AWS Podcast Series

In this episode of AWS TechChat we cover the Thursday keynote of re:Invent 2019 by Dr Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.

We start the show introducing Amazon Nitro System, look at it from a software lens and share with you the why and how we built this. As virtualization is at the core of the AWS Cloud, we went back to the drawing board and built our own hypervisor to provide performance almost indistinguishable of bare metal whilst providing a security demarcation for our platform. Nitro has allowed us to innovate faster; we have released 4x more instances since we have moved to Nitro.

We then take a refresher and look at Firecracker. You can launch lightweight micro-virtual machines (microVMs) in non-virtualized environments in a fraction of a second. Given we use Firecracker under the hood for AWS Lambda and AWS Fargate, it provides faster, tighter more seamless scaling than other platforms such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS).

To wrap up the show, we touch on the importance of “evolvable architectures” looking through the lens of Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) before introducing you to Amazon Builders’ Library that has papers and topics on how Amazon builds our own distributed systems.

Speakers:
Shane Baldacchino - Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS
Gabe Hollombe, Senior Technical Evangelist, AWS

Resources:
AWS Nitro System
AWS Nitro Enclaves
Firecracker – Lightweight Virtualization for Serverless Computing
Amazon EKS on AWS Fargate Now Generally Available
Shuffle Sharding: Massive and Magical Fault Isolation
The Amazon Builders' Library

AWS Events:
AWS Builders Online Series
AWS Modern Application Development on-demand
AWS Innovate on-demand
AWS Events and Webinars

In this episode of AWS TechChat we cover the main keynote of re:Invent 2019 by Andy Jassy, AWS CEO, with a ton of announcements for all.

We started the show with a new range of Arm-based processors based on AWS new Arm chip - M6g, C6g and R6g making that price to performance ration even more attractive. We continue to share the announcements that we made:

Amazon Braket – A fully managed service that allows scientists, researchers, and developers to begin experimenting with computers from multiple quantum hardware providers in a single place.

AWS Fargate has made its way to Amazon EKS, you can now launch EKS containers as a Fargate launch type.

Amazon EC2 instance for inference - the Amazon EC2 Inf1, powered by our own custom silicon Inferentia chips has gone GA.

AWS Fargate Spot is a new capability on AWS Fargate that can run interruption tolerant Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) Tasks at up to a 70% discount off the Fargate price.

AWS Outposts has gone GA, so if you need hybrid cloud with the same AWS feeling it is now available. If you do not want to manage your Outpost, you can leverage a Local Zone. The first Local Zone in Los Angeles is available now and you can start using it today.

AWS Wavelength brings local compute to the 5G Edge.

Provisioned Concurrency for AWS Lambda Functions ensure cold starts issue and sudden traffic spikes do not impact latent sensitive operations.

Amazon S3 Access Points makes it simple to manage access at scale for applications using shared data sets on S3.

Amazon Sagemaker bore the brunt of many announcements:
- Amazon Sagemaker Studio, your machine learning Integrated Development Environment in the cloud.
- Amazon Sagemaker Notebooks bringing one click Jupyter notebooks to AWS.
- Amazon Sagemaker Model Monitor automatically detects concept drift in deployed models.
- Amazon Sagamaker Autopilot automatically creating your machine learning models but with transparency.

Amazon CodeGuru is a new machine learning service for automated code reviews and application performance recommendations.

Amazon Fraud Detector, which is a new machine learning service that makes it easy to identify potentially fraudulent online activities such as online payment fraud and the creation of fake accounts.

Contact Lens for Amazon Connect, bulking out Amazon Connect capabilities, allows you to understand the sentiment, trends, and compliance risks of customer conversations to train agents effectively, replicate successful interactions, and identify crucial company and product feedback.
We are launching in open preview Amazon Managed Apache Cassandra Service (MCS), a scalable, highly available, and managed Apache Cassandra-compatible database service.

Amazon Redshift introduces RA3 nodes with managed storage enabling independent compute and storage scaling.

Finally, UltraWarm is a performance-optimized warm storage tier for Amazon Elasticsearch Service. It complements the existing Amazon Elasticsearch hot storage tier by providing less expensive storage for older and less-frequently accessed data while still providing an interactive analytics experience allowing up to 3PB per cluster.

Speakers:
Shane Baldacchino - Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS
Peter Stanski - Head of Solution Architecture, AWS

Resources:
AWS DeepRacer Evo
Amazon Braket – Get Started with Quantum Computing
Announcing New Amazon EC2 M6g, C6g, and R6g Instances Powered by Next-Generation Arm-based AWS Graviton2 Processors
Amazon EKS on AWS Fargate Now Generally Available
Introducing Amazon EC2 Inf1 Instances, high performance and the lowest cost machine learning inference in the cloud
AWS Fargate Spot Now Generally Available
AWS Outposts Now Available
AWS Now Available from a Local Zone in Los Angeles
Announcing AWS Wavelength for delivering ultra-low latency applications for 5G
Provisioned Concurrency for Lambda Functions
Amazon SageMaker Studio: The First Fully Integrated Development Environment For Machine Learning
Introducing the new Amazon SageMaker Notebook Experience
Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor – Fully Managed Automatic Monitoring for Your Machine Learning Models
Amazon SageMaker Autopilot – Automatically Create High-Quality Machine Learning Models With Full Control And Visibility
AWS announces Amazon CodeGuru for automated code reviews and application performance recommendations
Introducing Amazon Fraud Detector
Introducing Contact Lens for Amazon Connect
Amazon Managed Apache Cassandra Service (MCS)
Amazon Redshift introduces RA3 nodes with managed storage enabling independent compute and storage scaling
AWS announces UltraWarm (preview) for Amazon Elasticsearch Service

In this episode of AWS TechChat we cover ‘Monday Night Live’, the first keynote of AWS re:Invent 2019 presented by Peter Desantis - VP of AWS Global Infrastructure and Customer Support, and it's all about infrastructure.

