10/10’s AWS Updates ☁

A lookback of the past 24 hours of updates from AWS, applicable to my x-gov colleagues and I with the occasional interesting piece thrown in.

Today’s a day of availabilities, from EC2 instances to the Autumn Market here at the Met Office. Make sure your coffee is available and settle in :)

New Quick Start deploys Axomo on AWS

In 25 minutes you can have Axomo deployed. If you manage IBM Spectrum LSF RTM, then this is for you.

Kinesis Data Firehose adds support for Elasticsearch Service 7.x clusters

Following on from yesterday’s announcement of delivering to clusters in any account (within the same region?) you can now deliver to clusters running Elasticsearch Service 7.x! Near real-time data processing using the latest systems :)

AWS IoT Events is now available in London

IoT Events enables you to detect and action events based on IoT devices such as sensors/machinery/applications connected to IoT Events. You can now use IoT Events in London!

A1 Bare Metal instances are available!

a1.metal instances are powered by the AWS Graviton processors you can find in the other A1 intsance family, and are now available in Ireland and Frankfurt (amongst other larger AWS regions) The a1.metal instance size is the same as the a1.4xlarge, with 16 vCPUs and 32GiB All the same actions you can perform on the A1 instances are available on the A1.metal type, with that direct access to the processor and memory resources.

ElastiCache launches self-service updates for Memcached and Redis Cache clusters

You can use the self-services update feature announced for Redis Replication Groups to apply updates to memcached and Redis cache clusters at the time of your choosing, tracking the progress in real time.

Serverless Application Model feature support updates

SAM is a wonderful extension of CloudFormation, providing you don’t have complexity that it doesn’t support. Summarising the release notes:

  • In API Gateway on an API level you can whitelist/blacklist users based on AWS Account, IP address, or Source VPC
  • Add the SqsSubscription property to SNS topics which trigger lambdas. If this is set to true, SNS will publish to a SAM-created SQS queue which Lambda will then use.
  • Cognito is now an event source for Lambda functions.
  • Maximum Batching Window property supported for Kinesis and DynamoDB event sources.

Introducing EC2 M5n, M5dn, R5n, and R5dn instances

Available in Ireland and Frankfurt, these instance familes mirror their n-less sibling families but add that sweet super-Nitro networking and Elastic Fabric Adapter support

The smaller instances of these feature 25Gbps of network bandwidth up to the full 100Gbps on the larger instances. This network bandwdidth is available without any customisation of your kernel or applications- or at least any more than you would by sticking a 100Gbps NIC in 😅.

As a reminder these are all running Cascade Lake Xeon processors with support for AVX-512 Vector Neural Network Instructions, meaning not only is data transfer to S3 massively improved in terms of speed and parallelism, but also several ML operations.

New AWS Public Datasets available

From Audi’s Autonomous Driving Dataset to Kepler Mission Data to SILAM Air Quality from Finnish Meteorological Institute, there’s 11 new and updated datasets available covering Astronomy; Biology; Computer Vision; Disaster Response; Environmental; Geospatial; and Healthcare. Check the announcement page for more information and deep links.

Elemental MediaConvert has new features for Accelerated Transcoding, DASH, and improvements to AVC Video Quality

Improve video quality when using Advanced Video Coding codecs with improvements to the “Single-pass HQ” and “Multi-pass HQ” pipelines, meaning you can reduce bitrate and maintain the video quality. You can capture JPEG frames in Accelerated Transcoding jobs to generate thumbnails. Additionally you can specify in Accelerated Transcoding a “Preferred” option, where if a job doesn’t qualify for Accelerated Transcoding it’ll automatically fall back to standard transcoding, as opposed to the previous behaviour of failing the job. The “On Demand” profile is also available to Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) output groups. Change the Media Presentation Description manifest profile and increase compatibility with DASH players and DASH-capable devices.

Met Office Autumn Market

Because it’s Autumn, feel jealous at this Autumn Market at work. There’s so much more <3

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