Adrian’s top AWS updates — Jan 30th 2019
Curated list of my favorite AWS updates.
I am often asked how I keep up with all of the AWS updates; well, I regularly check the AWS What’s New pages and take notes — a sort of TODO list of things I need to deep-dive into; things related to architecture, resiliency, DevOps or anything else that catches my eye. No discrimination, I just can’t learn and like everything :)
1# Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility)
Amazon launched DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) — a fast, scalable, highly available, and fully managed document database service that supports MongoDB workloads. Developers can use the same MongoDB application code, drivers, and tools to run, manage, and scale workloads on Amazon DocumentDB and enjoy improved performance, scalability, and availability without having to worry about managing the underlying infrastructure.
I think it is interesting to see where this is going. A lot of folks, me included, love the ease of use of MongoDB especially to start building things. At scale though, the story is a bit more complicated. To be continued…
2# AWS Backup
AWS Backup is a fully managed backup service that makes it easy to centralize and automate the back up of data across AWS services in the cloud as well as on premises. With AWS Backup, protecting your AWS resources, such as Amazon EFS file systems, is as easy as a few clicks in the AWS Backup console. Customers can configure and audit the AWS resources they want to back up, automate backup scheduling, set retention policies, and monitor all recent backup and restore activity.
Anything that helps customers managing backups is always worth mentioning!! 100+
3# AWS Backup Integrates with Amazon DynamoDB for Centralized and Automated Backup Management
AWS Backup was launched today, and it is integrated with Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon EBS, Amazon RDS, Amazon EFS, and AWS Storage Gateway to give you a fully managed AWS backup solution.
And even better when it integrates with DynamoDB!
4# AWS CodePipeline Supports Deploying to Amazon S3
AWS CodePipeline is a fully managed continuous delivery (CD) service that lets you automate your software release process for fast and reliable updates. You can now use CodePipeline to deploy files, such as static website content or artifacts from your build process, to Amazon S3.
S3 is one of the most incredible piece of engineering. Take my money already!
5# AWS Trusted Advisor Expands Functionality With New Best Practice Checks
AWS Trusted Advisor is an application that draws upon best practices learned from AWS’ aggregated operational history of serving millions of AWS customers. Trusted Advisor inspects your AWS environment and makes recommendations for saving money, improving system performance, and closing security gaps.
Trusted Advisor is your personal Solution Architect — use it!
6# Amazon Elasticsearch Service announces support for Elasticsearch 6.4
Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports open source Elasticsearch 6.4 and Kibana 6.4. The new version of Elasticsearch and Kibana offers several new features and improvements, including weighted average aggregation, option to multiplex token filters, support for field aliases, and improved workflow for inspecting the data behind a visualization.
I have always loved Elasticsearch — love once, love forever! and Version 6.4 has big improvements that comes with it. Check it out!
7# Network Load Balancer Now Supports TLS Termination
Elastic Load Balancing now supports TLS termination on Network Load Balancers. With this new feature, you can offload the decryption/encryption of TLS traffic from your application servers to the Network Load Balancer, which helps you optimize the performance of your backend application servers while keeping your workloads secure. Additionally, Network Load Balancers preserve the source IP of the clients to the back-end applications, while terminating TLS on the load balancer.
This is a super duper feature!! Definitely my favorite one this time!
-Adrian
