News from AWS

News from AWS

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) introduces two new features that can help to protect your sender reputation: email pausing and reputation metrics. You can use API operations to automatically pause email sending when reputation metrics cross certain thresholds. These features are now available in the following AWS Regions: US West (Oregon), US East (N. Virginia), and EU (Ireland). Read more on the new SES features.

Amazon Route 53 releases API to view service limits: hosted zones, health checks, reusable delegation sets, traffic policies, and traffic policy instances. You can watch your usage and compare it against your current limits, so you can ask for an increase well before reaching a limit.

Amazon EC2 is announcing an increase to the monthly service commitment in the EC2 Service Level Agreement, for both EC2 and EBS, to 99.99%. This change is effective immediately in all regions, and is available to all EC2 customers.

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AWSome Day 2017 Romania

AWSome Day 2017 in Romania

November is a good month for Amazon Web Services lovers from Romania: Bittnet and AWS are hosting not one, but two editions of AWSome Day! AWSome Day is a free introductory one-day event, based on the official AWS Technical Essentials course. Bittnet is the only authorized AWS Training Partner in Romania, and also holds AWS Consulting Partner status.

This is the third consecutive year in which Romanian users can attend this type of event. I have attended the first edition held at Hotel Novotel in Bucharest in October 2015 and it was a great event. Excellent content for an AWS introduction and a great networking opportunity.

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News from AWS

Cloud Events for November 2017

November is a full month for cloud enthusiasts, with great cloud events both in United States and Europe, including one of the most important IT conference of the year (in my opinion, of course), which is AWS re:Invent.

AWS re:Invent 2017

Las Vegas, Nevada, will host this month the biggest AWS event of the year, AWS re:Invent 2017. Between 27 November and 1 December, you can attend over 1,000 breakout sessions, hackathons, bootcamps, labs, and workshops. Tickets are nearly sold out, hurry to secure your place.

If you can’t attend in person, you can still register for the live streaming of the keynotes. You can watch both keynotes (Andy Jassy, CEO, Amazon Web Services, and Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon.com) and  Tuesday Night Live featuring Peter DeSantis, VP, AWS Global Infrastructure.

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AWS Weekly News

AWS adds new features or services each week. I plan to issue “AWS Weekly News” on a weekly (lol) basis to highlight new features that I found appealing. Without further ado, let’s roll!

We do have Windows Server available for Lightsail (virtual private servers). Offer is available in all regions, price starts from $10 per month (Windows Server license included, 1 core, 512MB RAM, 30GB SSD, 1TB data transfer) and go up to $100 (for 2 cores, 8GB RAM, 80GB SSD, 5TB data transfer). As for base image, you can choose from Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2012 R2, and Windows Server 2016 with SQL Express.

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VMworld US 2017 – VMware Cloud on AWS Recommended Sessions

VMworldI previously wrote about my recommendations on vRealize Automation sessions at VMworld US 2017, now it’s time for the en-vogue product everyone is willing to try called VMware Cloud on AWS.

VMware Cloud on AWS is scheduled to be general available this summer, so as expected there are plenty of breakout sessions to choose from. VMware announced the product last year at VMworld Europe and I remember how all the formerly secret sessions suddenly were “sold out”. I attended a session led by Frank Denneman (you will see two of his sessions listed below) and I was super impressed by his enthusiasm. Former Senior Technical Marketing Architect at VMware, specialized in DRS, vMotion and Fault Tolerance, he joined few years PernixData (up to Chief Technologist), to come back late 2016 at VMware to work on an unknown technology. He did signed up on blanc, without knowing what is this about. That technology was indeed VMware Cloud on AWS. Since last VMworld, we have seen demos and found more data on the product, but I’m really waiting for this year sessions and to finally have some hands on with the product.

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Infrastructure as Code – New AWS Whitepaper

Infrastructure as CodeAWS (Amazon Web Services) made available a new whitepaper “Infrastructure as Code”. 39 pages of dense information, this is a must-read for all DevOps engineers.

My Take on Content

  • Introduction to Infrastructure as Code – short introduction presenting disadvantages of manual processes and the general philosophy of Infrastructure as Code
  • The Infrastructure Resource Lifecycle – short description of lifecycle stages
  • Resource Provisioning – now we start diving into AWS services, namely AWS CloudFormation (going through template anatomy, change sets, reusable templates, template linting, and best practices)
  • Configuration Management – we have two AWS services presented in this chapter: AWS EC2 Systems Manager and AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate.
  • Monitoring and Performance – this is of course Amazon CloudWatch (with its 3 services: CloudWatch, CloudWatch Logs and CloudWatch Events)
  • Governance and Compliance – short presentation of AWS Config and AWS Config Rules
  • Resource Optimization – comes in the form of AWS Trusted Advisor
  • Next Steps – practical action to start implementing Infrastructure as Code in your organization
  • Resources – short, but useful list of videos, documentation and related AWS whitepapers

As expected, there is good content into the whitepaper, so go and download it!

Alternatively, if you are not familiar with AWS whitepapers you can get more information at dedicated portal. You can download here introductory whitepapers or more specialized documents (Cloud Computing Economics, Security and Compliance, AWS Well-Architected Framework, DevOps, Operations, Backup & Recovery, Business Applications, Database Applications, Migration and many other).

No login required, so go grab them now 🙂