AWS Week in Review – May 9, 2022

This post is part of our Week in Review series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!

Another week starts, and here’s a collection of the most significant AWS news from the previous seven days. This week is also the one-year anniversary of CloudFront Functions. It’s exciting to see what customers have built during this first year.

Last Week’s Launches
Here are some launches that caught my attention last week:

Amazon RDS supports PostgreSQL 14 with three levels of cascaded read replicas – That’s 5 replicas per instance, supporting a maximum of 155 read replicas per source instance with up to 30X more read capacity. You can now build a more robust disaster recovery architecture with the capability to create Single-AZ or Multi-AZ cascaded read replica DB instances in same or cross Region.

Amazon RDS on AWS Outposts storage auto scaling – AWS Outposts extends AWS infrastructure, services, APIs, and tools to virtually any datacenter. With Amazon RDS on AWS Outposts, you can deploy managed DB instances in your on-premises environments. Now, you can turn on storage auto scaling when you create or modify DB instances by selecting a checkbox and specifying the maximum database storage size.

Amazon CodeGuru Reviewer suppression of files and folders in code reviews – With CodeGuru Reviewer, you can use automated reasoning and machine learning to detect potential code defects that are difficult to find and get suggestions for improvements. Now, you can prevent CodeGuru Reviewer from generating unwanted findings on certain files like test files, autogenerated files, or files that have not been recently updated.

Amazon EKS console now supports all standard Kubernetes resources to simplify cluster management – To make it easy to visualize and troubleshoot your applications, you can now use the console to see all standard Kubernetes API resource types (such as service resources, configuration and storage resources, authorization resources, policy resources, and more) running on your Amazon EKS cluster. More info in the blog post Introducing Kubernetes Resource View in Amazon EKS console.

AWS AppConfig feature flag Lambda Extension support for Arm/Graviton2 processors – Using AWS AppConfig, you can create feature flags or other dynamic configuration and safely deploy updates. The AWS AppConfig Lambda Extension allows you to access this feature flag and dynamic configuration data in your Lambda functions. You can now use the AWS AppConfig Lambda Extension from Lambda functions using the Arm/Graviton2 architecture.

AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) CLI now supports enabling AWS X-Ray tracing – With the AWS SAM CLI you can initialize, build, package, test on local and cloud, and deploy serverless applications. With AWS X-Ray, you have an end-to-end view of requests as they travel through your application, making them easier to monitor and troubleshoot. Now, you can enable tracing by simply adding a flag to the sam init command.

Amazon Kinesis Video Streams image extraction – With Amazon Kinesis Video Streams you can capture, process, and store media streams. Now, you can also request images via API calls or configure automatic image generation based on metadata tags in ingested video. For example, you can use this to generate thumbnails for playback applications or to have more data for your machine learning pipelines.

AWS GameKit supports Android, iOS, and MacOS games developed with Unreal Engine – With AWS GameKit, you can build AWS-powered game features directly from the Unreal Editor with just a few clicks. Now, the AWS GameKit plugin for Unreal Engine supports building games for the Win64, MacOS, Android, and iOS platforms.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New at AWS page.

Other AWS News
Some other updates you might have missed:

🎂 One-year anniversary of CloudFront Functions – I can’t believe it’s been one year since we launched CloudFront Functions. Now, we have tens of thousands of developers actively using CloudFront Functions, with trillions of invocations per month. You can use CloudFront Functions for HTTP header manipulation, URL rewrites and redirects, cache key manipulations/normalization, access authorization, and more. See some examples in this repo. Let’s see what customers built with CloudFront Functions:

• CloudFront Functions enables Formula 1 to authenticate users with more than 500K requests per second. The solution is using CloudFront Functions to evaluate if users have access to view the race livestream by validating a token in the request.
• Cloudinary is a media management company that helps its customers deliver content such as videos and images to users worldwide. For them, Lambda@Edge remains an excellent solution for applications that require heavy compute operations, but lightweight operations that require high scalability can now be run using CloudFront Functions. With CloudFront Functions, Cloudinary and its customers are seeing significantly increased performance. For example, one of Cloudinary’s customers began using CloudFront Functions, and in about two weeks it was seeing 20–30 percent better response times. The customer also estimates that they will see 75 percent cost savings.
• Based in Japan, DigitalCube is a web hosting provider for WordPress websites. Previously, DigitalCube spent several hours completing each of its update deployments. Now, they can deploy updates across thousands of distributions quickly. Using CloudFront Functions, they’ve reduced update deployment times from 4 hours to 2 minutes. In addition, faster updates and less maintenance work result in better quality throughout DigitalCube’s offerings. It’s now easier for them to test on AWS because they can run tests that affect thousands of distributions without having to scale internally or introduce downtime.
• Amazon.com is using CloudFront Functions to change the way it delivers static assets to customers globally. CloudFront Functions allows them to experiment with hyper-personalization at scale and optimal latency performance. They have been working closely with the CloudFront team during product development, and they like how it is easy to create, test, and deploy custom code and implement business logic at the edge.

AWS open-source news and updates – A newsletter curated by my colleague Ricardo to bring you the latest open-source projects, posts, events, and more. Read the latest edition here.

Reduce log-storage costs by automating retention settings in Amazon CloudWatch – By default, CloudWatch Logs stores your log data indefinitely. This blog post shows how you can reduce log-storage costs by establishing a log-retention policy and applying it across all of your log groups.

Observability for AWS App Runner VPC networking – With X-Ray support in App runner, you can quickly deploy web applications and APIs at any scale and take advantage of adding tracing without having to manage sidecars or agents. Here’s an example of how you can instrument your applications with the AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry (ADOT).

Upcoming AWS Events
It’s AWS Summits season and here are some virtual and in-person events that might be close to you:

• May 10–11, AWS Summit Korea (virtual)
• May 11, AWS Summit Stockholm (in-person)
• May 11–12, AWS Summit Berlin (in-person)
• May 18, AWS Summit Tel Aviv (in-person)
• May 23–25, AWS Summit Washington, DC (in-person)

You can now register for re:MARS to get fresh ideas on topics such as machine learning, automation, robotics, and space. The conference will be in person in Las Vegas, June 21–24.

That’s all from me for this week. Come back next Monday for another Week in Review!

— Danilo