AWS Blog

About once a week, I speak to current and potential AWS customers in our Seattle Executive Briefing Center. While I generally focus on our innovation process, we sometimes discuss other topics, including application migration. When enterprises decide to migrate their application portfolios they want to do it in a structured, orderly fashion. These portfolios typically consist of hundreds of complex Windows and Linux applications, relational databases, and more. Customers find themselves eager yet uncertain as to how to proceed. After spending time working with these customers, we have learned that their challenges generally fall in to three major categories:

Discovery – They want to make sure that they have a deep and complete understanding of all of the moving parts that power each application.

Server & Database Migration – They need to transfer on-premises workloads and database tables to the cloud.

Tracking / Management – With large application portfolios and multiple migrations happening in parallel, they need to track and manage progress in an application-centric fashion.

Over the last couple of years we have launched a set of tools that address the first two challenges. The AWS Application Discovery Service automates the process of discovering and collecting system information, the AWS Server Migration Service takes care of moving workloads to the cloud, and the AWS Database Migration Service moves relational databases, NoSQL databases, and data warehouses with minimal downtime. Partners like Racemi and CloudEndure also offer migration tools of their own.

New AWS Migration Hub
Today we are bringing this collection of AWS and partner migration tools together in the AWS Migration Hub. The hub provides access to the tools that I mentioned above, guides you through the migration process, and tracks the status of each migration, all in accord with the methodology and tenets described in our Migration Acceleration Program (MAP).

Here’s the main screen. It outlines the migration process (discovery, migration, and tracking):

Clicking on Start discovery reveals the flow of the migration process:

It is also possible to skip the Discovery step and begin the migration immediately:

The Servers list is populated using data from an AWS migration service (Server Migration Service or Database Migration Service), partner tools, or using data collected by the AWS Application Discovery Service:

I can on Group as application to create my first application:

Once I identify some applications to migrate, I can track them in the Migrations section of the Hub:

The migration tools, if authorized, automatically send status updates and results back to Migration Hub, for display on the migration status page for the application. Here you can see that Racemi DynaCenter and CloudEndure Migration have played their parts in the migration:

I can track the status of my migrations by checking the Migration Hub Dashboard:

Migration Hub works with migration tools from AWS and our Migration Partners; see the list of integrated partner tools to learn more:

Available Now
AWS Migration Hub can manage migrations in any AWS Region that has the necessary migration tools available; the hub itself runs in the US West (Oregon) Region. There is no charge for the Hub; you pay only for the AWS services that you consume in the course of the migration.

If you are ready to begin your migration to the cloud and are in need of some assistance, please take advantage of the services offered by our Migration Acceleration Partners. These organizations have earned their migration competency by repeatedly demonstrating their ability to deliver large-scale migration.

— Jeff;

Today we’re releasing a beta of a new tool, SAM Local, that makes it easy to build and test your serverless applications locally. In this post we’ll use SAM local to build, debug, and deploy a quick application that allows us to vote on tabs or spaces by curling an endpoint. AWS introduced Serverless Application Model (SAM) last year to make it easier for developers to deploy serverless applications. If you’re not already familiar with SAM my colleague Orr wrote a great post on how to use SAM that you can read in about 5 minutes. At it’s core, SAM is a powerful open source specification built on AWS CloudFormation that makes it easy to keep your serverless infrastructure as code – and they have the cutest mascot.

SAM Local takes all the good parts of SAM and brings them to your local machine.

• It lets you develop and test your AWS Lambda functions locally with sam local and Docker.
• It lets you simulate function invocations from known event sources like Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), and more.
• It lets you start a local Amazon API Gateway from a SAM template, and quickly iterate on your functions with hot-reloading.
• It lets you quickly validate your SAM template and even integrate that validation with linters or IDEs
• It provides interactive debugging support for your Lambda functions

There are a couple of ways to install SAM Local but the easiest is through NPM. A quick npm install -g aws-sam-local should get us going but if you want the latest version you can always install straight from the source: go get github.com/awslabs/aws-sam-local (this will create a binary named aws-sam-local, not sam).

I like to vote on things so let’s write a quick SAM application to vote on Spaces versus Tabs. We’ll use a very simple, but powerful, architecture of API Gateway fronting a Lambda function and we’ll store our results in DynamoDB. In the end a user should be able to curl our API curl https://SOMEURL/ -d '{"vote": "spaces"}' and get back the number of votes.

Let’s start by writing a simple SAM template.yaml:

AWSTemplateFormatVersion : '2010-09-09'
Transform: AWS::Serverless-2016-10-31
Resources:
  VotesTable:
    Type: "AWS::Serverless::SimpleTable"
  VoteSpacesTabs:
    Type: "AWS::Serverless::Function"
    Properties:
      Runtime: python3.6
      Handler: lambda_function.lambda_handler
      Policies: AmazonDynamoDBFullAccess
      Environment:
        Variables:
          TABLE_NAME: !Ref VotesTable
      Events:
        Vote:
          Type: Api
          Properties:
            Path: /
            Method: post

So we create a DynamoDB table that we expose to our Lambda function through an environment variable called TABLE_NAME.

