AWS TechChat

In this episode of AWS Techchat, we talk about history of Graviton, difference between ARM & x86, how to get workloads running on Graviton. We then talked about how to assess you application for ARM compatibility. First understanding the type of application, then the features and libraries used, then onto the components of the application like the database. Resources * AWS Graviton Public Page - https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/ * .NET on ARM - https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/build-and-deploy-net-web-applications-to-arm-powered-aws-graviton-2-amazon-ecs-clusters-using-aws-cdk/ * ARM for Databases: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/key-considerations-in-moving-to-graviton2-for-amazon-rds-and-amazon-aurora-databases/ * Transitioning to ARM Best Practices: https://github.com/aws/aws-graviton-getting-started/blob/main/transition-guide.md Speakers Shai Perednik (https://www.linkedin.com/in/shaiperednik/) - Global Tech Lead - Blockchain https://quip-amazon.com/fFV9EAv3Y3s (https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewbcline/) - Senior Solutions Architect https://quip-amazon.com/BEd9EACwBDU (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mmansoor/) - Senior Solutions Architect

In this episode of AWS Techchat, we talk about how leveraging the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) can help you accelerate your digital transformation efforts and business outcomes. We highlight the potential value that cloud transformation can bring to organizations, identify some of the key challenges that organizations may face along their journey, and discuss how the AWS CAF can help you overcome those. We unpack the key components of the AWS CAF, including four categories of business outcomes, four transformation domains, six perspectives, 47 foundational capabilities, and four incremental and iterative transformation phases that the AWS CAF recommends. And finally, we talk about the AWS CAF Envisioning and Alignment workshops and how they can be leveraged to help you identify and prioritize transformation opportunities, assess your organizational cloud readiness, and evolve your transformation roadmap. #AWSCAF, #AWS, #CLOUDTRANSFORMATION AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) – Key Links * AWS CAF Whitepaper (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/overview-aws-cloud-adoption-framework/welcome.html) in multiple languages * AWS CAF Whitepaper - eBook version (https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/aws-caf-ebook.pdf) * AWS CAF Public Page (https://aws.amazon.com/professional-services/CAF/) * AWS CAF Whitepaper - Kindle Edition (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09X9DBL4V/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_49MV5ZHXJBAAXRNS4VZ9) Speakers Shai Perednik - (https://www.linkedin.com/in/shaiperednik/) - Global Tech Lead - Blockchain Dr. Saša Baškarada (https://www.linkedin.com/in/baskarada/) - Worldwide Lead for the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework Jason Turse (https://www.linkedin.com/in/turse-262/) - Senior Practice Manager here at AWS and leads the Advisory Practice for the US Department of Defense. Resources: AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF) eBook (https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/aws-caf-ebook.pdf)

In this episode of AWS Techchat, we started by talking about foundations, where we spoke about an overview of EventBridge and how it is different from CloudWatch Events. Then we talked about some of the features such as Archive and replay, Schema Registry, Global Endpoints and API Destinations And finally we dove into architecture patterns. Here we touched on the need to spend time modeling your logical architecture to get a good foundation for your event-driven architecture and explored event bus topologies and best practices. Speakers Shai Perednik - Global Tech Lead - Blockchain Cheryl Joseph - Solutions Architect, AWS Stephen Liedig - Principal SA - Serverless, AWS Resources *Amazon EventBridge resource policy samples* https://github.com/aws-samples/amazon-eventbridge-resource-policy-samples *AWS re:Invent 2020 session* Building event-driven applications with Amazon EventBridge (https://youtu.be/Wk0FoXTUEjo) *Introducing global endpoints for Amazon EventBridge* https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/introducing-global-endpoints-for-amazon-eventbridge/ *ANZ Summit: Design event-driven integrations using Amazon EventBridge (Day 2)* * AWS Summit regisration (https://aws.amazon.com/events/summits/anz/) * Agenda at a glance (https://pages.awscloud.com/rs/112-TZM-766/images/AWS-Summit-ANZ-2022-Agenda.pdf) Blog Post * Building an event-driven application with Amazon EventBridge (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/building-an-event-driven-application-with-amazon-eventbridge/)

In this episode of AWS TechChat, we take a journey into EC2 Mac. I interviewed two EC2 Mac Specialists, Muhammad and Scott, who helped us deep dive into the depths of EC2 and supporting services and features. We start the show by setting foundations as we talked about the single tenancy model and how that relates to billing. We then discussed the differences between instances and hosts and EBS storage as well as building a CI/CD pipeline w/ EC2 macs for your build servers. And we wrapped that all up with some use cases we've heard and by looking at where customers should start their EC2 Mac journey. Speakers Shai Perednik - Sr. Solutions Architect, AWS Muhammad Mansoor - Sr. Solutions Architect, AWS Scott Malki - Sr EC2/Graviton Specialist Resources New – Use Amazon EC2 Mac Instances to Build & Test macOS, iOS, iPadOS,... (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-use-mac-instances-to-build-test-macos-ios-ipados-tvos-and-watchos-apps/)

