Episode 76 - September/October Tech Round-up

In this episode of AWS TechChat, we welcome Shai Perednik to the TechChat team as we perform a tech round-up from September to October of 2020. We cover a plethora of topics today, we start the show talking about price reductions with AWS IoT Events dropping a mammoth 86%. Amazon Connect - our ever-popular phone system in the cloud decreases telephony costs for outbound calls across six countries in Europe. We introduce a new service - AWS Cost Anomaly Detection which allows you to receive anomaly detection alert notifications with root cause analysis, so you can proactively take actions and minimize unintentional spend. We then move to compute, more AWS Graviton2 instances are available in more regions. Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) now has AWS Graviton2-based instances with MySQL and Amazon Aurora. Lastly, the latest generation of burstable, general-purpose Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) T4g instances are now available and deliver up to 40% better price performance over T3 instances. AWS Backup supports application-consistent backups for Windows instances and we also talk about AWS File Gateway performance upgrades. Next, Apache Flink Kinesis consumer now supports Enhanced Fan Out (EFO) and HTTP/2 data retrieval API for Amazon Kinesis Data Streams. In terms of Virtual Private Server (VPS) workloads, Amazon Lightsail offers an Amazon Machine Images (AMI) like experience with OS blueprints. On the container front, Amazon CloudWatch adds Prometheus support and there are EC2 security groups and customizable service IP ranges for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). We then pivot to serverless and database updates, AWS Lambda adds support in the console for AWS Step Functions, making the process of authoring state machines and Lambda functions even easier and with AWS Launch Wizard, you can now easily deploy SQL Server Always On availability groups on Ubuntu Server. Before we close out, we cover a few networking updates. Amazon CloudFront launch Origin Shield which is another caching layer that collapses requests 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, we end the show with a development update - Amazon EventBridge now supports Dead Letter Queues (DLQs), which makes event-driven applications more resilient and durable by storing your events in queues when the events can't be delivered, or the target is unavailable. Speakers: Shane Baldacchino - Edge Specialist Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS Shai Perednik - Solutions Architect, AWS