To test that this template is valid I’ll go ahead and call sam validate to make sure I haven’t fat-fingered anything. It returns Valid! so let’s go ahead and get to work on our Lambda function.

import os
import os
import json
import boto3
votes_table = boto3.resource('dynamodb').Table(os.getenv('TABLE_NAME'))

def lambda_handler(event, context):
    print(event)
    if event['httpMethod'] == 'GET':
        resp = votes_table.scan()
        return {'body': json.dumps({item['id']: int(item['votes']) for item in resp['Items']})}
    elif event['httpMethod'] == 'POST':
        try:
            body = json.loads(event['body'])
        except:
            return {'statusCode': 400, 'body': 'malformed json input'}
        if 'vote' not in body:
            return {'statusCode': 400, 'body': 'missing vote in request body'}
        if body['vote'] not in ['spaces', 'tabs']:
            return {'statusCode': 400, 'body': 'vote value must be "spaces" or "tabs"'}

        resp = votes_table.update_item(
            Key={'id': body['vote']},
            UpdateExpression='ADD votes :incr',
            ExpressionAttributeValues={':incr': 1},
            ReturnValues='ALL_NEW'
        )
        return {'body': "{} now has {} votes".format(body['vote'], resp['Attributes']['votes'])}

So let’s test this locally. I’ll need to create a real DynamoDB database to talk to and I’ll need to provide the name of that database through the enviornment variable TABLE_NAME. I could do that with an env.json file or I can just pass it on the command line. First, I can call:
$ echo '{"httpMethod": "POST", "body": "{\"vote\": \"spaces\"}"}' |\
TABLE_NAME="vote-spaces-tabs" sam local invoke "VoteSpacesTabs"
to test the Lambda – it returns the number of votes for spaces so theoritically everything is working. Typing all of that out is a pain so I could generate a sample event with sam local generate-event api and pass that in to the local invocation. Far easier than all of that is just running our API locally. Let’s do that: sam local start-api. Now I can curl my local endpoints to test everything out.
I’ll run the command: $ curl -d '{"vote": "tabs"}' http://127.0.0.1:3000/ and it returns: “tabs now has 12 votes”. Now, of course I did not write this function perfectly on my first try. I edited and saved several times. One of the benefits of hot-reloading is that as I change the function I don’t have to do any additional work to test the new function. This makes iterative development vastly easier.

Let’s say we don’t want to deal with accessing a real DynamoDB database over the network though. What are our options? Well we can download DynamoDB Local and launch it with java -Djava.library.path=./DynamoDBLocal_lib -jar DynamoDBLocal.jar -sharedDb. Then we can have our Lambda function use the AWS_SAM_LOCAL environment variable to make some decisions about how to behave. Let’s modify our function a bit:

import os
import json
import boto3
if os.getenv("AWS_SAM_LOCAL"):
    votes_table = boto3.resource(
        'dynamodb',
        endpoint_url="http://docker.for.mac.localhost:8000/"
    ).Table("spaces-tabs-votes")
else:
    votes_table = boto3.resource('dynamodb').Table(os.getenv('TABLE_NAME'))

Now we’re using a local endpoint to connect to our local database which makes working without wifi a little easier.

SAM local even supports interactive debugging! In Java and Node.js I can just pass the -d flag and a port to immediately enable the debugger. For Python I could use a library like import epdb; epdb.serve() and connect that way. Then we can call sam local invoke -d 8080 "VoteSpacesTabs" and our function will pause execution waiting for you to step through with the debugger.

Alright, I think we’ve got everything working so let’s deploy this!

First I’ll call the sam package command which is just an alias for aws cloudformation package and then I’ll use the result of that command to sam deploy.

$ sam package --template-file template.yaml --s3-bucket MYAWESOMEBUCKET --output-template-file package.yaml
Uploading to 144e47a4a08f8338faae894afe7563c3  90570 / 90570.0  (100.00%)
Successfully packaged artifacts and wrote output template to file package.yaml.
Execute the following command to deploy the packaged template
aws cloudformation deploy --template-file package.yaml --stack-name 
$ sam deploy --template-file package.yaml --stack-name VoteForSpaces --capabilities CAPABILITY_IAM
Waiting for changeset to be created..
Waiting for stack create/update to complete
Successfully created/updated stack - VoteForSpaces

Which brings us to our API:
.

I’m going to hop over into the production stage and add some rate limiting in case you guys start voting a lot – but otherwise we’ve taken our local work and deployed it to the cloud without much effort at all. I always enjoy it when things work on the first deploy!

You can vote now and watch the results live! http://spaces-or-tabs.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/

We hope that SAM Local makes it easier for you to test, debug, and deploy your serverless apps. We have a CONTRIBUTING.md guide and we welcome pull requests. Please tweet at us to let us know what cool things you build. You can see our What’s New post here and the documentation is live here.