In this episode of AWS TechChat, we take a journey into AWS Managed Blockchain and QLDB. I interviewed a Blockchain Specialist, Forrest, who helped 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. Followed up by a discussion around Private Blockchain vs public, HyperLedger or Ethereum, and we closed out that segment by answering “Is there one blockchain and why we need multiple blockchains?” We then jumped into blockchain vs databases and how to decide between QLDB or Managed Blockchain. Then dove into how do nodes on the blockchain know of eachother and their transactions. And we wrapped that all up with some use cases we've heard and by looking at where customers should start their blockchain journey. Thanks for joining again Forrest. Thank you for indulging my questions and allowing us to dive deep into that knowledge you've amassed over the years. Speakers Shai Perednik - Sr. Solutions Architect, AWS Forrest Colyer - Blockchain Specialist SA, AWS Getting Started https://docs.aws.amazon.com/qldb/latest/developerguide/getting-started.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/managed-blockchain/latest/hyperledger-fabric-dev/managed-blockchain-get-started-tutorial.html Customer stories https://d1.awsstatic.com/events/reinvent/2019/Enterprise_solutions_with_blockchain_Use_cases_from_Nestle_Sony_Music_and_Workday_BLC204.pdf and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6vPvZ0-7dY How Contura Energy built a letter of credit application on Amazon Mana... (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/how-contura-energy-built-a-letter-of-credit-application-on-amazon-managed-blockchain/) https://aws.amazon.com/managed-blockchain/customers/ Resources Deploy an Ethereum node on Amazon Managed Blockchain | AWS Database Bl... (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/deploy-an-ethereum-node-on-amazon-managed-blockchain/)” Building a serverless blockchain application with Amazon Managed Block... (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/building-a-serverless-blockchain-application-with-amazon-managed-blockchain/) Integrate Amazon Managed Blockchain identities with Amazon Cognito | A... (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/integrate-amazon-managed-blockchain-identities-with-amazon-cognito/) Tracking activity in Amazon Managed Blockchain with Amazon CloudWatch... (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/tracking-activity-in-amazon-managed-blockchain-with-amazon-cloudwatch-logs/) Automating Hyperledger Fabric chaincode deployment on Amazon Managed B... (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/automating-hyperledger-fabric-chaincode-deployment-on-amazon-managed-blockchain-using-aws-codepipeline/)

In this episode of AWS TechChat, we took a journey out the edge, and gave you an in-depth look in to a new product that we have released to market, CloudFront Function. I interviewed 2 special guests from our CloudFront service team, David Brown and Raji Sundararajan who gave me the low down on the major feature release. We started the show setting down a foundation of what is Edge Computing, how Edge Computing is changing modern architectures and some of the shortcomings customers face with Lambda @ Edge before introducing CloudFront Functions CloudFront Functions, which is a feature of Amazon CloudFront, enables you to write lightweight functions in JavaScript for high-scale, latency-sensitive CDN customizations. CloudFront Functions can manipulate the requests and responses that flow through CloudFront, perform basic authentication and authorization, generate HTTP responses at the edge and more. I then wore that hat of you, our customer and spend the better half of the show in a Q&A session with Raji and David to which we cover patterns, anti patterns, performance, the developer experience and more. Speakers: Shane Baldacchino - Edge Specialist Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS David Brown - Sr. Product Manager, Cloudfront Service Team Raji Sundararajan - Software Development Manager, CloudFront Service Team

In this episode of AWS TechChat, we started at the top with what containers are and what the many terms we hear mean. We asked the question why? Why is the industry adopting containers and why use them and how you can gert started in this container game by either using you using your local machine, single board computer or an Amazon technology. From images, through to docker files this episode will help get you started on your container journe. From there we dove into orchestration, containers vs server-less, and then container tools and running your container in AWS. We just scratched the surface on the tooling we covered and suggest our listeners take a read through some of the links below: AWS glossary - AWS General Reference (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/glos-chap.html) Glossary | Docker Documentation (https://docs.docker.com/glossary/) Container Orchestration Amazon ECS vs Amazon EKS: making sense of AWS container services | Con... (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/containers/amazon-ecs-vs-amazon-eks-making-sense-of-aws-container-services/) Lambda Containers: New for AWS Lambda – Container Image Support | AWS News Blog (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-for-aws-lambda-container-image-support/) CoPilot Developing an application based on multiple microservices using AWS Co... (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/containers/developing-an-application-based-on-multiple-microservices-using-the-aws-copilot-and-aws-fargate/) AWS Copilot is now generally available | Containers (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/containers/aws-copilot-is-now-generally-available/) ECS Amazon ECS developer tools overview - Amazon Elastic Container Service (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECS/latest/developerguide/ecs-developer-tools.html#developer-tools-dockercli) Tutorial: Creating a Cluster with an EC2 Task Using the Amazon ECS CLI... (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECS/latest/developerguide/ecs-cli-tutorial-ec2.html) EKSCTL The eksctl command line utility - Amazon EKS (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/latest/userguide/eksctl.html) MISC A Docker Tutorial for Beginners (https://docker-curriculum.com/) Speakers: Shane Baldacchino - Edge Specialist Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS Shai Perednik - Solutions Architect, AWS

n this episode of TechChat we close out our four part re:Invent 2020 series with an AI/ML special. We covered Sagemaker, Kendra, EMR, Quicksight and some brand new services. AWS HealthLake to make sense of health data. AmaOn Kendra now has a connector library and with this brings Google Drive support AWS Panorama for computer vision at the edge and a raft of new SageMaker additions - SageMaker Feature Store - SageMaker Clarify, - SageMaker Debugger makes it easy to train ML models faster by capturing real-time metrics - SageMaker Model Monitor. You can now detect drift in model quality, model bias, and feature importance - SageMaker pipeline, purpose built, ML CI/CD - SageMaker Jumpstart to get started on your ML Journey EMR studio-is the IDE for applications written in R, Python, Scala, PySpark and Jupyter notebooks now gives you option to deploy on Amazon EKS Amazon QuickSight allows you to ask NLP questions about your data and get answers in seconds and finally Amazon Redshift ML

