Amazon Kinesis Analytics is Like SaaS for Big Data Analysis
Real-time analysis of event streams has a new focus in Big Data platforms, both on-premise and in the cloud. AWS have released Amazon Kinesis Analytics, a rival to Azure StreamAnalytics. Both platforms use a simple SQL language for complex querying, and move Big Data analysis into a SaaS-like space.
Amazon Introduces API Gateway Usage Plans
Amazon recently updated their API Gateway service to include Usage Plans. A common pattern for companies that expose their APIs, include monetizing them through a 3rd party developer ecosystem. Usage Plans allow an organization to manage 3rd party developer consumption patterns and billing at an API key level.
AWS Launches Application Load Balancer
Amazon Web Services has launched their new Application Load Balancer, an OSI Layer 7 balancer that can route traffic to different end-points depending a set of URL rules.
AWS Adds Native SQL Server Backups to Database-as-a-Service
AWS released an update to its Relational Database Service (RDS) that allows users to take advantage of native SQL Server backup and restore functionality. AWS beat Microsoft Azure to market with this capability which simplifies database migration and disaster recovery scenarios.
AWS Adds Multi-Cloud Scripting to EC2 Run Command Feature
In late 2015, AWS unveiled the EC2 Run Command feature. It gave operators a single interface for running administrative tasks across a fleet of AWS servers. In June of this year, AWS expanded the scope of the feature to work with servers located in other clouds or data centers.
Amazon Announces Immediate Availability of Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region
On June 27th, Amazon announced the immediate availability of their 6th AWS Region in Asia Pacific. This region is in Mumbai, India and it joins other regions in Asia Pacific including Beijing, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo. With the addition of Mumbai, Amazon is now up to 35 Availability Zones across 13 geographic Regions worldwide.
Amazon Brings Auto Scaling to EC2 Container Service
Amazon recently announced it is bringing automatic scaling to its Amazon ECS service. This allows Amazon ECS services to scale out, or scale in, automatically. Scale events are the result of Amazon CloudWatch alarms being triggered when threshold-based metrics exceed, or fall below, expected values.
AWS Launches Massive X1 Instances Targeting High Memory Workloads
AWS recently added a new instance type with nearly 2 terabytes of memory and 128 virtual CPUs. This is the largest virtual server available today in the public cloud, and is a target for memory-intensive workloads such as SAP HANA.
Amazon Releases Kinesis Service Update
Amazon has recently announced an update to their Amazon Kinesis Service. In this update, three new features have been added to Amazon Kinesis Streams and Amazon Kinesis Firehose including support for Elasticsearch Service Integration, Shard-Level Metrics and Time-Based Iterators.
Supergiant.io - Container Platform for Stateful Applications
Supergiant is a container hosting platform built using Kubernetes for distributed, stateful applications.
Amazon Announces Managed Platform Updates for AWS Elastic Beanstalk
On April 19th, 2016 Amazon announced changes to their Elastic Beanstalk service. In this update, Amazon is providing customers with the ability to automatically install platform updates.
Microsoft Gets into Serverless Apps with Azure Functions
At this month's Build conference, Microsoft announced a preview of Azure Functions, a service that runs code on-demand. Azure Functions is Microsoft's entry into the increasingly-popular space of event-driven, serverless computing occupied by Amazon, Google, IBM, and others.
Amazon API Gateway Now Supports Swagger Definition Import
On April 5th, 2016 Amazon announced an update to its API Management service known as Amazon API Gateway. In this update, Amazon API Gateway now supports a direct way of importing Swagger 2.0 definitions.
Zalando’s STUPS: Creating an Audit-Compliant PaaS on Top of AWS
At the microXchg conference 2016, Zalando talked about their journey to creating an audit-compliant Platform as a Service (PaaS) for multiple autonomous teams that runs on top of Amazon Web Services (AWS). Key lessons learned included: the need for autonomous teams and a supporting PaaS, alongside auditing and a clear vision, are essential to scale development as an engineering organisation grows.
Dropbox Develops Magic Pocket, Moves Away From AWS
On March 14, 2016 Dropbox discussed their migration away from AWS on their blog. The blog post recounts all of the recent activities that have allowed them to achieve their goal of serving 90% of all user data exclusively from their own data centers. The project, named “Magic Pocket”, called for in-house developed software and hardware to be built to support their customer needs.