– Randall

With just 110 days left until November 27, 2017, my colleagues and I are working hard to get ready for re:Invent 2017. I have not yet started on my blog posts or on any new LEGO creations, but I have taken a look at a very preliminary list of launches and am already gearing up for a very busy month or two!

We’ve got more venues, a bigger expo hall, more content (over 1,000 sessions), more hackathons, more bootcamps, more workshops, and more certification opportunities than ever before. In addition to perennial favorites like the Tatonka Challenge and the re:PLAY party, we’ve added broomball (a long-time Amazon tradition) and some all-star fitness activities.

Every year I get last-minute texts, calls, and emails from long-lost acquaintances begging for tickets and have to turn them all down (I’m still waiting for the one that starts with “I am pretty sure we were in first grade together…” but you get the idea). Even though we increase capacity every year, we are expecting a sell-out crowd once again and I’d like to encourage you to register today in order to avoid being left out.

See you in Vegas!

— Jeff;

I’m really excited to share some recent enhancements to two of my favorite services: Amazon Connect and Amazon Lex. Amazon Connect is a self-service, cloud-based contact center service that makes it easy for any business to deliver better customer service at lower cost. Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces using voice and text. By integrating these two services you can take advantage of Lex‘s automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural language processing/understading (NLU) capabilities to create great self-service experiences for your customers. To enable this integration the Lex team added support for 8kHz speech input – more on that later. Why should you care about this? Well, if a bot can solve the majority of your customer’s requests your customers spend less time waiting on hold and more time using your products.

If you need some more background on Amazon Connect or Lex I strongly recommend Jeff’s previous posts[1][2] on these services – especially if you like LEGOs.

Let’s dive in and learn to use this new integration. We’ll take an application that we built on our Twitch channel and modify it for this blog. At the application’s core a user calls an Amazon Connect number which connects them to an Lex bot which invokes an AWS Lambda function based on an intent from Lex. So what does our little application do?

I want to finally settle the question of what the best code editor is: I like vim, it’s a spectacular editor that does one job exceptionally well – editing code (it’s the best). My colleague Jeff likes emacs, a great operating system editor… if you were born with extra joints in your fingers. My colleague Tara loves Visual Studio and sublime. Rather than fighting over what the best editor is I thought we might let you, dear reader, vote. Don’t worry you can even vote for butterflies.

Interested in voting? Call +1 614-569-4019 and tell us which editor you’re voting for! We don’t store your number or record your voice so feel free to vote more than once for vim. Want to see the votes live? http://best-editor-ever.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/.

Now, how do we build this little contraption? We’ll cover each component but since we’ve talked about Lex and Lambda before we’ll focus mostly on the Amazon Connect component. I’m going to assume you already have a connect instance running.

Amazon Lex

Let’s start with the Lex side of things. We’ll create a bot named VoteEditor with two intents: VoteEditor with a single slot called editor and ConnectToAgent with no slots. We’ll populate our editor slot full of different code editor names (maybe we’ll leave out emacs).

AWS Lambda

Our Lambda function will also be fairly simple. First we’ll create a Amazon DynamoDB table to store our votes. Then we’ll make a helper method to respond to Lex (build_response) – it will just wrap our message in a Lex friendly response format. Now we just have to figure out our flow logic.

def lambda_handler(event, context):
    if 'ConnectToAgent' == event['currentIntent']['name']:
        return build_response("Ok, connecting you to an agent.")
    elif 'VoteEditor' == event['currentIntent']['name']:
        editor = event['currentIntent']['slots']['editor']
        resp = ddb.update_item(
            Key={"name": editor.lower()},
            UpdateExpression="ADD votes :incr",
            ExpressionAttributeValues={":incr": 1},
            ReturnValues="ALL_NEW"
        )
        msg = "Awesome, now {} has {} votes!".format(
            resp['Attributes']['name'],
            resp['Attributes']['votes'])
        return build_response(msg)

Let’s make sure we understand the code. So, if we got a vote for an editor and it doesn’t exist yet then we add that editor with 1 vote. Otherwise we increase the number of votes on that editor by 1. If we get a request for an agent, we terminate the flow with a nice message. Easy. Now we just tell our Lex bot to use our Lambda function to fulfill our intents. We can test that everything is working over text in the Lex console before moving on.

Amazon Connect

Before we can use our Lex bot in a Contact Flow we have to make sure our Amazon Connect instance has access to it. We can do this by hopping over to the Amazon Connect service console, selecting our instance, and navigating to “Contact Flows”. There should be a section called Lex where you can add your bots!

Now that our Amazon Connect instance can invoke our Lex bot we can create a new Contact Flow that contains our Lex bot. We add the bot to our flow through the “Get customer input” widget from the “Interact” category.

Once we’re on the widget we have a “DTMF” tab for taking input from number keys on a phone or the “Amazon Lex” tab for taking voiceinput and passing it to the Lex service. We’ll use the Lex tab and put in some configuration.