In this episode of TechChat we continue our four part re:Invent 2020 series with this episode covering Customer Engagement, Gaming, IOT and Industry, Marketplace, Misc.., and closed out with Partner Updates. For Customer Engagement, we talked about: * Contact Lens now supports real-time contact center analytics to detect customer issues on live calls * Combine this with Connect Wisdom to pull up call relevant info to the agent in real-time. I love the warranty/support example you gave here ear * Voice ID provides real-time caller authentication with no changes to the natural call flow and fall back to traditional authentication methods. * Customer Profiles give you a unified view of your customers * Connect Tasks makes it easy to prioritize, assign, track, and automate contact center agent tasks * And if you're in or have call centers Latin America, 10 new price drops for telephony rates and new inbound numbers were announced at ReInvent. For you gamers or game developers out there: * GameLifts FlexMatch now works regardless of where developers host their game. So maybe we’ll see more cross-platform multi-player games match players across their game vs just that In IOT and Industrial topics we covered: * The new Lookout family of services. First one’s for * Equipment for detecting abnormal equipment behavior and encouragin predictive maintenance * Lookout for Vision will ingest images from the product line to he automate quality inspection * And finally Lookout for Metrics, will help you apply similar anomaly detection to any of your business data and respective metrics. * If your machinery doesn’t have sensors, then you can leverage Monitron, an end-to-end system you can buy at amazon.com (http://amazon.com/) to detect abnormal equipment behavior. * And finally Table charts added to IoT SiteWise help tabulate and visualize the latest key operational metrics like equipment properties and other machine data For Marketplace updates we had: * You can now purchase Professional Services for third-party software from the Marketplace * If you’re using the Private Marketplace, you now have API access to automate and scale out your operations and access. And some general updates we’re going to group together: * IGMP is now supported in Transit Gateway to easily deploy, manage and scale multicast applications * Audit Manager helps prep for audits automating collection of data on AWS resources. * Glue Elastic Views is in Preview for creating materialized views of your data. * And Elasticsearch Service now supports Glue Elastic Views * License Manager enhances automated discovery with tag-based search and detection of software uninstalls * And also provides central management for Entitlements purchased from the Marketplace * And finally, Service Catalog AppRegistry can be used to define and describe your applications running in AWS Partner updates: * Foundational Technical Review Lens now available in the AWS Well-Architected Tool along with SaaS Lens * SaaS Factory Insights Hub helps providers gain insights with various types of content * While SaaS Boost will help partners accelerate their solutions into a SaaS offering. * Introducing the New AWS Travel and Hospitality Competency as well as the * APN Travel & Hospitality Navigate track for partner in those verticals or looking to enter. * And Finally AWS Public Safely and Disaster Response Technology Partners are goto partners to help our customers around the world improve organizational capacity to prepare, respond, and recover from emergencies and disasters.

In this episode of AWS TechChat we continue with part two of our four part re:Invent 2020 series with this episode covering all Application Development, Containers, and Database announcements. For our developer community, we talked about: * Using CodeGuru’s new Security detectors to help you find and remediate security issues in your code * Python support for CodeGuru’s in preview * We shared another new service, DevOps Guru in preview, for measuring and improving an application’s operational performance * 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 * Appflow simplifies cloud app integrations for connect customers with Customer Profiles * Similarly, Appflow can provide similar app integrations with those 3rd party apps to HoneyCode. * For those Amplify users, deploy Fargate containers through the Amplify 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 kicked it off with EKS. * First, cluster add-ons managed through the EKS console, CLI, or API. * Run EKS on premises with EKS Distribution * EKS on Fargate now has built in logging with Fluent Bit under the hood * You can now see all your Kubernetes resources in the EKS console without needing extra tools * Public registries for your container images with ECR public and the ECR public gallery * Use your existing containers as a lambda package format * ECS Deployment Circuit Breaker is in preview to stop deployments from getting worse and auto-rollback In database land we covered * Bablefish, not the mythological creature, but a translation layer between Aurora PostgresSQL and Microsoft SQL. * v2 of Aurora Serverless has arrived, considerably faster and scales in a fraction of second, with scaling so fast it is perfect for those event driven applications. * Data Exchange adds revision access rules for governing access * RDS Service Delivery Partners for when you want someone to build, deploy, and manage your RDS deployments * RDS Cross-Region backups comes to RDS for Oracle * Share data across Redshift clusters with data sharing in preview and pull data from partners directly via the RedShift Console. * RedShift Federated query comes to RDS for MySQL and Aurora MySQL * Redshift Automatic Table Optimization to keep your data warehouse running in tip top shape automatically. * Move RedShift clusters easily across Availability Zones. * JSON supports in preview for RedShift * Finally, AQUA comes to RedShift in Preview as a caching layer to speed up queries. Stay tuned as we cover all aspects of re:invent 2020 in our coming multi-part re:Invent update

In this episode of TechChat we start our 4 part re:Invent 2020 series with this episode covering all ‘Security’, ‘Network’, ‘Compute’ and ‘Storage’ announcements. We started reviewing security announcements * AWS Security Hub (https://aws.amazon.com/security-hub/) can now automatically receive findings from the Kube-bench (https://github.com/aquasecurity/kube-bench). * AWS Audit Manager is a new service that helps you continuously audit your AWS usage and automates evidence collection to make it easier for you to assess whether your policies, procedures, and activities are operating effectively. * CloudTrail provides more granular control of data event logging through advanced event selectors Before pivoting to Network updates * AWS Transit Gateway Inter-region Peering is Now Available in additional regions which provides you more choice 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 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, a great win for customers Compute brings a raft of new instance and instance types * EC2 Mac instances for macOS * New instance types (M5zn high frequency and 100Gbps | D3 and D3en, the next generation of dense HDD storage instances | R5b instances featuring 60 Gbps of EBS Bandwidth and 260K IOPS | G4ad instances, powered by AMD Radeon Pro V520 GPUs) * Local Zones in Boston, Houston, and Miami * AWS Managed Services supports AWS Outposts * Amazon Machine Images now support tag-on-create and tag-based access control And finally to round out the show we discussed storage * New EBS general purpose 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% * quadruples per-volume maximum capacity and performance on io2 volume * S3 Replication adds support for two-way replication * S3 Bucket Keys reduce the costs of Server-Side Encryption with AWS Key Management Service * S3 now delivers strong read-after-write consistency automatically for all applications * S3 Replication adds support for multiple destinations in the same, or different AWS Regions Stay tuned as we cover all aspects of re:invent 2020 in our coming multi-part re:Invent update Speakers: Shane Baldacchino - Edge Specialist Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS Shai Perednik - Solutions Architect, AWS

