episode of AWS TechChat, we close out our four parts of AWS re:Invent 2020 series with an AI/ML special. We cover Amazon Sagemaker, Amazon Kendra, Amazon Elastic MapReduce (EMR), Amazon QuickSight, and some brand new services.

We talk about AWS HealthLake and how it makes sense of health data. AWS customers can use Kendra’s Google Drive connector to ingest and manage content from Google Docs and Google Slides.

We introduce AWS Panorama which will help improve your operations with computer vision at the edge. We continue with a raft of new Amazon SageMaker updates:

• Amazon SageMaker Feature Store - A fully managed repository for machine learning features
  
• Amazon SageMaker Clarify - Bias Detection and Explainability
  
• Amazon SageMaker Debugger - Optimize ML models with real-time monitoring of training metrics and system resources
  
• Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor - Detect drift in model quality, model bias, and feature importance
  
• Amazon SageMaker Pipelines - First purpose-built CI/CD service for machine learning
• Amazon SageMaker Jumpstart - Simplifies Access to Pre-built Models and Machine Learning Solutions
  
  

Before wrapping out, we share two more AI/ML updates - Amazon EMR Studio is the integrated development environment (IDE) for applications written in R, Python, Scala, PySpark, and Jupyter notebooks now gives you the option to deploy on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). Amazon QuickSight allows you to ask Natural Language Query (NLQ) about your data and get answers in seconds.

Speakers:
Shane Baldacchino - Edge Specialist Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS
Shai Perednik - Solutions Architect, AWS
Pallavi Nargund - Solutions Architect, AWS

AWS Events:
AWS Innovate AI/ML Edition On-Demand
AWS re:Invent
AWS Builders Online Series On-Demand
AWS Events and Webinars

In this episode of AWS TechChat, we continue our 4 parts of AWS re:Invent 2020 series with this episode covering customer engagement, gaming, IoT, industry, marketplace, and closeout with partner updates.

For customer engagement, we talk about:

• Contact Lens for Amazon Connect now supports real-time contact center analytics to detect customer issues on live calls.
• Combine this with Amazon Connect Wisdom to pull up call relevant info to the agent in real-time.
• Amazon Connect Voice ID provides real-time caller authentication with no changes to the natural call flow and falls back to traditional authentication methods.
• Amazon Connect Customer Profiles for a unified view of your customers to provide more personalized service.
• Amazon Connect Tasks makes it easy to prioritize, assign, track, and automate contact center agent tasks.
  
  

For gamers or game developers out there, GameLifts FlexMatch now works regardless of where developers host their game.

In IoT and Industrial topics, we cover:

• Amazon Lookout for Equipment detects abnormal equipment behavior and encouraging predictive maintenance.
• Amazon Lookout for Vision ingests images from the product line to automate quality inspection.
• Amazon Lookout for Metrics helps you apply similar anomaly detection to any of your business data and respective metrics.
• If your machinery doesn’t have sensors, check out Amazon Monitron - an end-to-end system you can buy at amazon.com to detect abnormal equipment behavior.
• Finally, table charts added to AWS IoT SiteWise help tabulate and visualize the latest key operational metrics like equipment properties and other machine data.
  
  

For Marketplace updates:

• You can now purchase Professional Services for third-party software from the AWS Marketplace.
• If you’re using the Private Marketplace, you now have Application Programming Interface (API) access to automate and scale out your operations and access.
  
  

We continue with some general updates:

• The Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) is now supported in AWS Transit Gateway to easily deploy, manage, and scale multicast applications.
• AWS Audit Manager helps prep for audits automating the collection of data on AWS resources.
• AWS Glue Elastic Views is in Preview for creating materialized views of your data.
• Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports AWS Glue Elastic Views.
• AWS License Manager enhances automated discovery with tag-based search and detection of software uninstalls.
• AWS Marketplace buyers can now manage entitlements for product licenses procured in AWS Marketplace within AWS License Manager.
• AWS Service Catalog AppRegistry can be used to define and describe your applications running in AWS.
  
  

Before closing out, we share the partner updates:

• AWS Foundational Technical Review Lens now available in the AWS Well-Architected Tool along with AWS SaaS Lens.
• AWS SaaS Factory Insights Hub helps providers gain insights into various types of content.
• AWS SaaS Boost helps partners accelerate their solutions into a SaaS offering.
• Introducing the New AWS Travel and Hospitality Competency.
• Announcing the APN Travel and Hospitality Navigate track.
• AWS Public Safely and Disaster Response Technology Partners are the go-to partners to help our customers around the world improve organizational capacity to prepare, respond, and recover from emergencies and disasters.
  