Lots of options, but in short we add the bot we want to use (including the version of the bot), the intents we want to use from our bot, and a short prompt to introduce the bot (and maybe prompt the customer for input).

Our final contact flow looks like this:

A real world example might allow a customer to perform many transactions through a Lex bot. Then on an error or ConnectToAgent intent put the customer into a queue where they could talk to a real person. It could collect and store information about users and populate a rich interface for an agent to use so they could jump right into the conversation with all the context they need.

I want to especially highlight the advantage of 8kHz audio support in Lex. Lex originally only supported speech input that was sampled at a higher rate than the 8 kHz input from the phone. Modern digital communication appliations typically use audio signals sampled at a minimum of 16 kHz. This higher fidelity recroding makes it easier differentiate between sounds like “ess” (/s/) and “eff” (/f/) – or so the audio experts tell me. Phones, however, use a much lower quality recording. Humans, and their ears, are pretty good at using surrounding words to figure out what a voice is saying from a lower quality recording (just check the NASA apollo recordings for proof of this). Most digital phone systems are setup to use 8 kHz sampling by default – it’s a nice tradeoff in bandwidth and fidelity. That’s why your voice sometimes sounds different on the phone. On top of this fundmental sampling rate issue you also have to deal with the fact that a lot of phone call data is already lossy (can you hear me now?). There are thousands of different devices from hundreds of different manufacturers, and tons of different software implentations. So… how do you solve this recognition issue?

The Lex team decided that the best way to address this was to expand the set of models they were using for speech recognition to include an 8kHz model. Support for an 8 kHz telephony audio sampling rate provides increased speech recognition accuracy and fidelity for your contact center interactions. This was a great effort by the team that enables a lot of customers to do more with Amazon Connect.

One final note is that Amazon Connect uses the exact same PostContent endpoint that you can use as an external developer so you don’t have to be a Amazon Connect user to take advantage of this 8kHz feature in Lex.

I hope you guys enjoyed this post and as always the real details are in the docs and API Reference.

– Randall

Imagine if you will, you have obtained a new position at Unicorn.Rentals, a company that specializes in LARM, Legendary Animal Rental Market. Given the chance, what child wouldn’t happily exchange anything for the temporary use of a unicorn? What parent could refuse the opportunity to make their children happy? Let’s estimate the year to be 2017 and Unicorn.Rentals continues to dominate in the animal rental market.

You are about to enter another dimension, a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and lies at the beginning of man’s cloud knowledge. This is a journey into a wondrous land of imagination, a land of both shadow and substance. You are crossing over into the GameDay Essentials Zone.

Well, maybe not another dimension but almost as cool. Maybe, kinda? Either way, I am very excited to introduce the newest show on the AWS Twitch Channel named GameDay Essentials. The GameDay Essentials show is a  “new hire training program” for the aforementioned Unicorn.Rentals company scenario. You will step into the shoes of a new employee being ramped up and trained on cloud computing in order to work successfully for a company using Amazon Web Services.

With the GameDay Essentials show, you will get hands-on computing experience to help with the growth of the Unicorn.Rentals startup. The first episode, Recon, premiered on July 25^th and provided information on logging services with CloudTrail and Cloudwatch, as well as, how to assess the configuration and identify existing inventory resources in an AWS Account. You can check out the recording of Episode 1–Recon here. The rest of season one for this six-part series airs on Tuesdays at 11:30 AM PT, the next three episodes discussing the following topics:

• Episode 2 – Scaling: Learn how to scale your application infrastructure by diving into the how to of implementing scaling techniques and auto scaling groups. Airing on August 1 
• Episode 3 – Changes: Winston Churchill is quoted saying “To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often”. This GameDay episode is all about managing change as a key component to success. You will learn how to use native AWS security and deployment tools to track and manage change and discuss how to handle changes in team dynamics. Airing on August 8th
• Episode 4 – Decoupling: Most people in the technology industry understand that you should avoid creating tightly coupled systems. Therefore, you will discover how loosely coupled systems operate and gain knowledge on how to diagnose any failures that may occur with these systems. Airing on August 15th 

Summary

Our latest show, GameDay Essentials is designed to help you “get into the game” and learn more about cloud computing and the AWS Platform. GameDay Essentials joins our other live coding shows already featured each week on the AWS Twitch Channel: Live Coding with AWS and AWS Maker Studio.

Tune in each week to the AWS Twitch channel to visit another dimension: a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of cloud. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area, which we call the GameDay Essentials Zone. Get it, like the Twilight Zone, still no? Oh well, check out the GameDay Essentials show on Twitch on the AWS Channel, it is a great resource for interactive learning about cloud computing with AWS, so enjoy the ride.

– Tara

Welcome back to another month of Hot Startups! Every day, startups are creating innovative and exciting businesses, applications, and products around the world. Each month we feature a handful of startups doing cool things using AWS.

July is all about learning! These companies are focused on providing access to tools and resources to expand knowledge and skills in different ways.