We start the show talking about HPC (High Performance Computing), the pain points around HPC that users faced in the past and how our investments in our network, with 100Gb networking, Nitro and EFA (Elastic Fabric Adapter) have been a game changer.

Formula 1 give us a lesson in CFD (Computation Fluid Dynamics) and how AWS is helping fans to stand on the edge of the seat with the 2021 car which reduces dirty air for the following car ensuring following cars don't take a huge down-force hit.

We talk about Machine Learning, P3dn, G4 and snuck in a tidbit for AWS Inferentia which was released today in the form of the Amazon EC2 Inf1 family.

To close out this episode, we cover AWS global network and introduce 10 new Amazon CloudFront edge locations before finishing on what we are doing on the sustainability front to run our business in the most environmentally friendly way possible.

Speakers:
Shane Baldacchino - Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS
Peter Stanski - Head of Solution Architecture, AWS

Resources:
High Performance Computing
Amazon EC2 C5n Instances
Elastic Fabric Adapter
F1 Insights powered by AWS
New – EC2 P3dn GPU Instances
Amazon EC2 G4 Instances
Inf1 Instances with AWS Inferentia Chips
Amazon CloudFront announces 10 new Edge locations
AWS & Sustainability

In this round-up episode of AWS TechChat, Shane and Gabe come at you with raft of short sharp and important updates that occurred in October and November in the year 2019.

The show starts with a fun announcement - Amazon WordPress plugin. It combines our plugins around Amazon Polly and Amazon Translate, now provides a workflow to configure an Amazon CloudFront distribution. It is available to download from the WordPress Plugin Directory.

Coming up next, something rather huge in the world of AWS - Savings Plans. They introduce the latest cost-savings plans, discuss how it compares to Reserved Instances (RI), talk about the two variations - Compute and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance and show you how to get started a savings plan.

Amazon CloudWatch has now launched cross-account and cross-region dashboard giving you an aggregated and single pane of view across multiple AWS accounts allowing you to display what matters to you.

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) on VMware has now gone GA, allowing you to run a database engine on your own hardware while the Amazon RDS service automates the time-consuming administration tasks.

It would not be an update show without Container updates! Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) now has container-scanning feature allowing you to detect CVE’s. Kubernetes has integration with Amazon EC2 Spot Instances and Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) now has Cloud Development Kit (CDK) support.

Lastly, to close out the show, they continue with more updates with Amazon GuardDuty. Amazon GuardDuty introduces three new threat detections, two around Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) - S3BlockPublicAccessDisabled and S3ServerAccessLoggingDisabled. Last one focus on EC2/MetaDataDNSRebind which informs you that an EC2 instance metadata exfiltration.

Speakers:
Shane Baldacchino - Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS
Gabe Hollombe - Senior Technical Evangelist, APAC, AWS

Resources:
AWS for WordPress plugin now available
Introducing Savings Plans
Amazon CloudWatch launches cross-account cross-region dashboards
Amazon RDS on VMware is now generally available
The Node Termination Handler
Amazon GuardDuty Adds Three New Threat Detections 

AWS Events:
AWS Builders Online Series on-demand
AWS Modern Application Development on-demand
AWS Innovate on-demand
AWS re:Invent
AWS Events and Webinars

In this event-driven themed episode of AWS TechChat, Shane and Pete started the show talking about event-driven architectures. The event-driven architecture is an architectural pattern that orchestrates behavior around the production, detection, and consumption of events as well as the responses they evoke.

They then moved on to AWS Lambda, which is the product that made the event-driven architecture pattern popular. AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that runs your code in response to events, which is why it is suited for event-driven architectures and as we learned, has 24 event sources that can invoke an AWS Lambda function.

Getting into the meat of the show, they pivoted to Single-Page Apps (SPA) and Event Forking, which are two patterns that are commonly used to exploit the benefits that event-driven architecture brings.

Let us not forget the AWS Event Forking Pipeline, a suite of open-source nested applications based on the AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM), which you can deploy directly from the AWS Event Fork Pipelines suite.

Lastly, they realized event-driven architecture is a bit of a paradigm shift in thinking, so they covered the skills needed and how you can get started on the event-driven architectures journey.

Speakers:
Shane Baldacchino - Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS
Peter Stanski - Head of Solution Architecture, AWS

Resources:
Amazon CloudFront Pricing
Amazon CloudFront Key Features
AWS Global Infrastructure
AWS Lambda
Amazon SNS Subscription Filter Policies
Nested Applications
AWS Serverless Application Model
AWS Event Fork Pipelines suite
Amazon Simple Notification Service
Getting Started with AWS Lambda

AWS Events:
AWSome Day Online Series
AWS Modern Application Development on-demand
AWS Innovate on-demand
AWS re:Invent
AWS Events and Webinars

In this round-up episode of AWS TechChat, Shane and Tom come at you with raft of short sharp and important updates that occurred in September and October in the year 2019.

They started the show with an announcement around Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) Single Region Replication, with this feature you can now automatically and asynchronously replicate newly uploaded S3 objects to a destination bucket in the same AWS Region. Just remember you need to enable versioning.

There is now a new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance, G4 Instances with NVIDIA T4 Tensor Core GPUs, which are the Most Cost-effective GPU Platform for Machine Learning Inference and Graphics Intensive Applications. You can find them in limited regions.