In this themed episode of AWS TechChat, I am joined by Darko Meshzaros as he helps me navigate all things Infrastructure As Code (IAC) and Configuration Management. IAC is such an important concept for advancing your IT maturity, this really is a practical episode and if these concepts are new to you, research these further as its something that will put you in good step in your IT career. In this episode we took a journey around IAC and Configuration Management and talked about some of the core concepts and hopefully demystified many of the topics for you. We answered the question why IAC, spoke about elasticity with IAC being key here before pivoting and discussing the differences between IAC vs. Configuration Management. We then spoke about AWS’s offerings and talked through CloudFormaton, CDK, SAM, CDK TF, CDK8s for Kubernetes and the Opsworks family Before talking through offerings in the market and most importantly how you can get started. Speakers: Shane Baldacchino - Edge Specialist Solutions Architect Darko Meszaros - Snr Developer Advocate

In this Episode of AWS TechChat, we welcome Shai Perednik to the TechChat team as we perform a tech round up from September through to October of 2020. We covered a plethora of topics today, we started the show talking about price reductions with AWS IOT Events dropping a mammoth 86%. Amazon Connect our ever popular phone system in the cloud decreased telephony costs for outbound calls across six countries in Europe. We then moved to compute, more AWS Graviton 2 instances in more regions. Amazon RDS now has Graviton2 based instances with MySQL and Aurora and a new EC2 instance, the T4G has launched. AWS Backup now is crash consistent for Windows instances and we speak of AWS File Gateway performance upgrades. Apache Flink Kinesis consumer now supports EFO and HTTP 2 data retrieval. Lightsail offers an AMI like experience with OS blueprints and Amazon CloudWatch adds Prometheus support. On the container front, there are now security groups and customizable service IP ranges for EKS. AWS Lambda adds support in the console for AWS Step Functions, making the process of authoring state machines and Lambda functions even easier and there is now a quick start for Microsoft SQL Server Always On under Linux (Ubuntu). Amazon CloudFront launched Origin Shield which is another caching layer that collapses request 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 Amazon EventBridge now offers DLQ support, wahoo.

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 together using data from your own 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 https://aws.amazon.com/eventbridge/ Amazon CloudWatch Events https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/events/WhatIsCloudWatchEvents.html Amazon EventBridge Schema Registry https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eventbridge/latest/userguide/eventbridge-schemas.html Amazon AppFlow https://aws.amazon.com/appflow/ AWS Events: AWS Modern Applications Online Series https://aws.amazon.com/events/application/modern-applications/ AWSome Day Online Conference https://aws.amazon.com/events/awsome-day/awsome-day-online/ AWS Data, Databases, and Analytics Online Series https://aws.amazon.com/events/data-analytics-series/ AWS Builders Online Series on-demand http://aws.amazon.com/events/builders-online-series/ AWS Summit Online on-demand - http://aws.amazon.com/events/summits/online AWS Events and Webinars - http://aws.amazon.com/events/

In this Episode of AWS TechChat, Shane and Gabe perform a tech round up from July through to August of 2020 We started with containers as we spoke about ACK or the AWS Controller for Kubernetes which means you can leverage AWS services directly in or your Kubernetes applications. Amazon EKS now supports UDP load balancing with the NLB and sticking with Amazon EKS, it is now included in Compute Savings plan A huge win for customers. Still with containers, Amazon ECS now has launched the new ECS Optimized Inferentia AMI making it easier for customers to run Inferentia based containers on ECS. Compute wise, Inferentia based EC2 instances (Inf1) are now available in additional regions and EC2 Launch is now at v2 with a range of new features, I particularly like you can rename the administrator account. Graviton 2 based instances make their way in to a heap more regions, that is super awesome and they can now be consumed by Amazon EKS, and sticking with EKS with Fargate it can now mount AWS EFS based file systems Amazon Bracket is generally available which is 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 introduced a new EBS storage class, IO2 which fits in between IO1 and GP2 based volumes. It has 5 9s of durability and up to 64 000IOPS per volume On the development front, AWS Step Functions adds support for string manipulation, new comparison operators, and improved output processing, Amazon API Gateway adds integration with five AWS services, meaning you no longer need to proxy through code as well as Amazon API GW supporting enhanced observability via access logs. Amazon Lightsail now has a CDN, Lightsail CDN, which is backed by Amazon CloudFront it offers three fixed-price data plans, including an introductory plan that’s free for 12 months CloudFront, adds additional geo-location headers for more fine grain geo-tagging as-well as cache key 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. Lastly we introduced AWS Glue version 2 which has some some sizeable changes around functionality, cost and speed.

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 - https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/ Amazon Route53 - https://aws.amazon.com/route53/ AWS Global Accelerator - https://aws.amazon.com/global-accelerator/ AWS Events: AWS Builders Online Series http://aws.amazon.com/events/builders-online-series/ AWS Summit Online on-demand - http://aws.amazon.com/events/summits/online AWS Events and Webinars - http://aws.amazon.com/events/

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 Direct Connect testing, You can noow use the Resiliency Toolkit to test the resiliency of their Direct Connect connections. The Fail over 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. 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 S3 permissions for your IAM users and roles using access history of S3 actions Amazon MSK now supports Apache Kafka version upgrades We spoke about the AWS Transfer family and you can now use the source IP as an additional factor of authentication A raft pf Ec2 updates including the availability of the Graviton 2 based instances Finally Amazon FSx for Windows File Server now enables you to grow storage and to scale performance on your file systems