  

Stay tuned as we cover all aspects of AWS re:invent 2020 in our coming updates.

Speakers:
Shane Baldacchino - Edge Specialist Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS
Shai Perednik - Solutions Architect, AWS

AWS Events:
AWS re:Invent
AWS Innovate AI/ML Edition
AWS Builders Online Series On-Demand
AWS Events and Webinars

In this episode of AWS TechChat, we continue with part 2 of AWS re:Invent 2020 series with this episode covering Application Development, Containers, and Database announcements.

For our developer community, we talk about:

• Using Amazon CodeGuru’s new Security Detectors to help you find and remediate security issues in your code.
• Python support for Amazon CodeGuru (in preview).
• We share another new service, Amazon DevOps Guru (in preview) for measuring and improving an application’s operational performance.
• Amazon Lambda now supports up to 10 GB of memory and 6 vCPU cores and a billing granularity reduction down to 1ms.
• Amazon API Gateway now supports integration with Step Functions StartSyncExecution for HTTP APIs.
• Amazon AppFlow now provides Amazon Connect Customer Profiles connectivity to several cloud applications.
• Amazon AppFlow can provide similar app integrations with those 3rd party apps to HoneyCode.
• For those AWS Amplify users, deploy AWS Fargate containers through the Amplify Command Line Interface (CLI) and you get a new AdminUI to boot that deploys all the underlying bits for you.
• AWS Proton to bridge the gap between platform and development teams.
  
  

In containers, we kick it off with Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS):

• First, cluster add-ons are managed through the Amazon EKS console, CLI, or API.
• Run Amazon EKS on-premises with Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) Distribution.
• Amazon EKS on AWS Fargate now has built-in logging with Fluent Bit under the hood.
• You can now see all your Kubernetes resources in the Amazon EKS console without needing extra tools.
• Public registries for your container images with Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) public and the Amazon ECR public gallery.
• Use your existing containers as an AWS Lambda package format.
• Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) Deployment Circuit Breaker is in preview to stop deployments from getting worse and auto-rollback.
  
  

In database, we cover the following announcements:

• Babelfish, not a mythological creature, but a translation layer between Amazon Aurora PostgresSQL and Microsoft SQL.
• V2 of Amazon Aurora Serverless has arrived, considerably faster and scales in a fraction of a second, with scaling so fast it is perfect for those event-driven applications.
• AWS Data Exchange adds revision access rules for governing access.
• Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) Service Delivery Partners for when you want someone to build, deploy, and manage your Amazon RDS deployments.
• Amazon RDS Cross-Region backups come to Amazon RDS for Oracle.
• Share data across Amazon Redshift clusters with data sharing in preview and pull data from partners directly via the Amazon RedShift Console.
• Amazon RedShift Federated query comes to Amazon RDS for MySQL and Amazon Aurora MySQL.
• Amazon Redshift Automatic Table Optimization to keep your data warehouse running in tip-top shape automatically.
• Move Amazon RedShift clusters easily across Availability Zones.
• JSON supports in preview for Amazon RedShift.
• Finally, AQUA (Advanced Query Accelerator) comes to Amazon RedShift (in Preview) as a caching layer to speed up queries.
  
  

Stay tuned as we cover all aspects of AWS re:invent 2020 in our coming updates.

Speakers:
Shane Baldacchino - Edge Specialist Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS
Shai Perednik - Solutions Architect, AWS

AWS Events:
AWS re:Invent
AWS Innovate AI/ML Edition
AWS Builders Online Series On-Demand
AWS Events and Webinars

In this episode of AWS TechChat, we start the 4 parts of AWS re:Invent 2020 recap series with this episode focusing on security, networking, compute, and storage announcements.

We start reviewing security announcements:

• AWS Security Hub can now automatically receive findings from the Kube-bench.
• AWS Audit Manager is a new service that helps you continuously audit your AWS usage and automate evidence collection to make it easier for you to assess whether your policies, procedures, and activities are operating effectively.
• AWS CloudTrail provides more granular control of data event logging through advanced event selectors.
  
  

Next, we pivot to Networking updates:

• AWS Transit Gateway inter-region peering is now available in additional regions which provides you more choices in how you architect your network and software stack.
• AWS Transit Gateway Connect brings SD-WAN connectivity to your VPC.
• AWS Global Accelerator launches custom routing allowing you to route multiple users to a specific Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) destination in a single or multiple AWS Regions by directing them to a unique port on your accelerator.
• VPC Reachability Analyzer is here to simplify connectivity testing and troubleshooting.
  