Limits are changing on Amazon EC2. We have made them easier with vCPU based on demand limits. Much easier to manage. All you need to do is remember you have two limits post-October 21. One limit that governs the usage of standard instance families (A,C,D,H,I,M,R,T, and Z) and the default limit is 1152 vCPU. The other limit for the specialized instance families of F, G, P, and X instances that is 128vCPU.

Check out the NoSQL Workbench for Amazon DynamoDB, a great new tool designed to help simplify working with Amazon DynamoDB, and the Amazon DynamoDBMapper class in the Java SDK has been updated to support optimistic locking.

Private EndPoints and API Gateway, it is now a thing. You can now associate one or more VPC Endpoints to a private API, and Amazon API Gateway will create and manage Amazon Route 53 alias records necessary for easily invoking the Private APIs.

Finally, they closed the show out with two things Shane like - Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio Code with the former now providing IntelliSense for Amazon ECS.

Speakers:
Shane Baldacchino - Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS
Tom McMeekin - Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS

Resources:

• Amazon S3 introduces Same-Region Replication
• Amazon EC2 Instance History 
• Amazon ECS adds support for G4 Instance type 
• vCPU-based On-Demand Instance Limits are Now Available in Amazon EC2 
• AWS Limit Monitor Now Supports vCPU-Based On-Demand Instance Limit Monitoring
• NoSQL Workbench for Amazon DynamoDB 
• DynamoDBMapper now supports optimistic locking for Amazon DynamoDB transactional API calls 
• Amazon API Gateway Simplifies Invoking Private APIs
• Amazon VPC console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/vpc/
• Amazon Elastic Container Service now supports IntelliSense in Visual Studio Code
  
  

AWS Events:

• AWSome Day Online Series
  
• AWS Modern Application Development on-demand
  
• AWS Innovate on-demand
  
• AWS re:Invent
  
• AWS Events and Webinars

In this messaging themed episode of AWS TechChat, Pete is back, and more so in person.

They started the show reminiscing about messaging history, going back, looking at where we came from and how we arrived at the position we are today. More importantly, why do we use messaging and the benefits you can derive in decoupling your architecture.

They then pivot to event streams, which cover both Amazon Kinesis and Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka, (Amazon MSK). They are both designed to process or analyze streaming data for specialized needs.

Next, they moved to a more traditional message bus - Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) and Amazon MQ (Managed message broker service for ActiveMQ), both a durable pull-based messaging platform. Amazon SQS being lightweight and tightly integrated to the AWS Cloud platform and Amazon MQ supporting a variety of protocols making it a great choice for existing applications that use industry-standard protocols.

Finally, they talked about push-based messaging with Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) and the Message Broker for AWS IoT. Both publish/subscribe (pub/sub) platform that enables you to build fan out architectures with hundreds of thousands to millions of subscribers.

You now have more than a hammer to build your applications, Maslow would be proud.

Speakers:
Shane Baldacchino - Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS
Peter Stanski - Head of Solution Architecture, AWS

Resources:

• Amazon CloudFront announces new Edge location in Shenzhen, China
• What is Pub/Sub Messaging?
  
• Amazon Kinesis Data Streams
  
• Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)
  
• Apache ZooKeeper
  
• Amazon Simple Queue Service
  
• Amazon Simple Queue Service Released
  
• Amazon MQ
  
• Amazon Simple Notification Service
  
• MQTT - AWS IoT
  
• Message Broker for AWS IoT
  
  

AWS Events:

• AWS re:Invent
  
• AWSome Day Online Series
  
• AWS Modern Application Development Online Event
  
• AWS Innovate on-demand
  

In this round-up episode of AWS TechChat, Shane and Dean come at you with raft of short sharp and important updates that occurred in August and September in the year 2019.

They start the show with an announcement - support for multiple TLS certificates on Network Load Balancers using Server Name Indication (SNI). You can now host multiple secure applications, each with its own TLS certificate, on a single load balancer listener.

Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB) is now GA, and it is a fully managed ledger database that provides a transparent, immutable, and cryptographically verifiable transaction log ‎owned by a central trusted authority.

They then spoke about the recently announced AWS Solution that uses Amazon Comprehend and Amazon Elasticsearch (ES) Service for indexing and analyzing unstructured text. This reference implementation in the form of AWS CloudFormation (CFN) deploys a cost-effective, end-to-end solution for extracting meaningful insights from unstructured data. Also, it has a tasty Kibana dashboard to provide visualizations.

Updates for Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Flow logs - In addition to existing fields, you can now choose to add in additional meta-data that will help provide more meaningful conclusions.

Finally, to close out the show we covered two updates for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). Amazon EKS now allows you to assign IAM permissions to Kubernetes service accounts. This update gives you fine-grained, pod level access-control when running clusters with multiple co-located services. Secondly, we just released 1.14.6 for Amazon EKS. Please check out the EKS support policy as we only support the last three (1.12, 1.13 & 1.14) EKS releases.

Speakers:
Shane Baldacchino - Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS
Dean Samuels – Lead Architect, ASEAN, AWS

Resources:

• Amazon CloudFront announces its first Edge location in Portugal 
• Amazon CloudFront announces new Edge location in Israel
• Amazon CloudFront expands presence in the Middle East with first Edge location in Bahrain
• Network Load Balancers now support multiple TLS certificates using Server Name Indication (SNI) 
• Additional Metadata to Amazon VPC Flow Logs
• General Availability of Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB)
  
• Analyzing Text with Amazon Elasticsearch Service and Amazon Comprehend
  
• Amazon EKS now supports Kubernetes version 1.14   
   

AWS Events:

• AWSome Day Online series
• AWS Modern Application Development Online Event
  
• AWS Data Analytics & Machine Learning Online Series on-demand
• AWS Builders Online Series on-demand
• AWS Innovate on-demand
• AWS re:Invent
  

In this themed episode of AWS TechChat, Shane brings along a special guest, AWS Solution Architect and Container expert - Mitch Beaumont.