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 speak about 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 https://soundcloud.com/user-684142981/episode-55-container-special CNI custom networking https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/latest/userguide/cni-custom-network.html Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service https://aws.amazon.com/eks/ AWS Fargate https://aws.amazon.com/fargate/ AWS Events: AWS Summit Online on-demand https://aws.amazon.com/events/summits/online/ AWS Innovate AIML Edition on-demand https://aws.amazon.com/events/aws-innovate/machine-learning/ AWS Events and Webinars https://aws.amazon.com/events/

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. Storage updates: • More nitro based Amazon EC2 systems receive IO performance updates. • Amazon FSx for Windows File Server is now has a Magnetic HDD option which brings storage down to 1.3cents per GB. • Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) announces 400% increase in read operations for General Purpose mode file systems. On Development front: • AWS Lambda@Edge now supports Node 12.x and Python 3.8. • Amplify CLI add support for additional AWS Lambda runtimes (Java, Go, .NET and Python) and Lambda cron jobs. • AWS Lambda now supports .NET Core 3.1. • Receive notifications for AWS CodeBuild, AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodeDeploy, and AWS CodePipeline in Slack, no need to use Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) and AWS Glue. • Amazon MSK adds support for Apache Kafka version 2.4.1 • Updates to AWS Deep Learning Containers for PyTorch 1.4.0 and MXNet 1.6.0 Containers updates: • AWS Fargate launches platform version 1.4 which brings a raft of improvements. • Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) updates service level agreement to 99.95%. • Amazon EKS now supports service-linked roles. • Amazon EKS adds envelope encryption for secrets with AWS Key Management Service (KMS). • Amazon EKS now supports Kubernetes version 1.15 • Amazon ECS supports in preview updating placement strategy and constraints for existing Amazon ECS Services without recreating the service. Connect your managed call centre in the cloud: • Introducing Voicemail for Amazon Connect. • Amazon Connect adds custom terminating keypress for DTMF. Other updates: • New versions of Elastic Search available for Amazon Elastic Search. • AWS DeepComposer is now shipping from Amazon.com Speakers: Shane Baldacchino - Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS Peter Stanski - Head of Solution Architecture, AWS AWS Events: AWS Summit Online https://aws.amazon.com/events/summits/online/ AWSome Day Online Conference https://aws.amazon.com/events/awsome-day/awsome-day-online/ AWS Innovate AIML Edition on-demand https://aws.amazon.com/events/aws-innovate/machine-learning/ AWS Events and Webinars https://aws.amazon.com/events/

In this themed episode of AWS TechChat we explore methods you can use to make a step change in optimizing cost in your AWS account and we are not talking about powering off idle resources. We talk about the new AWS Graviton Processor in the form of the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) M6G, R6G and C6G. Currently in public preview, meaning you can request access. If your workload can make use of an aarch64 architecture, they can save you in the realm of 40% off your EC2 costs. We also talk about Amazon EC2 Spot Instances that lets you take advantage of unused Amazon EC2 capacity in the AWS Cloud. Spot Instances are available at up to a 90% discount compared to On-Demand price, which is something to hang your hat on. You can consume spot from AWS Fargate - Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), Amazon EC2, Application Load Balancer, Amazon Elastic Map Reduce (EMR), AWS CloudFormation, AWS Data Pipleline and AWS Batch. We then pivot to AWS Well-Architected Framework that provides best practices for designing and operating reliable, secure, efficient, and cost-effective systems in the cloud. We hone in on the cost optimization pillar before riffing over some tips from a field solution architect on what they look when trying to trim costs out of an account. Speakers: Shane Baldacchino - Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS Peter Stanski - Head of Solution Architecture, AWS Resources: Amazon WorkSpaces https://aws.amazon.com/workspaces/pricing/?sc_icampaign=Launch_4027_Workspaces_June30 Amazon Chime https://aws.amazon.com/chime/pricing/?sc_icampaign=Launch_4027_Chime_June30 Working From Home? Here’s How AWS Can Help https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/working-from-home-heres-how-aws-can-help/ AWS Digital Training https://aws.amazon.com/training/course-descriptions/ AWS Graviton Processor https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/ Amazon EC2 Spot Instances https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/spot/ AWS Well-Architected https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/well-architected/ Cost Optimization https://aws.amazon.com/pricing/cost-optimization/ AWS Events: AWSome Day Online Conference https://aws.amazon.com/events/awsome-day/awsome-day-online/ AWS Innovate AIML Edition on-demand https://aws.amazon.com/events/aws-innovate/machine-learning/ AWS Builders Online Series on-demand https://aws.amazon.com/events/builders-online-series/ AWS Events and Webinars https://aws.amazon.com/events/

AWS TechChat Episode #68 – Cloud Adoption Anti-Patterns In this episode of AWS TechChat Peter ‘Dr Pete’ Stanski speaks with Mark Brown (Enterprise Lead) and they discuss some of the things that slow down cloud adoption. With a combined cloud experience tenure of more than 16 years, they share the 5 common anti-patterns for cloud projects. They dig deep and break these down into Leadership, Skills, Security, Operating models and Data. Speakers: Mark Brown – Enterprise Leader, Australia & New Zealand (ANZ), AWS Peter Stanski - Head of Technology (HoT), Australia & New Zealand (ANZ), AWS

