What's New in December 2020

Melbourne AWS User Group

re:Invent arrived, and with it came a lot of announcements. Some meh, some good, some great. In this episode Arjen, Jean-Manuel, Guy, and special guest star Rob will do their best to make sense of it. Or maybe they just make it more confusing? Who knows? Our brains can't really handle the number of announcements. Which is probably also why it took far too long to edit this episode.

What's New Finally in ANZ

• In the Works – AWS Region in Melbourne, Australia | AWS News Blog
• Amazon EMR now provides up to 30% lower cost and up to 15% improved performance for Spark workloads on Graviton2-based instances
• Amazon Aurora Serverless v1 with PostgreSQL compatibility now available in eight additional regions
• Amazon SageMaker Studio is now expanded to AWS regions worldwide

Serverless Lambda

• New for AWS Lambda – 1ms Billing Granularity Adds Cost Savings | AWS News Blog
• New for AWS Lambda – Functions with Up to 10 GB of Memory and 6 vCPUs | AWS News Blog
• New for AWS Lambda – Container Image Support | AWS News Blog
• Using Amazon CloudWatch Lambda Insights to Improve Operational Visibility | AWS News Blog
• AWS Lambda now supports batch windows of up to 5 minutes for functions with Amazon SQS as an event source
• AWS Lambda now supports Advanced Vector Extensions 2 (AVX2)
• Announcing Code Signing, a trust and integrity control for AWS Lambda

EventBridge

• AWS Systems Manager Change Calendar integrates with Amazon EventBridge to enable automated actions based on calendar state changes
• Amazon EventBridge adds Server-Side Encryption (SSE) and increases default quotas

Step Functions

• Amazon API Gateway now supports integration with Step Functions StartSyncExecution for HTTP APIs
• AWS Step Functions now supports Synchronous Express Workflows

Amplify

• AWS Amplify announces new Admin UI

Containers ECR

• Amazon Elastic Container Registry Public: A New Public Container Registry | AWS News Blog
• Amazon ECR announces cross region replication of images

Fargate

• New – Fully Serverless Batch Computing with AWS Batch Support for AWS Fargate | AWS News Blog

ECS

• Introducing Amazon ECS Anywhere | Containers
• Amazon ECS Announces the Preview of ECS Deployment Circuit Breaker
• Amazon ECS Cluster Auto Scaling now supports specifying a custom instance warm-up time
• Amazon ECS Capacity Providers Now Support Update Functionality
• Amazon ECS adds support for P4d instance types
• Amazon ECS Cluster Auto Scaling now offers more responsive scaling
• AWS Copilot CLI is now Generally Available

EKS

• Amazon EKS Anywhere – Amazon Web Services
• Amazon EKS Distro: The Kubernetes Distribution Used by Amazon EKS | AWS News Blog
• Simplify running Apache Spark jobs with Amazon EMR on Amazon EKS
• Amazon EKS simplifies installation and management for Kubernetes cluster add-ons
• Amazon EKS adds built-in logging support for AWS Fargate
• Amazon EKS adds support for EC2 Spot Instances in managed node groups
• Amazon EKS Console Now Includes Kubernetes Resources to Simplify Cluster Management

EC2 & VPC EBS

• New – Amazon EBS gp3 Volume Lets You Provision Performance Apart From Capacity | AWS News Blog
• Now in Preview – Larger & Faster io2 Block Express EBS Volumes with Higher Throughput | AWS News Blog
• AWS announces tiered pricing for input/output operations per second (IOPS) charges for Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) io2 volume, reducing the cost of provisioning peak IOPS by 15%
• Amazon EBS reduces the minimum volume size of Throughput Optimized HDD and Cold HDD Volumes by 75%
• AWS Compute Optimizer now supports Amazon EBS volume recommendations

Instance Types

• New – Use Amazon EC2 Mac Instances to Build & Test macOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, and watchOS Apps | AWS News Blog
• New EC2 M5zn Instances – Fastest Intel Xeon Scalable CPU in the Cloud | AWS News Blog
• Coming Soon – Amazon EC2 G4ad Instances Featuring AMD GPUs for Graphics Workloads | AWS News Blog
• Coming Soon – EC2 C6gn Instances – 100 Gbps Networking with AWS Graviton2 Processors | AWS News Blog
• EC2 Update – D3 / D3en Dense Storage Instances | AWS News Blog
• New – Amazon EC2 R5b Instances Provide 3x Higher EBS Performance | AWS News Blog