We started the show reminiscing about container history, going way back looking at where we came from and how we arrived at the position we are today and gave a quick overview of our container offerings - Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), and AWS Fargate.

I then posed a fictitious question about container orchestration - what options are available and the pros and cons of each platform.

We looked at our container roadmap, so pop that into your favorite search engine (https://github.com/aws/containers-roadmap) to get an understanding of what has shipped, what is coming soon and what we are working on.

They say, if you are not keeping score it’s just practice, so Mitch ran us through the approaches we need to take as we make the shift through to containers around observability and monitoring before talking through deployment and operational patterns.

Lastly, to close out the show, we once again touched base with Firecracker. Firecraker provides hardware-level isolation with the convenience of containers and underpins many of the container and serverless offerings on AWS. It is open-source so feel free to download it, kick the tires and have a play.

Speakers:
Shane Baldacchino - Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS
Mitch Beaumont - Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS

Resources:

• What is a Container?
• Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS)
• AWS Fargate
• AWS Container Roadmap
• Elastic Network Interfaces
• Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)
• Amazon VPC CNI Plugin for Kubernetes Upgrades
• Elastic Load Balancing
• Amazon CloudWatch
• Centralized Container Logging with Fluent Bit
  
• Amazon ECS and AWS Fargate FireLens
  
• Firecracker
  
• AWS Container DevSecOps Workshop
  
  

APAC Online Event:

• AWSome Day Online series
• AWS Data Analytics & Machine Learning Online Series
• AWS Builders Online Series on-demand
• AWS Innovate on-demand
  

In this round-up episode of AWS TechChat, Shane and Pete come at you with raft of short sharp and important updates that occurred in August in the year 2019.

However, before doing this they took a look at the SDLC or the Software Development Lifecycle through the lens of AWS Lambda, our favorite server-less compute engine. We discussed trade-offs; in other words, what you are getting and what you are losing with AWS Lambda. We talked through the AWS Lambda support policy, 12-factor apps and worked through three options in which you can manage deprecation of runtimes.

We then pivoted to updates, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (ECS) now supports multiple load balancers. You can now attach multiple target groups to your Amazon ECS services that are running on either Amazon EC2 or AWS Fargate. This update is quite huge and a big win for customers.

AWS Lake Formation is now Generally Available, and it is a new managed service to help you build a secure data lake in days. It allows you to Identify, ingest, clean, and transform data, enforce security policies across multiple services and gain and manage new insights.

Before closing the show off with a raft of Amazon EC2 Updates, 7 to be exact, some general updates, some around spot fleet and another around capacity optimization strategy for Amazon EC2 Spot instances.

Speakers:
Shane Baldacchino - Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS
Peter Stanski - Head of Solution Architecture, AWS

Resources:

• Achieve 3x better Spark performance with EMR 5.25.0
• Amazon CloudFront announces new Edge location in Israel
• AWS Lambda Runtime Support Policy
• Amazon ECS services now support multiple load balancer target groups
• AWS Lake Formation – Now Generally Available
  
  

APAC Online Event:

• AWS Builders Online Series 
• AWS Innovate on-demand
   

In this hour-long themed episode of AWS TechChat, Shane and Dean reminisce about their past and cover topics that are important to the budding systems engineer, systems administrator and network engineer.

We started the show by announcing a new region, Bahrain, the first in the Middle East taking our region count to 22.

On the Automation front, we spoke about methods and mechanisms you can use to automate the administration of your AWS environment via the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell, AWS CloudFormation, and now AWS Cloud Development Kit has gone GA.

We kept it real with a bit of QA, comparing on-premises via AWS, and Shane did not quite stump Dean, almost.

We then spoke about networking by introducing concepts and explaining ways in which you can deal with hybrid workloads at both the network layer and via DNS.

Lastly, we closed the show out with a conversation on what is the minimum kit to on-premises for most organizations before talking about Cloud migration options into AWS.

Speakers:
Shane Baldacchino - Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS
Dean Samuels - Solutions Architect Manager, AWS

Resources:

• Announcing the new AWS Middle East (Bahrain) Region
• AWS Command Line Interface
• AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell
  
• AWS CloudFormation
  
• AWS Cloud Development Kit
  
• Lambda@Edge
  
• AWS VPN
  
• Amazon EC2
  
• AWS Server Migration Service
  
• AWS Database Migration Service
   

APAC Online Event:

• AWS Builders Online Series
  
• AWS Innovate on-demand
  
  

In this monster episode of AWS TechChat, Shane and Tom (yes he is back) come at you with a raft of short sharp and important updates that occurred in the month of July in the year 2019.

They started the show with two Amazon CloudWatch updates. Amazon CloudWatch Anomaly Detection, which applies machine learning to continuously analyze a specific CloudWatch metrics determines a nominal baseline, and surfaces anomalies, all without user intervention before introducing you to Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights and as the sticker says, is a fully managed service to help monitor and troubleshoot containers. Both of these additions are not GA but get your hands dirty and have a play.

They then pivoted by introducing you to a new service, Amazon EventBridge, which is a serverless event bus that routes real-time data streams from your applications and services to targets like AWS Lambda. EventBridge facilitates event-driven application development by simplifying the process of ingesting and delivering events across your application architecture, and by providing built-in security and error handling. What's more, there are built-in integrations from the likes of ZenDesk, Pager Duty, and more.

On the Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) front, we spoke of four updates.

