AWS Week in Review – September 19, 2022

Things are heating up in Seattle, with preparation for AWS re:Invent 2022 well underway. Later this month the entire News Blog team will participate in our now-legendary “speed storming” event. Over the course of three or four days, each of the AWS service teams with a launch in the works for re:Invent will give us an overview and share their PRFAQ (Press Release + FAQ) with us. After the meetings conclude, we’ll divvy up the launches and get to work on our blog posts!

Last Week’s Launches
Here are some of the launches that caught my eye last week:

Amazon Lex Visual Conversation Builder – This new tool makes bot design easier than ever. You get a complete view of the conversation in one place, and you can manage complex conversations that have dynamic paths. To learn more and see the builder in action, read Announcing Visual Conversation Builder for Amazon Lex on the AWS Machine Learning Blog.

AWS Config Conformance Pack Price Reduction – We have reduced the price for evaluation of AWS Config Conformance Packs by up to 58%. These packs contain AWS Config rules and remediation actions that can be deployed as a single entity in account and a region, or across an entire organization. The price reduction took effect September 14, 2022; it lowers the cost per evaluation and decreases the number of evaluations needed to reach each pricing tier.

CDK (Cloud Development Kit) Tree View – The AWS CloudFormation console now includes a Constructs tree view that automatically organizes the resources that were synthesized by AWS CDK constructs. The top level of the tree view includes the named constructs and the second level includes all of the resources generated by the named construct. Read the What’s New to learn more!

AWS Incident Detection and Response – AWS Enterprise Support customers now have access to proactive monitoring and incident management for selected workloads running on AWS. As part of the onboarding process, AWS experts review workloads for reliability and operational excellence, and work with the customer to identify critical metrics and associated alarms. Incident Management Engineers then monitor the workloads, detect critical incidents, and initiate a call bridge to accelerate recovery. Read the AWS Incident Detection and Response page and the What’s New to learn more.

ECS Cluster Scale-In Speed – Auto-Scaled ECS clusters can now scale-in (reduce capacity) faster than ever before. Previously, each scale-in would reduce the capacity within an Auto Scaling Group (ASG) by 5% at a time. Now, capacity can be reduced by up to 50%. This change makes scaling more responsive to workload changes while still maintaining availability for spiky traffic patterns. Read Faster Scaling-In for Amazon ECS Cluster Auto Scaling and the What’s New to learn more.

AWS Outposts Rack Networking – AWS Outposts racks now support local gateway ingress routing to redirect incoming traffic to an Elastic Network Interface (ENI) attached to an EC2 instance before traffic reaches workloads running on the Outpost; read Deploying Local Gateway Ingress Routing on AWS Outposts to learn more. Outposts racks now also support direct VPC routing to simplify the process of communicating with your on-premises network; read the What’s New to learn more.

Amazon SWF Console Experience Updated – The new console experience for Amazon Simple Workflow Service (SWF) gives you better visibility of your SWF domains along with additional information about your workflow executions and events. You can efficiently manage high-volume workloads and quickly find the detailed information that helps you to operate at peak efficiency. Read the What’s New to learn more.

Dynamic Intermediate Certificate Authorities – According to a post on the AWS Security Blog, public certificates issued through AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) will soon (October 11, 2022) be issued from one of several intermediate certificate authorities managed by Amazon. This change will be transparent to most customers and applications, except those that make use of certificate pinning. In some cases, older browsers will need to be updated in order to properly trust the Amazon Trust Services CAs.

X in Y – We launched existing AWS services and instance types in additional regions:

• Graviton2-based C6gd instances in the Europe (Stockholm) Region
• Amazon WorkSpaces in the Africa (Cape Town) Region
• Memory optimized X2idn and X2iedn Instances in the Europe (Paris) Region
• Amazon FSx for Lustre in the Asia Pacific (Jakarta) Region

Other AWS News
AWS Open Source – Check out Installment #127 of the AWS Open Source News and Updates Newsletter to learn about new tools for AWS CloudFormation, AWS Lambda, Terraform / EKS, AWS Step Functions, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), and more.

New Case Study – Read this new case study to learn how the Deep Data Research Computing Center at Stanford University is creating tools designed to bridge the gap between biology and computer science in order to help researchers in precision medicine deliver tangible medical solutions.

Application Management – The AWS DevOps Blog showed you how to Implement Long-Running Deployments with AWS CloudFormation Custom Resources Using AWS Step Functions.

Architecture – The AWS Architecture Blog showed you how to Maintain Visibility Over the Use of Cloud Architecture Patterns.

Big Data – The AWS Big Data Blog showed you how to Optimize Amazon EMR Costs for Legacy and Spark Workloads.

Migration – In a two-part series on the AWS Compute Blog, Marcia showed you how to Lift and Shift a Web Application to AWS Serverless (Part 1, Part 2).

Mobile – The AWS Mobile Blog showed you how to Build Your Own Application for Route Optimization and Tracking using AWS Amplify and Amazon Location Service.

Security – The AWS Security Blog listed 10 Reasons to Import a Certificate into AWS Certificate Manager and 154 AWS Services that have achieved HITRUST Certificiation.

Training and Certification – The AWS Training and Certification Blog talked about The Value of Data and Pursuing the AWS Certified Data Analytics – Specialty Certification.

Containers – The AWS Containers Blog encouraged you to Achieve Consistent Application-Level Tagging for Cost Tracking in AWS.

Upcoming AWS Events
Check your calendar and sign up for an AWS event in your locale:

AWS Summits – Come together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. Registration is open for the following in-person AWS Summits: Mexico City (September 21–22), Bogotá (October 4), and Singapore (October 6).

AWS Community Days – AWS Community Day events are community-led conferences to share and learn with one another. In September, the AWS community in the US will run events in Arlington, Virginia (September 30). In Europe, Community Day events will be held in October. Join us in Amersfoort, Netherlands (October 3), Warsaw, Poland (October 14), and Dresden, Germany (October 19).

AWS Fest – This third-party event will feature AWS influencers, community heroes, industry leaders, and AWS customers, all sharing AWS optimization secrets (September 29th), register here.

Stay Informed
I hope that you have enjoyed this look back at some of what took place in AWS-land last week! To better keep up with all of this news, please check out the following resources:

• • What’s New with AWS – All AWS announcements. Add the RSS feed to your news reader.
  • AWS on Air – Join us every Friday on Twitch, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
  • The Official AWS Podcast – Listen each week for updates on the latest AWS news and deep dives into exciting use cases.
  • AWS News Blog – This blog.

— Jeff;