This month’s startups:

• CodeHS – provides fun and accessible computer science curriculum for middle and high schools.
• Insight – offers intensive fellowships to grow technical talent in Data Science.
• iTranslate – enables people to read, write, and speak in over 90 languages, anywhere in the world.

CodeHS (San Francisco, CA)

In 2012, Stanford students Zach Galant and Jeremy Keeshin were computer science majors and TAs for introductory classes when they noticed a trend among their peers. Many wished that they had been exposed to computer science earlier in life. In their senior year, Zach and Jeremy launched CodeHS to give middle and high schools the opportunity to provide a fun, accessible computer science education to students everywhere. CodeHS is a web-based curriculum pathway complete with teacher resources, lesson plans, and professional development opportunities. The curriculum is supplemented with time-saving teacher tools to help with lesson planning, grading and reviewing student code, and managing their classroom.

CodeHS aspires to empower all students to meaningfully impact the future, and believe that coding is becoming a new foundational skill, along with reading and writing, that allows students to further explore any interest or area of study. At the time CodeHS was founded in 2012, only 10% of high schools in America offered a computer science course. Zach and Jeremy set out to change that by providing a solution that made it easy for schools and districts to get started. With CodeHS, thousands of teachers have been trained and are teaching hundreds of thousands of students all over the world. To use CodeHS, all that’s needed is the internet and a web browser. Students can write and run their code online, and teachers can immediately see what the students are working on and how they are doing.

Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon CloudFront, and Amazon S3 make it possible for CodeHS to scale their site to meet the needs of schools all over the world. CodeHS also relies on AWS to compile and run student code in the browser, which is extremely important when teaching server-side languages like Java that powers the AP course. Since usage rises and falls based on school schedules, Amazon CloudWatch and ELBs are used to easily scale up when students are running code so they have a seamless experience.

Be sure to visit the CodeHS website, and to learn more about bringing computer science to your school, click here!

Insight (Palo Alto, CA)

Insight was founded in 2012 to create a new educational model, optimize hiring for data teams, and facilitate successful career transitions among data professionals. Over the last 5 years, Insight has kept ahead of market trends and launched a series of professional training fellowships including Data Science, Health Data Science, Data Engineering, and Artificial Intelligence. Finding individuals with the right skill set, background, and culture fit is a challenge for big companies and startups alike, and Insight is focused on developing top talent through intensive 7-week fellowships. To date, Insight has over 1,000 alumni at over 350 companies including Amazon, Google, Netflix, Twitter, and The New York Times.

The Data Engineering team at Insight is well-versed in the current ecosystem of open source tools and technologies and provides mentorship on the best practices in this space. The technical teams are continually working with external groups in a variety of data advisory and mentorship capacities, but the majority of Insight partners participate in professional sessions. Companies visit the Insight office to speak with fellows in an informal setting and provide details on the type of work they are doing and how their teams are growing. These sessions have proved invaluable as fellows experience a significantly better interview process and companies yield engaged and enthusiastic new team members.

An important aspect of Insight’s fellowships is the opportunity for hands-on work, focusing on everything from building big-data pipelines to contributing novel features to industry-standard open source efforts. Insight provides free AWS resources for all fellows to use, in addition to mentorships from the Data Engineering team. Fellows regularly utilize Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon EMR, AWS Lambda, Amazon Redshift, Amazon RDS, among other services. The experience with AWS gives fellows a solid skill set as they transition into the industry. Fellowships are currently being offered in Boston, New York, Seattle, and the Bay Area.

Check out the Insight blog for more information on trends in data infrastructure, artificial intelligence, and cutting-edge data products.

iTranslate (Austria)

When the App Store was introduced in 2008, the founders of iTranslate saw an opportunity to be part of something big. The group of four fully believed that the iPhone and apps were going to change the world, and together they brainstormed ideas for their own app. The combination of translation and mobile devices seemed a natural fit, and by 2009 iTranslate was born. iTranslate’s mission is to enable travelers, students, business professionals, employers, and medical staff to read, write, and speak in all languages, anywhere in the world. The app allows users to translate text, voice, websites and more into nearly 100 languages on various platforms. Today, iTranslate is the leading player for conversational translation and dictionary apps, with more than 60 million downloads and 6 million monthly active users.

iTranslate is breaking language barriers through disruptive technology and innovation, enabling people to translate in real time. The app has a variety of features designed to optimize productivity including offline translation, website and voice translation, and language auto detection. iTranslate also recently launched the world’s first ear translation device in collaboration with Bragi, a company focused on smart earphones. The Dash Pro allows people to communicate freely, while having a personal translator right in their ear.

iTranslate started using Amazon Polly soon after it was announced. CEO Alexander Marktl said, “As the leading translation and dictionary app, it is our mission at iTranslate to provide our users with the best possible tools to read, write, and speak in all languages across the globe. Amazon Polly provides us with the ability to efficiently produce and use high quality, natural sounding synthesized speech.” The stable and simple-to-use API, low latency, and free caching allow iTranslate to scale as they continue adding features to their app. Customers also enjoy the option to change speech rate and change between male and female voices. To assure quality, speed, and reliability of their products, iTranslate also uses Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, and Amazon Route 53.