1. Amazon RDS for Oracle Supports Oracle Application Express (APEX) Version 19.1
2. Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL Serverless has gone GA.
3. Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL supports new minor versions.
4. Amazon RDS introduces Compatibility Checks for Upgrades from MySQL 5.7 to MySQL 8.0.

Another new feature - Amazon EC2 Instance Connect, introduces that ability to control Secure Shell (SSH) access to your instances using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies, plus with AWS CloudTrail events giving you a centralized way to audit your SSH connections.

Finally, Tom snuck in some last-minute updates around Amazon AppStream 2.0 and Amazon WorkSpaces. Amazon AppStream 2.0 adding in support for Windows Server 2016 and Windows Server 2019 base images. Amazon WorkSpaces is now allowing you to copy your Amazon WorkSpaces Images across AWS regions.

Speakers:
Shane Baldacchino - Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS
Tom McMeekin - Solutions Architect, AWS

Resources:

• Amazon CloudWatch
  
• Amazon CloudWatch Anomaly Detection
  
• Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights
• Amazon EventBridge
  
• Amazon RDS for Oracle Supports Oracle Application Express (APEX) Version 19.1
  
• Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL Compatibility Supports Serverless
  
• Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL supports new minor versions
  
• Amazon RDS introduces Compatibility Checks
  
• Introducing Amazon EC2 Instance Connect
  
• AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
  
• AWS CloudTrail
  
• Amazon AppStream 2.0 adds support for Windows Server 2016 and Windows Server 2019
  
• Amazon WorkSpaces now supports copying Images across AWS Regions
  

In this themed episode of AWS TechChat, Shane and Gabe talk about the modern relational database built for the cloud: Amazon Aurora. So prepare to SELECT some Amazon Aurora knowledge INTO your brain!

They start the episode with some level setting. Amazon Aurora is a fully-managed MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible database, purpose-built for the cloud. It has great performance, and it gives enterprise-grade reliability at 1/10th the cost of traditional options. It has a distributed, fault-tolerant, self-healing storage system that auto-scales up to 64TB.

Keeping it modern and real, they then discuss Amazon Aurora Serverless, which is an on-demand, auto-scaling configuration for Amazon Aurora where the database will automatically start up, shut down, and scale capacity up or down based on your app's needs. It enables you to run your database with all the benefits that serverless brings.

Finally, they close the show out with a discussion around Amazon Aurora Global Database, which is designed for globally distributed applications, allowing a single Amazon Aurora database to span multiple AWS regions. It replicates your data with no impact to database performance, enables fast local reads with low latency in each region, and provides disaster recovery from region-wide outages.

Resources:

• AWS Innovate 2019 Global Edition
• Amazon CloudFront
• Lambda@Edge
• AWS Aurora
• Amazon Aurora Serverless
• Amazon Aurora Global Database
  

In this episode of AWS TechChat, TechChat turns 50 and Shane and Pete come at you with a raft of short sharp and important updates that occurred in June, in the year 2019.

They started the show, introducing you to a new service that has gone GA - AWS IoT Events. AWS IoT Events is a new, fully managed IoT service that makes it easy to detect and respond to events from IoT sensors and applications without the traditional heavy lifting of building traditional IoT applications and brings a managed complex event detection service to our already buff IoT suit.

Sticking with IoT theme, we quickly announced BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) support has landed in Amazon FreeRTOS, and a new MQTT library is now generally available in Amazon FreeRTOS 201906.00. With this update, you can now securely connect Amazon FreeRTOS devices using BLE to AWS IoT via Android and iOS devices, and use the new MQTT library to create applications that are independent of the connectivity protocol.

We then spoke about two new features for Microsoft SQL. Always On Availability Groups have made their way to SQL Server 2017 Enterprise Edition and we let you know you can now restore a multi-file native SQL Server backup from Amazon S3 to an Amazon RDS SQL Server database instance.

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) for Windows containers has gone GA so prepare your BSODs, only kidding. We now support Amazon ECS clusters running Windows Server 2019 containers, so if Windows containers are your thing, take a look at Amazon ECS.

Lastly, with Amazon API Gateway custom domains, you can now enforce a minimum Transport Layer Security (TLS) version and cipher suites through a security policy allowing you to further improve security for your customers.

Recourses:

• AWS IoT Events
• Amazon FreeRTOS Bluetooth Low Energy
• Amazon RDS SQL Server
• Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) for Windows containers
• Amazon API Gateway – TLS
  
  

In this episode of AWS TechChat, Shane and Pete take it up a notch in a thought-provoking episode. They discuss some key AWS feature releases that are fundamentally changing the approach of how customers wire up those more complex AWS account structures and talk to you about some modern approaches more mature customers are adopting.

We started the show with AWS RAM (Resource Access Manager) which is a simple and secure way to share resources across AWS Accounts, worth taking a look if you use VPC Peering or hybrid DNS resolvers today.

They then pivoted to AWS CDK (Cloud Development Kit) which is a software development framework, with the artifact being AWS CloudFormation, yet another tool to help you move to No-Ops and focus on improving developer productivity. AWS CDK offers a higher-level object-oriented abstraction to define AWS resources imperatively.

And lastly out with the old and in with the new (and it’s not Pete). Node JS 6 is EOL (End-of-Life) for AWS Lambda, and we announce the arrival of Node JS 10 touting significant performance and functionality improvements.

We like to hear what you like and perhaps what you don’t like, keep the feedback coming and don’t be shy, send us an email at awstechchat@amazon.com

In this monster episode of AWS TechChat, Shane and Pete (yes he’s alive and back) come at you with a raft of short sharp and important updates that occurred in May 2019.