In this themed episode of AWS TechChat we explore how one deals with failure because as we say, everything fails all the time. The show starts with level setting with some acronyms to ensure we are all on the same page. RTO, RPO’s and will now mean something to everyone by the end of this episode. Disaster Recovery (DR) is often thought in many organizations as an insurance policy and we discuss about the impact versus risk and how you can put some structure around your decision-making. We then pivot to various approaches you can use for DR: • Pilot Light - ensuring you replicate your statement of records and are able to instantiate your stacks via infrastructure as code. • Warm Standby, allowing you to run a scaled down version of your stack, but allowing you to scale up with Auto Scaling Groups and increasing the number of running tasks in your containers. • Before speaking about a traditional backup and restore approach, which is still very valid. LTO may be gone but you can use most backup applications in 2020 with Amazon S3 and Amazon S3 Glacier as a target and if that's not an option there is also a VTL option in Storage Gateway. Pete talks about nifty trick for auto recovery with Min 1|Max 1 auto scaling groups as well as Amazon EC2 recovery options. We then pivot to what it would takes to architect for multi-region application allowing you to run your solution across multiple AWS regions in an active/active topology speaking through the challenges you may face and what tools are available. Before closing out, we share about Multi Availability Zones (AZ) architectures, which is a key differentiator of AWS from other providers. We give a refresher on what AZ are and explain that all AWS services are either multi-AZ by default or a tick-box offering allowing you to build robust architectures than with stand AZ failure. Speakers: Shane Baldacchino - Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS Peter Stanski - Head of Solution Architecture, AWS Resources: Amazon EKS Workshop https://eksworkshop.com/ AWS Glossary https://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/glos-chap.html Amazon Disaster Recovery https://aws.amazon.com/disaster-recovery/ Auto Scaling Groups https://docs.aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/ec2/userguide/AutoScalingGroup.html Amazon S3 Glacier https://aws.amazon.com/glacier/ Regions, Availability Zones, and Local Zones https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-regions-availability-zones.html AWS Events: AWS Innovate AIML Edition https://aws.amazon.com/events/aws-innovate/machine-learning/ AWS Innovate DeepRacer Challenge https://aws.amazon.com/events/aws-innovate/machine-learning/deepracer/ AWS Builders Online Series on-demand https://aws.amazon.com/events/builders-online-series/ AWS Summits https://aws.amazon.com/events/summits/ AWS Events and Webinars https://aws.amazon.com/events/

In this Episode of AWS TechChat, Pete and Shane are in Chicago and continue on part 2 of an update show that continues to cover some of the missed but very important updates that occurred in the last few months (November 2019 → January 2020) whilst we embraced re:Invent 2019. We start the show with some Container news. Firstly, we have four GitHub actions that provide hooks to accelerate your CI/CD pipeline. The actions relate to credentials, secrets, through to ECR and deployment. It helps developers focus on iterating with a high velocity and GitHub handling the heavy lifting of the deployment. Amazon EKS being all popular has had a limit increase - 100 Amazon EKS clusters per region per account. We continue to share two networking related updates - Access Control List (ACL) restrictions to public endpoints and the ability to resolve the private Amazon EKS cluster endpoint when using a peered VPC. Finally, on the container front we launched AWS Fargate Spot, only for Amazon ECS allowing saving up to 70%. Amazon EC2 Spot Now Provides Instance Launch Notifications via Amazon CloudWatch Events allowing you to up your observability and monitoring game. We then pivot to messaging updates. Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) enables you to configure DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) using your own RSA key pair. It is now supports FIPS 140-2 compliant end-points and Account-Level Suppression list which allowing you to specify whether addresses should be added to the list when they result in hard bounces, or when they result in complaints, or both. Amazon SNS now brings support for a DLQ. You can now set a dead-letter queue (DLQ) to an (SNS) subscription to capture undeliverable messages and push them to a SQS queue. AWS Lambda now provides support to allow you to provision capacity, allowing you to prevent cold starts and is another tool in your toolbox that may make AWS Lambda more applicable to more workloads that require highly consistent latency. Lastly, we close off the show with Amazon EBS Fast Snapshot Restore (FSR) update. It eliminates the need for pre-warming data into volumes created from snapshots. Speakers: Shane Baldacchino - Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS Peter Stanski - Head of Solution Architecture, AWS Resources: AWS DataSync announces a 68% price reduction https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/11/aws-datasync-announces-68-percent-price-reduction/ Amazon Elastic Container Service publishes multiple GitHub Actions https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/11/amazon-elastic-container-service-publishes-multiple-github-actions/ AWS for GitHub Actions https://github.com/aws-actions Amazon EKS Increases Limits to 100 Clusters per Region https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/11/amazon-eks-increases-limits-to-100-clusters-per-region/ Amazon EKS enables network access restrictions to Kubernetes cluster public endpoints https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/12/amazon-eks-enables-network-access-restrictions-to-kubernetes-cluster-public-endpoints/ DNS Resolution for EKS Clusters Using Private Endpoints https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/12/dns-resolution-for-eks-clusters-using-private-endpoints/ AWS launches Fargate Spot, save up to 70% for fault tolerant applications https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/12/aws-launches-fargate-spot-save-up-to-70-for-fault-tolerant-applications/ Amazon EC2 Spot Now Provides Instance Launch Notifications via Amazon CloudWatch Events https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/12/amazon-ec2-spot-now-provides-instance-launch-notifications-via-amazon-cloudwatch-events/ AWS Whats New (Webhook): Amazon SES now enables you to configure DKIM using your own RSA key pair https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/12/amazon-ses-now-enables-you-to-configure-dkim-using-your-own-rsa-/