To get started with iTranslate, visit their website here.

—–

Thanks for reading!

-Tina

Amazon CloudWatch has been an important part of AWS since early 2009! Launched as part of a three-pack that also included Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing, CloudWatch has evolved into a very powerful monitoring service for AWS resources and the applications that you run on the AWS Cloud. CloudWatch custom metrics (launched way back in 2011) allow you to store business and application metrics in CloudWatch, view them in graphs, and initiate actions based on CloudWatch Alarms. Needless to say, we have made many enhancements to CloudWatch over the years! Some of the most recent include Extended Metrics Retention (and a User Interface Update), Dashboards, API/CloudFormation Support for Dashboards, and Alarms on Dashboards.

Originally, metrics were stored at five minute intervals; this was reduced to one minute (also known as Detailed Monitoring) in response to customer requests way back in 2010. This was a welcome change, but now it is time to do better. Our customers are streaming video, running flash sales, deploying code tens or hundreds of times per day, and running applications that scale in and out very quickly as conditions change. In all of these situations, a minute is simply too coarse of an interval. Important, transient spikes can be missed; disparate (yet related) events are difficult to correlate across time, and the MTTR (mean time to repair) when something breaks is too high.

New High-Resolution Metrics
Today we are adding support for high-resolution custom metrics, with plans to add support for AWS services over time. Your applications can now publish metrics to CloudWatch with 1-second resolution. You can watch the metrics scroll across your screen seconds after they are published and you can set up high-resolution CloudWatch Alarms that evaluate as frequently as every 10 seconds.

Imagine alarming when available memory gets low. This is often a transient condition that can be hard to catch with infrequent samples. With high-resolution metrics, you can see, detect (via an alarm), and act on it within seconds:

In this case the alarm on the right would not fire, and you would not know about the issue.

Publishing High-Resolution Metrics
You can publish high-resolution metrics in two different ways:

• API – The PutMetricData function now accepts an optional StorageResolution parameter. Set this parameter to 1 to publish high-resolution metrics; omit it (or set it to 60) to publish at standard 1-minute resolution.
• collectd plugin – The CloudWatch plugin for collectd has been updated to support collection and publication of high-resolution metrics. You will need to set the enable_high_resolution_metrics parameter in the config file for the plugin.

CloudWatch metrics are rolled up over time; resolution effectively decreases as the metrics age. Here’s the schedule:

• 1 second metrics are available for 3 hours.
• 60 second metrics are available for 15 days.
• 5 minute metrics are available for 63 days.
• 1 hour metrics are available for 455 days (15 months).

When you call GetMetricStatistics you can specify a period of 1, 5, 10, 30 or any multiple of 60 seconds for high-resolution metrics. You can specify any multiple of 60 seconds for standard metrics.

A Quick Demo
I grabbed my nearest EC2 instance, installed the latest version of collectd and the Python plugin:

$ sudo yum install collectd collectd-python

Then I downloaded the setup script for the plugin, made it executable, and ran it:

$ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/awslabs/collectd-cloudwatch/master/src/setup.py
$ chmod a+x setup.py
$ sudo ./setup.py

I had already created a suitable IAM Role and added it to my instance; it was automatically detected during setup. I was asked to enable the high resolution metrics:

collectd started running and publishing metrics within seconds. I opened up the CloudWatch Console to take a look:

Then I zoomed in to see the metrics in detail:

I also created an alarm that will check the memory.percent.used metric at 10 second intervals. This will make it easier for me to detect situations where a lot of memory is being used for a short period of time:

Now Available
High-resolution custom metrics and alarms are available now in all Public AWS Regions, with support for AWS GovCloud (US) coming soon.

As was already the case, you can store 10 metrics at no charge every month; see the CloudWatch Pricing page for more information. Pricing for high-resolution metrics is identical to that for standard resolution metrics, with volume tiers that allow you to realize savings (on a per-metric) basis when you use more metrics. High-resolution alarms are priced at $0.30 per alarm per month.

AWS Training allows you to learn from the experts so you can advance your knowledge with practical skills and get more out of the AWS Cloud. Today I am happy to announce that three of our most popular training bootcamps (a staple at AWS re:Invent and AWS Global Summits) are becoming part of our permanent instructor-led training portfolio:

• Building a Serverless Data Lake – Teaches you how to design, build, and operate a serverless data lake solution with AWS services.
• Secrets to Successful Cloud Transformations – Teaches you how to select the right strategy, people, migration plan, and financial management methodology needed when moving your workloads to the cloud. Does not require advanced technical expertise.
• Running Container-Enabled Microservices on AWS – Teaches you how to manage and scale container-enabled applications by using Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS).

These one-day courses are intended for individuals who would like to dive deeper into a specialized topic with an expert trainer.