  

Compute brings a raft of new instances and instance types:

• Amazon EC2 Mac instances for macOS.
• New Amazon EC2 instance types
  • Amazon EC2 M5zn instances with high frequency processors and 100 Gbps networking.
  • Amazon EC2 D3 and D3en instances, the next generation of dense HDD storage instances.
  • Amazon EC2 R5b instances featuring 60 Gbps of EBS Bandwidth and 260K IOPS.
  • Amazon EC2 G4ad instances, powered by AMD Radeon Pro V520 GPUs.
• Local Zones in Boston, Houston, and Miami.
• AWS Managed Services can now operate AWS workloads hosted on AWS Outposts.
• Amazon Machine Images now support tag-on-create and tag-based access control.
  
  

Finally, to round out the show, we talk about the storage announcements:

• New Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) general purpose SSD volumes, gp3.
• EBS io2 volumes now support SAP workloads.
• Tiered pricing for input/output operations per second (IOPS) charges for Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) io2 volume, reducing the cost of provisioning peak IOPS by 15%.
• AWS quadruples per-volume maximum capacity and performance on io2 volume.
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) Replication adds support for two-way replication.
• Amazon S3 Bucket Keys reduce the costs of Server-Side Encryption with AWS Key Management Service.
• Amazon S3 now delivers strong read-after-write consistency automatically for all applications.
• Amazon S3 Replication adds support for multiple destinations in the same, or different AWS Regions.
  
  

Stay tuned as we cover all aspects of AWS re:Invent 2020 in our coming episodes.

Speakers:
Shane Baldacchino - Edge Specialist Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS
Shai Perednik - Solutions Architect, AWS

AWS Events:
AWS re:Invent
AWS Builders Online Series
AWS Innovate AI/ML Edition
AWS Events and Webinars

In this themed episode of AWS TechChat, we are joined by Darko Meshzaros as he helps to navigate all things Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and Configuration Management.

IaC is such an important concept for advancing your IT maturity. In this episode we take a journey around IaC and Configuration Management and talk about some of the core concepts and hopefully demystify many of these topics for you.

We answer the questions on why we use IaC, discuss about elasticity with IaC and share with you the differences between IaC vs. Configuration Management.

Before closing out, we talk through some relevant AWS services such as AWS CloudFormation, AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK), AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM), Cloud Development Kit for Terraform (cdktf), Cloud Development Kit for Kubernetes (cdk8s) and the AWS OpsWorks family.

Speakers:
Shane Baldacchino - Edge Specialist Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS
Darko Meszaros - Senior Developer Advocate, AWS

Resources:
Darko Meszaros YouTube’s channel
AWS CloudFormation
AWS Cloud Development Kit
AWS Serverless Application Model
Introducing the Cloud Development Kit for Terraform (Preview)
AWS OpsWorks

AWS Events:
AWS re:Invent
AWS Modern Applications Online Series On-Demand
AWS Data, Databases, and Analytics Online Series On-Demand
AWS Events and Webinars

In this episode of AWS TechChat, we welcome Shai Perednik to the TechChat team as we perform a tech round-up from September to October of 2020.

We cover a plethora of topics today, we start the show talking about price reductions with AWS IoT Events dropping a mammoth 86%. Amazon Connect - our ever-popular phone system in the cloud decreases telephony costs for outbound calls across six countries in Europe. We introduce a new service - AWS Cost Anomaly Detection which allows you to receive anomaly detection alert notifications with root cause analysis, so you can proactively take actions and minimize unintentional spend.

We then move to compute, more AWS Graviton2 instances are available in more regions. Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) now has AWS Graviton2-based instances with MySQL and Amazon Aurora. Lastly, the latest generation of burstable, general-purpose Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) T4g instances are now available and deliver up to 40% better price performance over T3 instances.

AWS Backup supports application-consistent backups for Windows instances and we also talk about AWS File Gateway performance upgrades. Next, Apache Flink Kinesis consumer now supports Enhanced Fan Out (EFO) and HTTP/2 data retrieval API for Amazon Kinesis Data Streams.

In terms of Virtual Private Server (VPS) workloads, Amazon Lightsail offers an Amazon Machine Images (AMI) like experience with OS blueprints. On the container front, Amazon CloudWatch adds Prometheus support and there are EC2 security groups and customizable service IP ranges for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS).