In this Episode of AWS TechChat, I cover some of the missed but very important updates that occurred in the last few months (November 2019 to January 2020) whilst we embraced re:Invent 2019. The show starts with the introduction of AWS Lambda Destinations. It’s a new feature of Lambda that provides visibility into a Lambda functions invocation and routes the execution results to AWS services, which simplifying event-driven applications when a function is invoked asynchronously, I pivot to a raft of EC2 updates, starting with some house keeping with longer Amazon EC2 Resource IDs. From now until the end of April 2020, you can test your systems with the longer format and opt in when you are ready but after April 2020. All new resources will be created with longer resource IDs by default. It applies only to new resources and i encourage you test out before April 2020. Amazon ElastiCache and Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) are now having new Amazon EC2 instance types available for you. Saving you money and increasing performance. I also touch on how the credit system works on our T instances. Next, I introduce an entirely new service - AWS Data Exchange, which is a new service that makes it easy to securely find, subscribe to, and use third-party data in the cloud. Before jumping in to five FSx for Windows updates around De-Duplication, Encryption, PowerShell, Smaller Volume Sizes and File Share Witnesses for SQL, I talk about Amazon GuardDuty. You can now export findings from across regions and also export findings from all associated member accounts and all AWS regions to a single S3 bucket. To close out the show, I share a unique but important update on Amazon Route53. It now supports overlapping name spaces, simplifying complex AWS accounts Speakers: Shane Baldacchino - Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS Resources: Introducing AWS Lambda Destinations https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/introducing-aws-lambda-destinations/ Longer Format Resource IDs are Now Available in Amazon EC2 https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/11/longer-format-resource-ids-are-now-available-in-amazon-ec2/ Amazon ElastiCache now supports T3-Standard cache nodes https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/11/amazon-elasticache-now-supports-t3-standard-cache-nodes/ RDS New Instance Types https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/11/amazon-rds-for-sql-server-now-supports-additional-instance-sizes/ Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Now Supports Maximum Instance Lifetime https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/11/amazon-ec2-auto-scaling-supports-max-instance-lifetime Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Now Supports Instance Weighting https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/11/amazon-ec2-auto-scaling-supports-instance-weighting/ Introducing AWS Data Exchange https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/11/introducing-aws-data-exchange/ Amazon GuardDuty Supports Exporting Findings to an Amazon S3 Bucket https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/11/amazon-guardduty-supports-exporting-findings-to-an-amazon-s3-bucket/ Amazon FSx for Windows File Server now supports Data Deduplication, reducing storage costs by 50-60% for general file shares https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/11/amazon-fsx-windows-file-server-supports-data-deduplication-reducing-storage-costs/ Amazon Route 53 Now Supports Overlapping Namespaces For Private Hosted Zones https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/11/amazon-route-53-now-supports-overlapping-namespaces-for-private-hosted-zones/ AWS Events: AWS Builders Online Series https://aws.amazon.com/events/builders-online-series/ AWS Innovate AIML Edition https://aws.amazon.com/events/aws-innovate/machine-learning/ AWS Innovate DeepRacer Challenge https://aws.amazon.com/events/aws-innovate/machine-learning/deepracer/

In this Amazon SageMaker themed episode of AWS TechChat, Shane & Tom start the show level setting on what Amazon SageMaker is and how and where it slots in to our product offerings. Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed service that provides every developer and data scientist with the ability to build, train, and deploy machine learning models quickly at scale. We introduce Amazon SageMaker AutoPilot, which lets you automatically create the best classification and regression machine learning models, while providing full control and visibility. We then talk about Amazon SageMaker Studio - your machine learning integrated development environment (IDE) in the cloud. Developers can write code, track experiments, visualize data, and perform debugging and monitoring all within a single, integrated visual interface. As part of Amazon SageMaker Studio, it comes with the new Amazon SageMaker Notebook, which allows developers to spin up machine learning notebooks in seconds, without needing to pick an instance and wait for it to be operational. We also speak about Amazon SageMaker Processing, which lets you easily run your pre-processing, post-processing and model evaluation workloads on fully managed infrastructure. It also has a python SDK. We all like to experiment and try things out, I am talking in the machine learning space here and because of that, we introduce Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor. Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor continuously monitors the quality of Amazon SageMaker machine learning models in production allowing you to set alerts for when there are deviations in the model quality. To close the show out, we mention SageMaker Operators for Kubernetes, which you can access fully managed Amazon SageMaker ML tools and optimizations natively from Kubernetes, specifically for model training, hyperparameter optimization, real-time inference, and batch inference. Speakers: Shane Baldacchino - Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS Tom McMeekin - Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS Resources: AWS re:Invent 2019 Sessions & Podcast Feed http://aws-reinvent-audio.s3-website.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/2019/2019.html Amazon SageMaker https://aws.amazon.com/sagemaker/ Amazon SageMaker Autopilot https://aws.amazon.com/sagemaker/autopilot/ Amazon SageMaker Studio https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/12/introducing-amazon-sagemaker-studio-the-first-integrated-development-environment-ide-for-machine-learning/ Amazon SageMaker Notebook https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/12/introducing-the-new-amazon-sagemaker-notebook-experience-now-in-preview/ Amazon SageMaker Processing https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-sagemaker-processing-fully-managed-data-processing-and-model-evaluation/ Amazon SageMaker Experiments https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-sagemaker-experiments-organize-track-and-compare-your-machine-learning-trainings/ Amazon SageMaker Debugger https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-sagemaker-debugger-debug-your-machine-learning-models/ Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/12/introducing-amazon-sagemaker-model-monitor/ Amazon SageMaker Operators for Kubernetes https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/12/introducing-amazon-sagemaker-operators-for-kubernetes/ AWS Events: AWS Builders Online Series https://aws.amazon.com/events/builders-online-series/ AWS Innovate AIML Edition https://aws.amazon.com/events/aws-innovate/machine-learning/ AWS Events and Webinars https://aws.amazon.com/events/

