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.

You can now use up to four monitors with Amazon WorkSpaces when accessing your WorkSpace from a Windows or Apple Mac computer. Two of the monitors can have 4K Ultra HD resolution. There is no additional cost to use these features, and they are available in all AWS regions where Amazon WorkSpaces is available.

AWS released AWS Amplify, an Open Source library under Apache 2.0 for developers looking to build cloud connected applications with JavaScript on web or mobile platforms.

Users of Amazon Kinesis can enjoy a new management console which simplifies the console user experience.

I am not personally a fan of Amazon Chime, but this worth mentioning. Chime now supports incoming webhooks. Developers can configure their applications to use incoming webhooks to post messages into Amazon Chime chat rooms. Read the documentation for more details.

AWS announced a new pricing plan for IoT, starting 1st January 2018. The new plan unbundles pricing by charging for components independently. You can connect a device to AWS IoT 24/7 for an entire year for as little as $0.042. Messaging prices, which were priced $5 per million messages, start at just $1 per million messages and go as low as $0.70.

When using Amazon RDS for MySQL and Amazon RDS for MariaDB you can now launch R4, db.t2.xlarge, db.t2.2xlarge, and db.m4.16xlarge instances types. R4 instances are the latest generation of Memory Optimized instances, featuring all previous-generation sizes plus a new 16xlarge instance size. They offer between 15.25 GiB to 488 GiB of DDR4 memory and 2 to 64 vCPUs.

Amazon EC2 now supports Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS) enabled EBS snapshots for Windows Server AMIs. VSS allows application data to be backed up while applications are still running, by coordinating between user applications that update data on disk and those that back up applications.

You can see the custom Reserved Instance buy recommendations based on your Amazon EC2 usage via AWS Cost Explorer. AWS calculates these recommendations based on past usage. These recommendations show opportunities for cost savings, you may want to take a look at them.

AWS released a new whitepaper: Serverless Architectures with AWS Lambda. Document covers AWS Lambda (the basics and deep dive), Serverless best practices (architecture and development), and few sample serverless architectures.

AWS re:Invent is around the corner. I wrote about it before in “Cloud Events for November 2017”. Last call, 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.

Constantin Ghioc

I usually play with vSphere API, Ansible, vRealize Automation, vRealize Orchestrator, and different AWS tools. In my other life I’m a husband and a father, an amateur photographer and a Go enthusiast.

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