We then pivot to serverless and database updates, AWS Lambda adds support in the console for AWS Step Functions, making the process of authoring state machines and Lambda functions even easier and with AWS Launch Wizard, you can now easily deploy SQL Server Always On availability groups on Ubuntu Server.

Before we close out, we cover a few networking updates. Amazon CloudFront launch Origin Shield which is another caching layer that collapses requests from Edge Locations and Regional Edge Caches to the closest Regional Edge Cache to the origin, providing an increased cache hit ratio and a reduction of load on the origin. A great feature release if your application has a global audience.

Lastly, we end the show with a development update - Amazon EventBridge now supports Dead Letter Queues (DLQs), which makes event-driven applications more resilient and durable by storing your events in queues when the events can't be delivered, or the target is unavailable.

Speakers:
Shane Baldacchino - Edge Specialist Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS
Shai Perednik - Solutions Architect, AWS

Resources:
AWS announces an 86%+ price reduction for AWS IoT Events
Amazon Connect decreases outbound telephony rates for the second time this year in Europe
Introducing AWS Cost Anomaly Detection (Preview)
AWS Compute Optimizer enhances EC2 instance type recommendations with Amazon EBS metrics
Amazon RDS M6g and R6g instances powered by AWS Graviton2 processors are now available in Asia Pacific regions
Announcing new Amazon EC2 T4g instances powered by AWS Graviton2 processors, available with a free trial
Amazon EC2 M6g, C6g, and R6g instances powered by AWS Graviton2 processors are now available in US West (Northern California) region
AWS Storage Gateway increases performance by 4x for File Gateway
AWS Backup Will Automatically Copy Tags from Nested EBS Volumes to EC2 Recovery Points
AWS Backup supports application-consistent backups of Microsoft workloads on EC2
Apache Flink Kinesis Consumer supports EFO and HTTP/2 data retrieval
AWS TechChat episode 57 - Messaging Special
Amazon Lightsail now offers new OS blueprints
Amazon CloudWatch now monitors Prometheus metrics from Container environments
Amazon EKS now supports assigning EC2 security groups to Kubernetes pods
AWS Lambda adds console support for visualizing AWS Step Functions workflows
AWS Launch Wizard now supports SQL Server Always On deployments on Linux
Amazon EventBridge announces support for Dead Letter Queues

AWS Events:
AWS re:Invent
AWS Modern Applications Online Series On-Demand
AWS Data, Databases, and Analytics Online Series On-Demand
AWS Events and Webinars

In this themed episode of AWS TechChat, I am joined by Gabe Hollombe and we look at two relatively new AWS Services - Amazon EventBridge and Amazon AppFlow.

We start the show revisiting a messaging foundation and what are the gaps Amazon EventBridge fills in our product portfolio.

We discuss that Amazon EventBridge is a serverless event bus that makes it easy to connect applications using data from your applications, SaaS applications, and AWS services before contrasting Amazon EventBridge to Amazon CloudWatch Events. Then we pivot to Amazon EventBridge Schema Registry which allows you to discover, create, and manage OpenAPI schemas for events on Amazon EventBridge. You can find schemas for existing AWS services, create and upload custom schemas, or generate a schema based on events on an event bus.

Lastly, we talk about Amazon AppFlow, an even newer AWS service. Amazon AppFlow allows you to securely transfer data between SaaS applications like Salesforce, Marketo, and Slack with AWS services like Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and Amazon Redshift in just a few clicks.

Speakers:
Shane Baldacchino - Edge Specialist Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS
Gabe Hollombe - Principal Developer Advocate, AWS

Resources:
Amazon EventBridge
Amazon CloudWatch Events
Amazon EventBridge Schema Registry
Amazon AppFlow

AWS Events:
AWS Modern Applications Online Series
AWSome Day Online Conference
AWS Data, Databases, and Analytics Online Series On-Demand
AWS Builders Online Series On-Demand
AWS Summit Online On-Demand
AWS Events and Webinars

In this episode of AWS TechChat, join us as we perform a tech round-up from July to August of 2020. We start the show with containers, and we talk about AWS Controller for Kubernetes (ACK) which means you can leverage AWS services directly in your Kubernetes applications.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) now supports UDP load balancing with the Network Load Balancer (NLB) running on Amazon EKS. AWS Fargate for Amazon EKS is now included in Compute Savings Plans. Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) now launches the new Amazon ECS Optimized Inferentia Amazon Machine Image (AMI) making it easier for customers to run Inferentia based containers on Amazon ECS.

