AWS Week in Review – November 7, 2016

Let’s take a quick look at what happened in AWS-land last week. Thanks are due to the 17 internal and external contributors who submitted pull requests!

Monday November 7	We announced a CloudWatch Update – Jump From Metrics to Associated Logs. We published a Quick Start Reference Deployment for CI/CD for Microsoft Windows on AWS. We announced that you can now Test Drive Amazon Kinesis Firehose Using Built-in Sample Data. We announced that Amazon RDS for SQL Server now supports Microsoft SQL Server 2016. The AWS Compute Blog talked about Real World AWS Scalability. The AWS Compute Blog showed you how to Run Swift Web Applications with Amazon ECS. The AWS Database Blog published Part 1 of a series on Migrating Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise Workloads to Amazon RDS. The AWS Government, Education, & Nonprofits Blog wrote about Honoring All Who Served on Veterans Day. Elliott from GorillaStack kicked off a new series around Getting Dirty With Serverless Framework v1 with Part 1: Redirects. The AWS Podcast released an episode covering a whole raft of recent Service updates. Mistwire.com has compelted a series of articles covering the 8 Domains of the AWS Solutions Architect Professional Certification Exam. Alvaro Barbero and Luis Herrera wrote an article on How to Fake it As an Artist with AWS new P2 instances and Deep Learning. Ihor Kravchuk wrote an article on How to secure your AWS account using CloudFormation. AWS Community Hero Eric Hammond talked about Running aws-cli Commands Inside an AWS Lambda Function. Flux7 explored DevOps, DaaS & AWS WorkSpaces: Facilitating Self-Service Across the Organization.
Tuesday November 8	The AWS Government, Education, & Nonprofits Blog shared Examples of How the Cloud Scales to Meet Election Day Demand. The AWS Security Blog revealed some re:Invent 2016 Security and Compliance Sessions with Seats Remaining. The AWS Startup Collection explained How Crimson Hexagon Increased Productivity by 82%. Carl Nordenfelt released lulo, a plugin engine for AWS Lambda based AWS CloudFormation CustomResources. CloudHealth Technologies dropped a press release: CloudHealth Optimizes Cloud Infrastructure Through Integrated Performance Metrics. Kim Schmidt added another video to her Amazon Aurora Deep Dive Video Section 2.0 (Architecture): Video 2.8: Understanding Amazon Aurora’s Performance. Kim Schmidt was a contributor along with 5 others to the newly published Business Intelligence and Big Data on AWS White Paper. Noah Zoschke from Convox shared the why and how of Encryption at Rest with KMS. Batchly showed you how to Lower Your EMR Costs by Leveraging AWS Spot Instances. Spotinst announced a New Console Feature – Spot Market Scoring. Trek10 talked about Serverless Architectures for IoT.
Wednesday November 9	The AWS Compute Blog showed you how to Build Serverless Applications in AWS Mobile Hub with New Cloud Logic and User Sign-in Features. We announced Cloud Logic, Email and Password Sign-In, and SAML Authentication for AWS Mobile Hub. The AWS DevOps Blog talked about Deploying a Spring Boot Application on AWS Using AWS Elastic Beanstalk. cloudonaut.io wrote about My Opinion on Serverless. Spotinst explored Blended EC2 Clusters and How to Create Them, published an AWS Case Study: Inneractive, and talked about EC2 Container Service. 2nd Watch listed the Top 5 Things to Avoid at AWS re:Invent 2016. DZone Cloud Zone shared a Docker for AWS Getting Started Video. ParkMyCloud addressed the question Does ParkMyCloud Support AWS Reserved Instances?
Thursday November 10	We announced a new Burst Balance Metric for SSD (gp2) Volumes. A guest post talked about Genome Engineering Applications: Early Adopters of the Cloud. The AWS Compute Blog described Distributed Deep Learning Made Easy. The AWS Security Blog explained How to Assign Permissions Using New AWS Managed Policies for Job Functions. The Amazon Mobile App Distribution Blog showed you How to Set up Amazon API Gateway as a Proxy to Debug Account Linking. The Cloudability Blog explored the AWS cost efficiency of the new EC2 x1.16xlarge in a recent article. Is it time to upgrade? The Cloud Academy Blog wrote a post about how to successfully complete a Parse Server Migration on AWS. Brian Beach shared a Simple Email Service (SES) Sample Application. Botmetric listed 5 Surefire AWS Security Best Practices (Not Just) for Dummies. CloudCheckr shared an AWS re:Invent Roundup on Unified Cloud Governance. Cloudyn is Getting Set for the Cloud Event of the Year.
Friday November 11	We announced that AWS Educate is Now Available to US Veterans. We announced HIPAA Eligibility for AWS Snowball. We announced that the Amazon Kinesis Streams Console Now Supports Configuring Data Retention and Shard Level Metrics. We announced new Data Compression, Connection Management, and Data Loading Features for Amazon Redshift. We announced our Fourth Edge Location in Japan for Amazon CloudFront. We announced that Amazon RDS Now Supports Version 9.6.1 of PostgreSQL. The AWS Big Data Blog listed AWS Big Data & Machine Learning Sessions at re:Invent 2016. N2WS listed 5 AWS re:Invent Backup Sessions to Attend This Year. RightScale announced Product Updates including Support for P2 Instances in Cloud Analytics and New AWS Regions. Kim Schmidt added another video to her Amazon Aurora Deep Dive Video Section 2.0 (Architecture): Video 2.9: Amazon Aurora’s Performance Benchmarking”.
Saturday November 12	Eric Hammond talked about the Alestic.com Blog Infrastructure Upgrade. AHEAD talked about Deploying Coded Infrastructure With Your Cloud Management Portal. DZone Cloud Zone shared Three Things You Can Do to Improve Your AWS Security Posture.
Sunday November 13	The AWS Compute Blog listed AWS Lambda Sessions at re:Invent 2016. Serverless Code wrote about using Lambda to enable Prod-to-Staging data pipelines for better CI/CD environments. REA Group talked about Reactive Streams and DynamoDB. DZone Cloud Zone reviewed The Open Guide to Amazon Web Services.