Other EC2

• Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) now support tag-on-create and tag-based access control
• Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling now supports attaching multiple network interfaces at launch
• AWS Announcing Windows Server version 20H2 AMIs for Amazon EC2
• Simplify EC2 provisioning and viewing cloud resources in the ServiceNow CMDB with AWS Service Management Connector for ServiceNow

Networking

• New – VPC Reachability Analyzer | AWS News Blog
• Introducing AWS Transit Gateway Connect to simplify SD-WAN branch connectivity
• AWS Global Accelerator launches custom routing

Dev & Ops New services

• Preview: AWS Proton – Automated Management for Container and Serverless Deployments | AWS News Blog
• AWS announces Amazon DevOps Guru in Preview, an ML-powered cloud operations service to improve application availability for AWS workloads
• Preview: Amazon Lookout for Metrics, an Anomaly Detection Service for Monitoring the Health of Your Business | AWS News Blog

Code

• New for Amazon CodeGuru – Python Support, Security Detectors, and Memory Profiling | AWS News Blog
• Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer announces Security Detectors to help improve code security
• Amazon CodeGuru Profiler adds Memory Profiling and Heap Summary
• Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer announces CodeQuality Detector to help manage technical debt and codebase maintainability
• AWS CodeArtifact now supports NuGet

Tools

• AWS IDE Toolkit now available for AWS Cloud9
• Porting Assistant for .NET adds support for .NET 5

Other

• Announcing Modules for AWS CloudFormation
• Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics now supports canary scripts in Python with Selenium framework
• AWS Systems Manager now supports Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) endpoint policies

Security New services

• AWS Audit Manager Simplifies Audit Preparation | AWS News Blog

SSO

• New – Attribute-Based Access Control with AWS Single Sign-On | AWS News Blog
• AWS Single Sign-On enables administrators to require users to set up MFA devices during sign-in
• AWS Single Sign-On adds Web Authentication (WebAuthn) support for user authentication with security keys and built-in biometric authenticators

Other

• AWS CloudTrail provides more granular control of data event logging through advanced event selectors
• AWS Security Hub adds open source tool integrations with Kube-bench and Cloud Custodian
• AWS Transfer Family supports AWS WAF for identity provider integrations
• AWS Secrets Manager now supports 5000 requests per second for the GetSecretValue API operation

Data Storage & Processing Aurora

• Introducing the next version of Amazon Aurora Serverless in preview
• Introducing Amazon Aurora R6g instance types, powered by AWS Graviton2 processors, in preview (includes Sydney)
• Babelfish for Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL is Available for Preview
• Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL Integrates with AWS Lambda

RDS

• Amazon RDS for Oracle supports managed disaster recovery (DR) with Amazon RDS Cross-Region Automated Backups
• PostgreSQL 13 now available in Amazon RDS Database preview environment

Lakes

• Amazon HealthLake Stores, Transforms, and Analyzes Health Data in the Cloud | AWS News Blog
• Announcing preview of AWS Lake Formation features: Transactions, Row-level Security, and Acceleration

S3

• New – Amazon S3 Replication Adds Support for Multiple Destination Buckets | AWS News Blog
• Amazon S3 Update – Strong Read-After-Write Consistency | AWS News Blog
• Amazon S3 Replication adds support for multiple destinations in the same, or different AWS Regions
• Amazon S3 now delivers strong read-after-write consistency automatically for all applications
• Amazon S3 Bucket Keys reduce the costs of Server-Side Encryption with AWS Key Management Service (SSE-KMS)
• Amazon S3 Replication adds support for two-way replication

EMR

• Amazon EMR Studio makes it easier for data scientists to build and deploy code

Redshift

• AWS announces AQUA for Amazon Redshift (preview)
• Amazon Redshift introduces data sharing (preview)
• Amazon Redshift launches RA3.xlplus nodes with managed storage
• Amazon Redshift announces Automatic Table Optimization
• Amazon Redshift now includes Amazon RDS for MySQL and Amazon Aurora MySQL databases as new data sources for federated querying (Preview)
• Amazon Redshift launches the ability to easily move clusters between AWS Availability Zones (AZs)