Compute wise, Amazon EC2 Inf1 instances featuring AWS Inferentia chips are now available in additional AWS regions and EC2Launch is now at v2 with a range of new features, including renaming of the administrator account. AWS Graviton2 based instances make their way into more AWS regions. They can now be consumed by Amazon EKS, Amazon EKS pods running on AWS Fargate can now mount Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) file systems.

Amazon Braket is now generally available. It provides a development environment for you to explore and build quantum algorithms, test them on quantum circuit simulators, and run them on different quantum hardware technologies.

We then introduce a new Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volume type - Provisioned IOPS SSD (io2) which fits in between io1 and General Purpose SSD (gp2) based volumes. It has 99.999% of durability and up to 64,000 IOPS per EBS volume.

On the development front, AWS Step Functions adds support for string manipulation, new comparison operators, and improved output processing. Amazon API Gateway HTTP APIs adds integration with five AWS services, meaning you no longer need to proxy through code as well as Amazon API Gateway now supports enhanced observability via access logs.

Amazon Lightsail now offers content delivery network (CDN) distributions to accelerate content delivery. Lightsail CDN, which is backed by Amazon CloudFront offers three fixed-price data plans, including an introductory plan that's free for 12 months. Amazon CloudFront adds additional geolocation headers for more granular geotagging, caching, and origin request policies providing more options to control and configure headers, query strings, and cookies that can be used to compute the cache key or forwarded to your origin.

Before closing out, we talk about AWS Glue version 2.0 which has some sizeable changes around functionality, cost, and speed.

Speakers:
Shane Baldacchino - Edge Specialist Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS
Gabe Hollombe - Principal Developer Advocate, AWS

Resources:
Announcing the AWS Controllers for Kubernetes Preview
Amazon EKS now supports UDP load balancing with Network Load Balancer
AWS Fargate for Amazon EKS now included in Compute Savings Plans
Amazon ECS now launches the Amazon ECS Optimized Inferentia AMI
Introducing EC2 Launch v2 to simplify customizing Windows instances
Amazon EC2 M6g, C6g and R6g instances powered by AWS Graviton2 processors are now available in Asia Pacific regions
Amazon EKS support for Arm-based instances powered by AWS Graviton is now generally available
Amazon EKS on AWS Fargate now supports Amazon EFS file systems
AWS Step Functions adds support for string manipulation, new comparison operators, and improved output processing
API Gateway HTTP APIs adds integration with five AWS services
Amazon API Gateway now supports enhanced observability via access logs
Amazon CloudFront adds additional geolocation headers for more granular geotargeting

AWS Events:
AWS Modern Applications Online Series
AWS Builders Online Series On-Demand
AWS Summit Online On-Demand
AWS Events and Webinars

In this 1 hour-long themed episode of AWS TechChat, join us as we sail to the Edge and demystify many of the core concepts that occur before end-user requests are made.

We start the show setting a foundation of Domain Name System (DNS), why it is important, before talking about Amazon Route 53, a highly available and scalable cloud DNS Service. It is also a full featured DNS service that is API, SDK, and CLI driven.

We then introduce the concept of Content Delivery Networks (CDN), and talk about Amazon CloudFront which speeds up the distribution of your static and dynamic web content. Amazon CloudFront also delivers the content through a worldwide network of data centers called edge locations.

Amazon CloudFront allows you to run AWS Lambda functions at the edge. Lambda@Edge is an extension of AWS Lambda which lets you execute functions and customize the content Amazon CloudFront delivers.

Before closing out, we talk about AWS Global Accelerator, a service that improves the availability and performance of your applications with local or global users. It provides static IP addresses that act as a fixed entry point to your application endpoints in a single or multiple AWS Regions.

Speakers:
Shane Baldacchino - Edge Specialist Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS
Dean Samuels - Lead Technologist, ASEAN, AWS

Resources:
Amazon CloudFront
Amazon Route 53
AWS Global Accelerator

AWS Events:
AWS Builders Online Series
AWS Summit Online on-demand
AWS Events and Webinars

In this Episode of AWS TechChat, Shane and Pete perform a tech round up from May through to June of 2020.

There is now an ability to provide AWS Direct Connect testing. You can now use the Resiliency Toolkit to test the resiliency of the AWS Direct Connect connections. The failover testing feature enables customers to test resiliency by disabling one or more Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) sessions using the AWS Management Console, Command Line Interface, or AWS Direct Connect API.

