Adrian’s top AWS updates — Nov 19th 2018
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 :)
This update comes only a few days after the previous one, and reInvent has not even happened yet … oh dear.
#1 AWS CloudFormation Now Supports Drift Detection
AWS CloudFormation now allows you to detect if configuration changes were made to your stack resources outside of CloudFormation via the AWS Management Console, CLI, and SDKs. Drift is the difference between the expected configuration values of stack resources defined in CloudFormation templates and the actual configuration values of these resources in the corresponding CloudFormation stacks. This allows you to better manage your CloudFormation stacks and ensure consistency in your resource configurations. For more information on Drift detection, visit the AWS Blog.
OK!! This is MY favorite update of the year!! I have been dreaming of that feature ever since I started using CloudFormation, from day 1!!
2# Announcing Support for DNS Resolution over Inter-Region VPC Peering
You can now resolve DNS hostnames to private IP addresses when queried from a peered VPC in another AWS Region. Using DNS names to access resources makes application development and management simpler and less error-prone. By using DNS resolution over Inter-Region VPC Peering, resources in peered VPCs in another AWS Region are always accessed over the Inter-Region VPC Peering connection.
This goes into my “multi-region bucket” support. I love that because it makes configurations and service discovery a lot easier now. Note for self: update my blog series :-)
3# AWS Systems Manager Now Supports Multi-Account and Multi-Region Inventory View
Another mulit-region update: AWS Systems Manager, which provides information about your instances and the software installed on them, now supports a multi-account, multi-region view. With this enhancement, you can simplify your workflow by centrally viewing, storing, and exporting inventory data across your accounts from a single console.
Note for self: update, yet again, my multi-region blog series :-)
4# Memcached 1.5 now available on Amazon ElastiCache
Amazon ElastiCache for Memcached now supports Memcached version 1.5. This open source Memcached version offers significant improvements including better connection management, improved item size management for items above 1MB, and memory overhead improvements by reducing per-item memory requirements. Additionally, this release also offers new Memcached features such as automated slab rebalancing, faster hash table lookups, segmented LRU algorithm, LRU crawler for background memory reclamation, and the ASCII protocol now supports the get and touch commands.
I loved Memcached at first sight, and continue to love it today — Perfect for side-cache patterns and other transient state operations. Don’ be jealous Redis, I love you both :)
5# Amazon RDS Automated Backups Can Now Be Retained After Database Deletion
You can now retain Amazon RDS automated backups (system snapshots and transaction logs) when you delete a database instance. This allows you to restore a deleted database instance to a specified point in time within the backup retention period even after it has been deleted, protecting you against accidental deletion of data.
I once “cleaned” a database in production … this would have been nice to have back then …
-Adrian