New & Notable Open Source

Sippy Cup is a Python nanoframework for AWS Lambda and API Gateway.
Yesterdaytabase is a Python tool for constantly refreshing data in your staging and test environments with Lambda and CloudFormation.
ebs-snapshot-lambda is a Lambda function to snapshot EBS volumes and purge old snapshots.
examples is a collection of boilerplates and examples of serverless architectures built with the Serverless Framework and Lambda.
ecs-deploy-cli is a simple and easy way to deploy tasks and update services in AWS ECS.
Comments-Showcase is a serverless comment webapp that uses API Gateway, Lambda, DynamoDB, and IoT.
serverless-offline emulates Lambda and API Gateway locally for development of Serverless projects.
aws-sign-web is a JavaScript implementation of AWS Signature v4 for use within web browsers.
Zappa implements serverless Django on Lambda and API Gateway.
awsping is a console tool to check latency to AWS regions.

New Customer Success Stories

Cambia Health Solutions – Cambia Health Solutions creates and invests in innovations designed to serve the changing needs of individuals and families, including a wide range of companies in its Direct Health Solutions Network. Within the portfolio of Direct Health Solutions companies, Wildflower uses AWS to deliver its pregnancy app to more than 50,000 women and HealthSparq delivers its healthcare price transparency app to more than 70 health plans covering 70 million members
Europol – Using AWS, Europol deployed its anti-ransomware website in three days, supported 2.6 million visitors on the first day, and has supported 12 million visitors since the website’s launch. Europol, the European Union’s law-enforcement agency, assists European Union member states in their fight against international crime and terrorism.
Goodwill Industries – Goodwill Industries of Southern New Jersey and Philadelphia reduces downtime at its stores, schools, and offices, backs up servers hourly, and can restore servers within moments of failure using AWS. The non-profit organization, based in Maple Shade, New Jersey, helps put people to work so they can realize their economic potential.
Infor – Infor saves 75 percent on monthly database backup costs, completes application backups 30 percent faster, and keeps pace with global business growth by going all in on AWS. The organization provides enterprise resource planning and other software solutions to a range of enterprises worldwide. Infor runs more than 30 customer-facing applications on the AWS Cloud.
Olympusat – Olympusat uses AWS to support its microservices architecture, saving $25,000 a month by eliminating the use of similar, more expensive services. Olympusat is a large independent media company specializing in Spanish-language movie, music, and entertainment television channels.
PayFort – PayFort delivers trusted, highly secure services to its customers by using AWS’s Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliance credentials. The startup provides its payment solutions to organizations across the Middle East, giving them an easy way to conduct online transactions.

New SlideShare Presentations

Upcoming Events

November 14 (Seoul, Korea) – AWSKRUG & JAWS Kobe IoT Online Seminar (Korean | Japanese).
November 16 (Seoul, Korea) – AWSomeDay Online.
November 14 (New Delhi, India) – AWS DevDay India.
November 16 (Pune, India) – AWS DevDay India.
November 17 (Bangalore, India) – AWS DevDay India.
November 22 (Oslo, Norway) – AWS User Group Norway: Deployments pipelines in Spinnaker.
November 23 (Cardiff, Wales) – Meetup #4 of the AWS South Wales User Group.

Help Wanted

AWS Careers.

Stay tuned for next week! In the meantime, follow me on Twitter and subscribe to the RSS feed.

— Jeff;

AWS News Blog

AWS Week in Review – November 7, 2016

Modified 1/21/2021 – In an effort to ensure a great experience, expired links in this post have been updated or removed from the original post.

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