In this episode of AWS TechChat we cover the Thursday keynote of re:Invent 2019 by Dr Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon. We start the show introducing Amazon Nitro System, look at it from a software lens and share with you the why and how we built this. As virtualization is at the core of the AWS Cloud we went back to the drawing board and built our own hypervisor to provide performance almost in-distinguishable of bare metal whilst providing a security demarcation for our platform. Nitro has allowed us to innovate faster, we have released 4x more instances since we have moved to Nitro. We then take a refresher and look at Firecracker. You can launch lightweight micro-virtual machines (microVMs) in non-virtualized environments in a fraction of a second. Given we use Firecracker under the hood for AWS Lambda and AWS Fargate, it provides faster, tighter more seamless scaling than other platforms such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). To wrap up the show, we touch on the importance of “evolvable architectures” looking through the lens of Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) before introducing you to Amazon Builders’ Library that has papers and topics on how Amazon builds our own distributed systems. Speakers: Shane Baldacchino - Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS Gabe Hollombe, Senior Technical Evangelist, AWS Resources: AWS Nitro System https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/nitro/ AWS Nitro Enclaves https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/nitro/nitro-enclaves/ Firecracker – Lightweight Virtualization for Serverless Computing https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/firecracker-lightweight-virtualization-for-serverless-computing/ Amazon EKS on AWS Fargate Now Generally Available https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-eks-on-aws-fargate-now-generally-available/ Shuffle Sharding: Massive and Magical Fault Isolation https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/shuffle-sharding-massive-and-magical-fault-isolation/ The Amazon Builders' Library https://aws.amazon.com/builders-library/ 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/

In this episode of AWS TechChat we cover the main keynote of re:Invent 2019 by Andy Jassy, AWS CEO, with a ton of announcements for all. We started the show with a new range of Arm-based processors based on AWS new Arm chip - M6g, C6g and R6g making that price to performance ration even more attractive. We continue to share the announcements that we made: Amazon Braket – A fully managed service that allows scientists, researchers, and developers to begin experimenting with computers from multiple quantum hardware providers in a single place. AWS Fargate has made its way to Amazon EKS, you can now launch EKS containers as a Fargate launch type. Amazon EC2 instance for inference - the Amazon EC2 Inf1, powered by our own custom silicon Inferentia chips has gone GA. AWS Fargate Spot is a new capability on AWS Fargate that can run interruption tolerant Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) Tasks at up to a 70% discount off the Fargate price. AWS Outposts has gone GA, so if you need hybrid cloud with the same AWS feeling it is now available. If you do not want to manage your Outpost, you can leverage a Local Zone. The first Local Zone in Los Angeles is available now and you can start using it today. AWS Wavelength brings local compute to the 5G Edge. Provisioned Concurrency for AWS Lambda Functions ensure cold starts issue and sudden traffic spikes do not impact latent sensitive operations. Amazon S3 Access Points makes it simple to manage access at scale for applications using shared data sets on S3. Amazon Sagemaker bore the brunt of many announcements: - Amazon Sagemaker Studio, your machine learning Integrated Development Environment in the cloud. - Amazon Sagemaker Notebooks bringing one click Jupyter notebooks to AWS. - Amazon Sagemaker Model Monitor automatically detects concept drift in deployed models. - Amazon Sagamaker Autopilot automatically creating your machine learning models but with transparency. Amazon CodeGuru is a new machine learning service for automated code reviews and application performance recommendations. Amazon Fraud Detector, which is a new machine learning service that makes it easy to identify potentially fraudulent online activities such as online payment fraud and the creation of fake accounts. Contact Lens for Amazon Connect, bulking out Amazon Connect capabilities, allows you to understand the sentiment, trends, and compliance risks of customer conversations to train agents effectively, replicate successful interactions, and identify crucial company and product feedback. We are launching in open preview Amazon Managed Apache Cassandra Service (MCS), a scalable, highly available, and managed Apache Cassandra-compatible database service. Amazon Redshift introduces RA3 nodes with managed storage enabling independent compute and storage scaling. Finally, UltraWarm is a performance-optimized warm storage tier for Amazon Elasticsearch Service. It complements the existing Amazon Elasticsearch hot storage tier by providing less expensive storage for older and less-frequently accessed data while still providing an interactive analytics experience allowing up to 3PB per cluster. Speakers: Shane Baldacchino - Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS Peter Stanski - Head of Solution Architecture, AWS 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/

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 AWS TechChat

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/

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 awstechchat@amazon.com

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.

In this episode of AWS TechChat, Shane and Dean cover updates that aid in optimising your server and container operations via the Amazon Linux Upgrade Assistant and Amazon ECS Enhanced Container Dependency Management respectively. They also cover how applications in an Amazon VPC'es (Virtual Private Cloud)can now securely access AWS PrivateLink endpoints across VPC peering connections. Finally they look at emerging trends and technologies customers are using to experiment and innovate for their businesses.

In this episode of AWS TechChat, Shane and Dr. Pete reflect on changes to the AWS platform that have occurred over the years. They review the services that often go hidden away. Whilst often niche to the masses, they are important and are the unsung heroes which can affect developer and operational productivity. Shane talks about patterns and anti-patterns for AWS Secrets Manager and AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store. They then pivot to AWS Certificate Manager and explain a little bit about public and private certificates, and how AWS Certificate Manager regardless if you are a developer or an operational person makes your life easier. Lastly, they cover AWS Simple Email Service which is a reliable and simple way to send email and how it can easily slot in to you landscape.

Its the new year and a new episode of AWS TechChat, Shane and Dr. Pete look over the 50 or so announcements post re:Invent. They talk about price cuts for AWS Fargate of up to 50%, introduce Server 2019 Amazon EC2 AMI's and what it brings to the table and why you should upgrade. They introduce 3 new services, AWS Backup, AWS Client VPN and Amazon WorkLink and talk about the latest Amazon EC2 Placement group feature and partition placement groups.

In this bumper episode of AWS TechChat, Shane and Tom close out our 3 part re:Invent special with an episode for the builders. They talk through the added functionality released around AWS Lambda, and there is a lot. AWS Lambda as a ALB Target, AWS Lambda Layers providing common dependencies across functions and Lambda Custom Runtimes allowing you build AWS Lambda functions with your own runtimes. They introduce StepFunctions API Connectors enabling customers to workflows that consume AWS services without writing extensive code and lastly the AWS Amplify Console which provides continuous delivery and hosting services for mobile and web applications