You can explore our complete course catalog, and you can search for a public class near you within the AWS Training and Certification Portal. You can also request a private onsite training session for your team by contacting us.

— Jeff;

We launched Amazon AppStream 2.0 at re:Invent 2016. This application streaming service allows you to deliver Windows applications to a desktop browser.

AppStream 2.0 is fully managed and provides consistent, scalable performance by running applications on general purpose, compute optimized, and memory optimized streaming instances, with delivery via NICE DCV – a secure, high-fidelity streaming protocol. Our enterprise and public sector customers have started using AppStream 2.0 in place of legacy application streaming environments that are installed on-premises. They use AppStream 2.0 to deliver both commercial and line of business applications to a desktop browser. Our ISV customers are using AppStream 2.0 to move their applications to the cloud as-is, with no changes to their code. These customers focus on demos, workshops, and commercial SaaS subscriptions.

We are getting great feedback on AppStream 2.0 and have been adding new features very quickly (even by AWS standards). So far this year we have added an image builder, federated access via SAML 2.0, CloudWatch monitoring, Fleet Auto Scaling, Simple Network Setup, persistent storage for user files (backed by Amazon S3), support for VPC security groups, and built-in user management including web portals for users.

New GPU-Powered Streaming Instances
Many of our customers have told us that they want to use AppStream 2.0 to deliver specialized design, engineering, HPC, and media applications to their users. These applications are generally graphically intensive and are designed to run on expensive, high-end PCs in conjunction with a GPU (Graphics Processing Unit). Due to the hardware requirements of these applications, cost considerations have traditionally kept them out of situations where part-time or occasional access would otherwise make sense. Recently, another requirement has come to the forefront. These applications almost always need shared, read-write access to large amounts of sensitive data that is best stored, processed, and secured in the cloud. In order to meet the needs of these users and applications, we are launching two new types of streaming instances today:

Graphics Desktop – Based on the G2 instance type, Graphics Desktop instances are designed for desktop applications that use the CUDA, DirectX, or OpenGL for rendering. These instances are equipped with 15 GiB of memory and 8 vCPUs. You can select this instance family when you build an AppStream image or configure an AppStream fleet:

Graphics Pro – Based on the brand-new G3 instance type, Graphics Pro instances are designed for high-end, high-performance applications that can use the NVIDIA APIs and/or need access to large amounts of memory. These instances are available in three sizes, with 122 to 488 GiB of memory and 16 to 64 vCPUs. Again, you can select this instance family when you configure an AppStream fleet:

To learn more about how to launch, run, and scale a streaming application environment, read Scaling Your Desktop Application Streams with Amazon AppStream 2.0.

As I noted earlier, you can use either of these two instance types to build an AppStream image. This will allow you to test and fine tune your applications and to see the instances in action.

Streaming Instances in Action
We’ve been working with several customers during a private beta program for the new instance types. Here are a few stories (and some cool screen shots) to show you some of the applications that they are streaming via AppStream 2.0:

AVEVA is a world leading provider of engineering design and information management software solutions for the marine, power, plant, offshore and oil & gas industries. As part of their work on massive capital projects, their customers need to bring many groups of specialist engineers together to collaborate on the creation of digital assets. In order to support this requirement, AVEVA is building SaaS solutions that combine the streamed delivery of engineering applications with access to a scalable project data environment that is shared between engineers across the globe. The new instances will allow AVEVA to deliver their engineering design software in SaaS form while maximizing quality and performance. Here’s a screen shot of their Everything 3D app being streamed from AppStream:

Nissan, a Japanese multinational automobile manufacturer, trains its automotive specialists using 3D simulation software running on expensive graphics workstations. The training software, developed by The DiSti Corporation, allows its specialists to simulate maintenance processes by interacting with realistic 3D models of the vehicles they work on. AppStream 2.0’s new graphics capability now allows Nissan to deliver these training tools in real time, with up to date content, to a desktop browser running on low-cost commodity PCs. Their specialists can now interact with highly realistic renderings of a vehicle that allows them to train for and plan maintenance operations with higher efficiency.

Cornell University is an American private Ivy League and land-grant doctoral university located in Ithaca, New York. They deliver advanced 3D tools such as AutoDesk AutoCAD and Inventor to students and faculty to support their course work, teaching, and research. Until now, these tools could only be used on GPU-powered workstations in a lab or classroom. AppStream 2.0 allows them to deliver the applications to a web browser running on any desktop, where they run as if they were on a local workstation. Their users are no longer limited by available workstations in labs and classrooms, and can bring their own devices and have access to their course software. This increased flexibility also means that faculty members no longer need to take lab availability into account when they build course schedules. Here’s a copy of Autodesk Inventor Professional running on AppStream at Cornell:

Now Available
Both of the graphics streaming instance families are available in the US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Regions and you can start streaming from them today. Your applications must run in a Windows 2012 R2 environment, and can make use of DirectX, OpenGL, CUDA, OpenCL, and Vulkan.