They started the show with a price cut for Amazon Connect because everyone likes price cuts, and Amazon Connect is now 26% cheaper in two US regions.

Next, they cover additional cloud-formation support for both AWS Transfer for SFTP and AWS Backup, allowing you automate the usage of these services.

Moving on they talked through Amazon CloudWatch percentiles, as it has introduced support for percentiles on metric filters which are particularly useful when applied to metrics that exhibit large variances.
AWS Ground Station has gone GA (General Availability). So prepare your satellites. There are no long-term commitments, you pay only for antenna time, and you gain the ability to rapidly scale your satellite communications on-demand when your business needs it.

Shane then kept it real by talking about AWS Step Functions Callbacks. Callback patterns automate workflows for applications with human activities and custom integrations with third-party services, and now it's native.
Lastly, to close out the show, they covered three new EKS updates that address monitoring updates, through to additional functionality and reduced administrative effort.

We like to hear what you like and perhaps what you don’t like, keep the feedback coming and don’t be shy, send us an email at awstechchat@amazon.com

In this AWS TechChat - Application Security Edition, Shane chats with Gabe about all things application security, providing a crash course for the builder in all of us.

They start the show with some level setting to set the scene, introducing the Top 10 OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) before moving on to CVE's (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures). They then move up the stack to Layer 7 and speak about AWS WAF, which is our web application firewall that helps protect your web applications from common web exploits and how you can use AWS WAF to mitigate against OWASP Top 10 risks as well as how you can leverage managed rule sets for common COTS (Commercial off-the-shelf) applications.

Lastly, introducing Amazon Inspector - an automated security assessment service that helps shine a light on the security and compliance of applications deployed on Amazon EC2 by detecting CVE's and instance drift again CIS standards.

Join Shane and Dr. Pete as they get their inner geek on and cover a few significant announcements that occurred last month that help the modern builders. They cover some quick announcements around Amazon EC2. Amazon EC2 T3a instances are now a thing, and what’s more, our A1 instances are finding their way into Amazon ECS and Amazon EKS with the latter being in preview. They then set the scene around containers, romanticized about the past and how they differ from Virtual Machines before introducing AWS AppMesh. AWS AppMesh is a service mesh that provides application-level networking to make it easy for your services to communicate with each other, before rounding out the show by introducing the AWS Toolkit for VS Code which provides an integrated one-stop experience for developing and debugging serverless applications in AWS Lambda and AWS SAM.

Join Shane and Dr. Pete as they close our two-part series of getting started on AWS. In this episode they build on part 1 by extending the foundational concepts, allowing the student to become the master. They cover ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) via Amazon Elasticsearch Service allowing you to keep score on your website by visualizing logs, spotting trends and finding that needle in the haystack. They then pivot to collaboration and help reduce feedback cycles and bring your team closer together via Amazon Chime before briefly touch on Managed Active Directory and why you should run it on AWS. Lastly, they talk about Amazon WorkSpaces, your VDI experience in the cloud allows you to build desktop systems at scale from general purpose, to GPU backed instances and pay for them by the hour.

Join Dr. Pete and Shane as they cover the core concepts on how you can get a website and email service up and running on AWS. In part 1 of this two-part series, they lay a technical foundation and cover domain registration, and DNS in general with Amazon Route 53 - an awesome DNS service. They then speak about web-hosting and touched on the various options you have in AWS before transitioning to MX records and Amazon WorkMail for email hosting.

Join Dr. Pete and Shane as they cover the latest AWS Tech Round-Up. In this episode, they touch on topics relevant to all gamuts of IT. They start the show with a deep dive of AWS Step Functions Local and AWS Step Functions support for Tag Based Permissions. They then pivot to ALB (Application Load Balancer) announcement as ALB now supports ARR (Advanced Request Routing). They wrap up the episode with an introduction to AWS Deep Learning Containers.

In this episode of AWS TechChat, Shane and Dean cover updates that aid in optimizing your server and container operations via the Amazon Linux Upgrade Assistant and Amazon ECS Enhanced Container Dependency Management respectively. They also cover how applications in Amazon VPC'es (Virtual Private Cloud) can now securely access AWS PrivateLink endpoints across VPC peering connections. Finally, they look at emerging trends and technologies customers are using to experiment and innovate.

In this episode of AWS TechChat, Shane and Dr. Pete reflect on changes to the AWS platform that have occurred over the years. They review the services that often go hidden away. Whilst often niche to the masses, they are important and are the unsung heroes which can affect developer and operational productivity. Shane talks about patterns and anti-patterns for AWS Secrets Manager and AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store. They then pivot to AWS Certificate Manager and explain a little bit about public and private certificates, and how AWS Certificate Manager makes your life easier. Lastly, they cover AWS Simple Email Service and how it can easily slot into your landscape.

It is the new year and a new episode of AWS TechChat, Shane and Dr. Pete look over the 50 or so announcements post AWS re:Invent 2018. They talk about price cuts for AWS Fargate of up to 50%, introduce Server 2019 Amazon EC2 AMI's and what it brings to the table and why you should upgrade. They introduce 3 new services, AWS Backup, AWS Client VPN and Amazon WorkLink and talk about the latest Amazon EC2 Placement group feature and partition placement groups.

In this bumper episode of AWS TechChat, Shane and Tom close out our 3 part re:Invent special with an episode for the builders. They talk through the added functionality released around AWS Lambda, and there is a lot. AWS Lambda as a ALB Target, AWS Lambda Layers providing common dependencies across functions and Lambda Custom Runtimes allowing you build AWS Lambda functions with your own runtimes. They introduce Step Functions API Connectors enabling customers to workflows that consume AWS services without writing extensive code and lastly the AWS Amplify Console, which provides continuous delivery and hosting services for mobile and web applications.