DynamoDB

• You now can use Amazon DynamoDB with AWS Glue Elastic Views to combine and replicate data across multiple data stores by using SQL – available in limited preview
• You now can use a SQL-compatible query language to query, insert, update, and delete table data in Amazon DynamoDB

Glue

• Announcing Amazon Elasticsearch Service support for AWS Glue Elastic Views
• Announcing AWS Glue Elastic Views Preview
• AWS Glue now supports workload partitioning to further improve the reliability of Spark applications

Other

• Amazon FSx for Lustre now enables you to grow storage on your file systems with the click of a button
• Introducing Amazon Managed Workflows for Apache Airflow (MWAA)

AI & ML Sagemaker :allthethings:

• Amazon SageMaker Simplifies Training Deep Learning Models With Billions of Parameters | AWS News Blog
• Amazon SageMaker JumpStart Simplifies Access to Pre-built Models and Machine Learning Solutions | AWS News Blog
• New – Store, Discover, and Share Machine Learning Features with Amazon SageMaker Feature Store | AWS News Blog
• New – Profile Your Machine Learning Training Jobs With Amazon SageMaker Debugger | AWS News Blog
• New – Amazon SageMaker Pipelines Brings DevOps Capabilities to your Machine Learning Projects | AWS News Blog
• Amazon SageMaker Edge Manager Simplifies Operating Machine Learning Models on Edge Devices | AWS News Blog
• New – Managed Data Parallelism in Amazon SageMaker Simplifies Training on Large Datasets | AWS News Blog
• Introducing Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler, a Visual Interface to Prepare Data for Machine Learning | AWS News Blog
• Amazon SageMaker JumpStart Simplifies Access to Pre-built Models and Machine Learning Solutions | AWS News Blog
• New – Amazon SageMaker Clarify Detects Bias and Increases the Transparency of Machine Learning Models | AWS News Blog
• Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor now supports new capabilities to maintain model quality in production
• Introducing two new libraries for managed distributed training on Amazon SageMaker

Edge

• New – Amazon Lookout for Equipment Analyzes Sensor Data to Help Detect Equipment Failure | AWS News Blog
• Amazon Lookout for Vision – New ML Service Simplifies Defect Detection for Manufacturing | AWS News Blog
• AWS Panorama Appliance: Bringing Computer Vision Applications to the Edge | AWS News Blog
• Introducing Amazon Monitron, an end-to-end system to detect abnormal equipment behavior

AI Services

• Amazon Kendra adds Google Drive connector
• Amazon Kendra launches incremental learning
• Amazon Kendra launches connector library
• Announcing Amazon Forecast Weather Index – automatically include local weather to increase your forecasting model accuracy

Added ML

• Amazon announces Amazon Neptune ML: easy, fast, and accurate predictions for graphs
• AWS announces Amazon Redshift ML (preview)

Other Cool Stuff Regions/Zones

• Announcing new AWS Wavelength Zone in Las Vegas
• Announcing Preview of AWS Local Zones in Boston, Houston, and Miami

Braket

• PennyLane on Braket + Progress Toward Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computing + Tensor Network Simulator | AWS News Blog
• Amazon Braket tensor network simulator supports 50-qubit quantum circuits
• Amazon Braket now supports manual qubit allocation

Connect

• Contact Lens for Amazon Connect launches real-time contact center analytics to detect customer issues on live calls
• Amazon Connect Wisdom provides contact center agents the information they need to quickly solve customer issues
• Amazon Connect Customer Profiles for a unified view of your customers to provide more personalized service
• Amazon Connect Voice ID provides real-time caller authentication for more secure calls
• Amazon Connect Tasks makes it easy to prioritize, assign, track, and automate contact center agent tasks
• Amazon Connect Chat now supports Apple Business Chat (Preview)

Quicksight

• Introducing Amazon QuickSight Q: ask questions about your data and get answers in seconds
• Amazon QuickSight launches new session capacity pricing options, embedding without user management and a developer portal for embedded analytics

Other

• Announcing Unified Search in the AWS Management Console
• Amazon WorkSpaces Streaming Protocol now Generally Available
• New – SaaS Lens in AWS Well-Architected Tool | AWS News Blog
• The Amazon Chime SDK now supports messaging
• AWS Batch now has integrated Amazon Linux 2 support

Nanos

• Amazon WorkDocs now supports Dark Mode on Android

Sponsors Gold Sponsor Innablr Silver Sponsors

• AC3
• CMD Solutions
• DoIT International