With prices in the US East (Northern Virginia) Region starting at $0.50 per hour for Graphics Desktop instances and $2.05 per hour for Graphics Pro instances, you can now run your simulation, visualization, and HPC workloads in the AWS Cloud on an economical, pay-by-the-hour basis. You can also take advantage of fast, low-latency access to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), AWS Lambda, Amazon Redshift, and other AWS services to build processing workflows that handle pre- and post-processing of your data.

— Jeff;

AWS CloudFormation helps AWS customers implement an Infrastructure as Code model. Instead of setting up their environments and applications by hand, they build a template and use it to create all of the necessary resources, collectively known as a CloudFormation stack. This model removes opportunities for manual error, increases efficiency, and ensures consistent configurations over time.

Today I would like to tell you about a new feature that makes CloudFormation even more useful. This feature is designed to help you to address the challenges that you face when you use Infrastruccrture as Code in situations that include multiple AWS accounts and/or AWS Regions. As a quick review:

Accounts – As I have told you in the past, many organizations use a multitude of AWS accounts, often using AWS Organizations to arrange the accounts into a hierarchy and to group them into Organizational Units, or OUs (read AWS Organizations – Policy-Based Management for Multiple AWS Accounts to learn more). Our customers use multiple accounts for business units, applications, and developers. They often create separate accounts for development, testing, staging, and production on a per-application basis.

Regions – Customers also make great use of the large (and ever-growing) set of AWS Regions. They build global applications that span two or more regions, implement sophisticated multi-region disaster recovery models, replicate S3, Aurora, PostgreSQL, and MySQL data in real time, and choose locations for storage and processing of sensitive data in accord with national and regional regulations.

This expansion into multiple accounts and regions comes with some new challenges with respect to governance and consistency. Our customers tell us that they want to make sure that each new account is set up in accord with their internal standards. Among other things, they want to set up IAM users and roles, VPCs and VPC subnets, security groups, Config Rules, logging, and AWS Lambda functions in a consistent and reliable way.

Introducing StackSet
In order to address these important customer needs, we are launching CloudFormation StackSet today. You can now define an AWS resource configuration in a CloudFormation template and then roll it out across multiple AWS accounts and/or Regions with a couple of clicks. You can use this to set up a baseline level of AWS functionality that addresses the cross-account and cross-region scenarios that I listed above. Once you have set this up, you can easily expand coverage to additional accounts and regions.

This feature always works on a cross-account basis. The administrator account owns one or more StackSets and controls deployment to one or more target accounts. The administrator account must include an assumable IAM role and the target accounts must delegate trust to the administrator account. To learn how to do this, read Prerequisites in the StackSet Documentation.

Each StackSet references a CloudFormation template and contains lists of accounts and regions. All operations apply to the Cartesian product of the accounts and regions in the StackSet. If the StackSet references three accounts (A1, A2, and A3) and four regions (R1, R2, R3, and R4), there are twelve targets:

• Region R1: Accounts A1, A2, and A3.
• Region R2: Accounts A1, A2, and A3.
• Region R3: Accounts A1, A2, and A3.
• Region R4: Accounts A1, A2, and A3.

Deploying a template initiates creation of a CloudFormation stack in an account/region pair. Templates are deployed sequentially to regions (you control the order) to multiple accounts within the region (you control the amount of parallelism). You can also set an error threshold that will terminate deployments if stack creation fails.

You can use your existing CloudFormation templates (taking care to make sure that they are ready to work across accounts and regions), create new ones, or use one of our sample templates. We are launching with support for the AWS partition (all public regions except those in China), and expect to expand it to to the others before too long.

Using StackSets
You can create and deploy StackSets from the CloudFormation Console, via the CloudFormation APIs, or from the command line.

Using the Console, I start by clicking on Create StackSet. I can use my own template or one of the samples. I’ll use the last sample (Add config rule encrypted volumes):

I click on View template to learn more about the template and the rule:

I give my StackSet a name. The template that I selected accepts an optional parameter, and I can enter it at this time:

Next, I choose the accounts and regions. I can enter account numbers directly, reference an AWS organizational unit, or upload a list of account numbers:

I can set up the regions and control the deployment order:

I can also set the deployment options. Once I am done I click on Next to proceed:

I can add tags to my StackSet. They will be applied to the AWS resources created during the deployment:

The deployment begins, and I can track the status from the Console:

I can open up the Stacks section to see each stack. Initially, the status of each stack is OUTDATED, indicating that the template has yet to be deployed to the stack; this will change to CURRENT after a successful deployment. If a stack cannot be deleted, the status will change to INOPERABLE.

After my initial deployment, I can click on Manage StackSet to add additional accounts, regions, or both, to create additional stacks:

Now Available
This new feature is available now and you can start using it today at no extra charge (you pay only for the AWS resources created on your behalf).

— Jeff;

PS – If you create some useful templates and would like to share them with other AWS users, please send a pull request to our AWS Labs GitHub repo.