In the second part of AWS re:Invent 2018 recap episode, Shane is joined by Tom McMeekin, Solutions Architect, AWS. They dive into important Machine Learning and AI announcements around Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon Elastic Inference, AWS optimized TensorFlow, Amazon DeepRacer, Amazon SageMaker Neo, Amazon Textract, Amazon Personalize and Amazon Forecast.

In this bumper episode of AWS TechChat, Dr. Pete and Shane scratch the surface of AWS re:Invent 2018. This episode will highlight ARM's coming of age with the Amazon EC2 A1 instance powered by the AWS Graviton processor. They will introduce you to Firecracker, a platform that gives customers the hardware virtualization-based security boundaries of virtual machines, while maintaining the smaller package size and agility of containers and functions and lastly they will cover storage updates by introducing you to AWS FSx, which provides two managed file systems and briefly scratch the surface of AWS Transfer for SFTP.

Joining host Shane in the latest episode of AWS TechChat is special guest Tom McMeekin, Solution Architect, AWS. Shane and Tom discuss updates to Amazon Route 53, support for DNS resolution over inter region VPC, Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling and AWS CloudFormation.  

In this latest episode of AWS TechChat, Dr.Pete and Shane are diving deep on databases! From the newest edge locations to the announcement of AMD EPYC. They dive into the updates around Amazon RDS for SQL server, MySQL version updates and Amazon Athena.

Dr.Pete and Shane are back again with another episode of AWS TechChat! Tune in to find out more about price reductions and the latest AWS updates around Amazon EC2, AWS Storage Gateway, Multi Factor Authentication with Universal 2nd Factor (U2F), AWS Lambda, AWS WAF and Amazon Aurora.

In another exciting episode of AWS TechChat, hosts Dean and Gabe share, the latest AWS events, key releases such as AWS X-Ray adding support for controlling sampling rate from the X-Ray console, Amazon API Gateway adding support for AWS X-Ray, Amazon WorkSpaces Web Access and, dive deep into system observability and hybrid IT.

Join Dr Pete and Shane in the latest episode of AWS TechChat as, they share quick wins to save time and money! They share six quick wins from updating your Amazon EC2 instances, using Amazon Aurora for Auto Scaling, managing and measuring your free tier usage with the free tier widget, reducing time spent on application development with Serverless Bot Framework and AWS Amplify, upgrading to Amazon Redshift DC2 Reserved Instances to the price reduction of Amazon Lightsail.

In this latest episode of AWS TechChat, hosts Olivier and Dean discuss how AWS enables you to innovate quickly with the latest from AWS PrivateLink, Amazon CloudFront, VPC endpoints, AWS Greengrass, AWS Snowball Edge, AWS Fargate, Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Transcribe.

Unable to attend some of your favourite AWS events? Join Dr Pete and Shane as they kick off the 30th episode of AWS TechChat on the latest events, update of AWS stats and dive into deep tech details around AWS landing zones, Amazon API Gateway, Storage Gateway, Application Load Balancer, Amazon Linux, Amazon EMR and AWS DeepLens.

In the latest episode of AWS TechChat, we welcome onboard Gabe Hollombe as a co-host. Join Dean and Gabe as they start the episode with the latest AWS stats, general availability of Amazon Neptune, Amazon EKS and Amazon Sumerian. They then go into the latest from Amazon Cognito, AWS AppSync, AWS MobileHub, AWS CodeBuild, AWS CodePipeline, Amazon SQS, Application Load Balancer and Amazon SageMaker.

In the latest episode of AWS TechChat, Dr. Pete and Shane share with you some of the latest AWS Stats, how you can optimize CPUs for Amazon EC2 instance, updates and announcements around AWS Elastic Beanstalk, AWS Auto Scaling, Amazon SNS, Amazon Aurora, Amazon ECS, registry of open data on AWS, opportunities for cost savings for Amazon RDS, AWS Certified Security Exam and AWS Database Migration Service.

Missed the AWS Summits? We bring you AWS TechChat from the AWS Summit Sydney! In the first episode of TechChat TV, hear Dr Pete & Dean Samuels share what’s new at AWS.

Watch this session on TechChat TV.

In this episode of AWS TechChat, we welcome Shane Baldacchino to the line-up of AWS TechChat hosts! Dr Pete & Shane kick off this episode with updates on the AWS infrastructure and, dive into the latest from IoT and Machine Learning at AWS with news around Amazon EC2 H1 Instances, Amazon SageMaker, AWS DeepLens, AWS Greengrass ML Inference, Amazon FreeRTOS, AWS IoT Device Management, Amazon Rekognition Video, Amazon Transcribe, Amazon Translate, and Amazon Comprehend.

Hosts Oli and Dean, bring you the latest episode of AWS TechChat where they kick it off with updates from AWS re:Invent 2017, how to keep up to date with AWS and the new AWS regions. They then dive into AWS Database services such as Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Neptune, Amazon Aurora and, AWS Compute services such as Amazon EC2, Amazon ECS and AWS Lambda.

Tune into the latest episode of AWS TechChat, as it kicks off with some interesting news around Artificial Intelligence (AI), latest updates and announcements around Amazon EC2 P3 Instances, Apache MXNet Release, Amazon EC2 C5 Instances, AWS Deep Learning AMI, Amazon Kinesis Analytics, Amazon API Gateway, Amazon Aurora, Preview of Performance Insights, Amazon Athena, AWS Shield, AWS Direct Connect and, information around AI related sessions at AWS re: Invent 2017. 