AWS Shield Advanced now allows proactive engagement from the DDoS Response Team (DRT) when a DDoS event is detected. When you turn on proactive engagement, the DRT will directly contact you if an Amazon Route 53 health check associated with your protected resource becomes unhealthy during an event that's detected by Shield Advanced.

Amazon Redshift now delivers better cold query performance by significantly improving compilation times.

Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL Global Database Supports Managed Recovery Point Objective (RPO).

Tighten Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) permissions for your IAM users and roles using access history of Amazon S3 actions.

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) now supports Apache Kafka version upgrades.

We pivot to share the AWS Transfer family update, you can now use the source IP as an additional factor of authentication.

A raft of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) updates including the availability of the Graviton 2 based instances.

Finally, we talk about Amazon FSx for Windows File Server now enables you to grow storage and to scale performance on your file systems.

Speakers:
Shane Baldacchino - Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS
Peter Stanski - Head of Solution Architecture, AWS

Resources:
AWS Direct Connect enables Failover Testing
AWS Shield Advanced now supports proactive response to events
Amazon Redshift now delivers better cold query performance by significantly improving compilation times
Now Query for AWS Availability Zones and Local Zones using AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store
Tighten S3 permissions for your IAM users and roles using access history of S3 actions
Amazon MSK now supports Apache Kafka version upgrades
Announcing the General Availability of Amazon EC2 G4dn Bare Metal Instances - GPU instances with up to 8 NVIDIA T4 GPUs
Now Available, Amazon EC2 C5a instances featuring 2nd Generation AMD EPYC Processors
Amazon EC2 C5n, M5n, M5dn, R5n, and R5dn instances now available in additional regions
Amazon EC2 C6g and R6g instances powered by AWS Graviton2 processors are now generally available
Amazon FSx for Windows File Server now enables you to grow storage and to scale performance on your file systems

AWS Events:
AWS Data, Databases, and Analytics Online Series on-demand
AWS Summit Online on-demand
AWS Innovate AIML Edition on-demand
AWS Builders Online Series on-demand
AWS Events and Webinars

In this 1 hour long themed episode of AWS TechChat, I am joined by my container yoda Mitch Beaumont explore everything containers in the world of Kubernetes, or is that Kube or K8?

It is Kubernetes themed affair, we start the show reminiscing about its history, going back, way back looking at where Kubernetes came from and how we arrived at the position we are today and gave an overview of Kubernetes concepts in the forms of Pods, ReplicaSet, Services, Volumes, NameSpaces, ConfigMaps, Secrets, StatefulSets & DaemonSet.

We then pivot to CNI (Container Network Interface) and Istio for container networking and service discovery before a bit of a Q&A session on why Kubernetes?

Lastly we talk about Amazon’s Kubernetes offerings in the form of Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), AWS Fargate for EKS and how you can get started on Kubernetes journey.

Speakers:

Shane Baldacchino - Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS
Mitch Beaumont - Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS

Resources:
Episode 55 - Container Special
CNI custom networking
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service
AWS Fargate

AWS Events:
AWS Summit Online on-demand
AWS Innovate AIML Edition on-demand
AWS Events and Webinars

In this Episode of AWS TechChat, Shane and Pete embark on a different style of the show and share with you a lot of updates - over 30 updates and we tackle it like speed dating.

We start the show with some updates, there are now an additional 2 AWS regions, Milan in Italy and Cape Town in South Africa. This brings the region count to 24 Regions and 76 Availability Zones.

Amazon Guard Duty has a price reduction for the customers who are consuming it on the upper end of the scale, VPC flow log scanning is now 40% cheaper when your logs are more than 10,000GB.

Lots of Database engine updates:

• Database engine version updates across almost all engines. Microsoft SSAS (SQL Server Analysis Studio) is now available on Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for SQL Server now.
• If you are currently running SSAS on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), you can now save costs by running SSAS directly on the same Amazon RDS DB instance as your SQL Server database. SSAS is currently available on Amazon RDS for SQL Server 2016 and SQL Server 2017 in the single-AZ configuration on both the Standard and Enterprise edition.
• NoSQL Workbench for Amazon DynamoDB is now is now generally available. NoSQL Workbench is a client-side application, available for Windows and macOS that helps developers build scalable, high-performance data models, and simplifies query development and testing.
• Apache Kafka is an option for AWS Database Migration Service and Amazon Managed Apache Cassandra Service is now available in public preview. Microsoft SQL Server on RDS now supports Read Replicas.