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AWS Expands Cloud to Canada, United Kingdom
Just days after the end of re:Invent, AWS shared news of further geographic expansion. Amazon added locations in Montréal and London, representing the 15th and 16th regions of the AWS cloud.
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Amazon Preview FPGA Enabled EC2 Instances
Amongst the flurry of announcements at re:invent 2016 was the launch of a developer preview for a new F1 instance type. The F1 comes with one to eight high end Xilinx Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) to provide programmable hardware. The FPGAs are likely to be used for risk management, simulation, search and machine learning applications.
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Azure Functions Reach General Availability
Microsoft recently announced an addition to its Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering called Azure Functions. Initially launched as a preview service in March 2016, Azure Functions provide developers with an event-driven serverless compute platform that allow organizations to pay for only what they consume.
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Building Conversational and Text Interfaces Using Amazon Lex
At the recent AWS re:Invent conference, Amazon introduced a preview of their deep learning technology called Amazon Lex which can be used to build conversational interfaces using voice and text. Amazon Lex is powered on the same deep learning technology as Alexa, which is used in the portable Bluetooth and Wi-Fi enabled Amazon Echo speaker.
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AWS re:Invent Recap
At their annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, AWS unleashed a flurry of announcements about upcoming cloud services. Amazon outlined over two dozen new capabilities coming to the public cloud, including directly querying data in S3 object storage, building code as part of deployment pipelines, provisioning cheap virtual private servers, and moving data in bulk, ETL-style.
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Amazon Launches Lightsail Virtual Private Servers
Amazon has launched Lightsail, a Virtual Private Server (VPS) service to compete with companies like Digital Ocean, Linode and the multitude of Low End Box providers. The service bundles a basic Linux virtual machine with SSD storage and a bandwidth allowance. Pricing starts at $5/month with tiers by RAM allocation. Each larger configuration comes with more storage and bandwidth.
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Amazon Releases 'AWS X-Ray' Distributed Tracing Service in Preview
At the AWS re:Invent 2016 conference, held in Las Vegas, USA, a distributed tracing service named AWS X-Ray was released in preview within all 12 public AWS Regions. In a similar fashion to Google’s Dapper, Twitter’s Zipkin and the OpenTracing API, AWS X-Ray helps developers analyse and debug distributed applications, such as those built using a microservices architectural style.
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Amazon Introduces AWS Batch Preview
At the recent AWS Re:Invent event, Amazon announced a new preview service, called AWS Batch. AWS Batch allows organizations to optimize their scheduling and workload execution across a cloud-based landscape. Amazon has built this service in response to many AWS customers building their own batch platforms using EC2 instances, containers and CloudWatch.
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Amazon Announces AWS Shield for DDoS Protection
At the recent re:Invent 2016 event, Amazon announced a new service called AWS Shield, which provides customers with protection from Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. This announcement comes just over a month after Amazon was impacted by a DDoS attack on a DNS provider that Amazon used, Dynamic Network Services (Dyn).
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Technologies for the Future of Software Engineering
The Cloud, infrastructure as code, federated architectures with APIs, and anti-fragile systems: these are technologies for developing software systems that are rapidly coming into focus, claimed Mary Poppendieck. Systems are moving towards the cloud, and APIs are replacing central shared databases and enable the internet of things. We need to develop anti-fragile systems which embrace failure.
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AWS Launches Amazon Linux Container Image
AWS recently launched a Docker container image for its Amazon Linux operating system, complementing the EC2 specific Amazon Linux AMI with a versatile deployment option for custom cloud and on-premise environments. The image is available through the Amazon EC2 Container Registry (Amazon ECR), and also as an official repository on Docker Hub.
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Microsoft Flow Reaches General Availability
Microsoft recently announced the General Availability of Microsoft Flow, a cloud-based automation platform that provides workflow and connectivity capabilities across many popular online and on-premises services. Since the preview, in April 2016, 117,000 people from 61,000 organizations have used the service to automate their business processes.
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The AWS Well-Architected Framework Adds Operational Excellence
Amazon has updated their AWS Well-Architected Framework (PDF) based on feedback from clients, adding a new pillar, Operational Excellence.
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AWS Lambda Now Supports Environment Variables
AWS has recently added to AWS Lambda the possibility to define variables to customize the environment the code runs in. This will enable writing code that is clean and reusable without requiring its redeployment, writes AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr.
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Microsoft Launches BizTalk Server 2016
On October 27th, Microsoft launched their 10th release of BizTalk Server. With this release, Microsoft has invested in hybrid and cloud connectivity for BizTalk Server 2016.