Joining Pete and Oli as a co-host from this episode is Dean Samuels, Solutions Architect Manager, HKT, AWS. In this latest episode, Pete and Dean round up the latest around Amazon CloudFront, AWS WAF, Amazon EC2 Spot, Windows Server for Amazon LightSail, Microsoft SQL Server for Amazon EC2, Lifecycle Policies for Amazon EC2 Container Registry, Amazon Database Migration Service, Amazon Redshift, Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator and Gluon, Application Load Balancer and AWS Marketplace.

Join host Oli in the latest episode of AWS TechChat as he speaks with special guest, Dean Samuels, Solutions Architect Manager, HKT, AWS. Oli and Dean dive into the latest updates and announcements around Network Load Balancer, Amazon Lex, Amazon EC2 Systems Manager, AWS Greengrass, Per-Second billing, Middle East Region, Apache MXNet, and Prime Day 2017.

Join host Dr Pete in the latest episode of AWS TechChat, as he shares the information and updates around VMware on AWS, improvements to signing into your AWS Account, Amazon Route 53, Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon VPC, Amazon EC2, Amazon SES, Amazon RDS, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CloudFormation, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon Lex, New Quick Starts on deploying IBM MQ on AWS and deploying NGNIX Plus on the AWS Cloud.

In the exciting 20th episode of AWS TechChat, hosts Dr Pete and Oli take listeners through new service announcements of AWS Migration Hub, Amazon Macie, AWS CloudTrail Event History, AWS Glue, launch of edge locations for Amazon CloudFront, general availability of Lambda@Edge and VPC endpoints for Amazon DynamoDB, updates and information around Amazon EFS, NOAA GOES-R on AWS, UK Met Office Forecast Data, New Quick Start, AWS CodeCommit, introducing AWS SAM Local and AWS CodeDeploy.

In the latest episode of AWS TechChat, Dr.Pete welcomes Olivier Klein as the new co-host. The hosts kick off the episode with, information and updates around Amazon Connect, Amazon WorkSpaces, AWS Direct Connect, AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF), AWS Config, Amazon Kinesis, New Quick Start, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon EC2 Systems Manager, Amazon Athena, Amazon Route 53 and wrap it up with an Amazon Connect demo.

Join Dr Pete and Russ in the latest episode of AWS TechChat as they share security best practices and news around Amazon Rekognition, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon ECS, AWS Greengrass, Amazon SQS, AWS CodeStar, AWS Lambda, AWS X-Ray, Amazon Aurora, Amazon RDS, Amazon EMR and AWS Deep Learning AMIs.

In this action packed episode of AWS TechChat, hosts Dr. Pete and Russ share the latest announcements around Amazon EC2 P2 instances, Amazon LightSail, updates around Remote Desktop Gateway, Amazon Athena, Amazon Elasticsearch, Amazon Aurora, Amazon RDS, Amazon CloudFront, HIPAA eligible services, Amazon Cognito, Amazon QuickSight, AWS Serverless Application, IAM policy summaries and new AWS Certification Specialty exams. 

From new announcements to service updates, hosts Dr. Pete and Russ bring you another packed episode of AWS TechChat. In this episode, they take you through the announcement of new edge locations, updates to Amazon QuickSIght, AWS CloudTrail, AWS Marketplace, Amazon WorkMail, Amazon EMR, Amazon RDS, AWS Schema Conversion Tool, AWS Organizations, Elastic Load Balancing, AWS Deep Learning, Amazon Simple Queue System (SQS), Amazon Chime, AWS Lambda and introduce, AWS and Ionic’s Mobile Web and Hybrid Application on GitHub.

Join Dr. Pete and Russ in another episode of AWS TechChat as they discuss the latest AWS announcements and updates around AWS CodeStar, Amazon Redshift, Amazon EC2, Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Database Migration, AWS X-Ray, Amazon Aurora, Amazon Rekognition, Amazon Polly, Amazon Lex, Amazon Mobile Hub Integration, AWS Lambda, AWS Marketplace and Simplified Pricing API.

Useful Links:

• AWS CodeStar
• Amazon Redshift Spectrum
• FPGA Amazon EC2 F1 instances
• Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator
• VPC Endpoints for Amazon DynamoDB
• AWS Database Migration Service Adds Support for MongoDB and Amazon DynamoDB
• AWS X-Ray Now Supports Tracing for AWS Lambda
• Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL Compatibility
• Detect Explicit or Suggestive Adult Content using Amazon Rekognition
• Amazon Polly Introduces a new Whispered Voice Tag, and Speech Marks
• Amazon Lex
• AWS Mobile Hub Integration with Amazon Lex
• AWS Lambda Supports Tagging and Cost Allocations
• AWS Marketplace Copy to Service Catalog is Now Available
• Simplified Pricing API

Tune into the latest episode of AWS TechChat as special guest Adrian Cockcroft, Vice President, Cloud Architecture Strategy, AWS joins our hosts Dr Pete and Russ to talk about Innovation, Architecture and the AWS Cloud. 

In this episode, Dr Pete and Russ run through a round-up of the latest AWS updates and announcements including the launch of the new Zurich edge location, the general availability of Amazon Cloud Directory, updates to Move over JSON, AWS Lambda, Amazon ECS, Amazon WorkDocs, AWS Cryptography, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon EMR, Amazon ElastiCache, Databases, Deep Learning, Amazon Elastic File System and Amazon EC2 reserved Instances.

Useful Links:

• Amazon CloudFront Global Edge Locations
  
• Amazon Cloud Directory API
  
• AWS CloudTrail
  
• Amazon Cloud Directory
  
• AWS Free Tier
  
• IAM console
  
• Move Over JSON – Policy Summaries Make Understanding IAM Policies Easier
  
• Understanding Policy Summaries in the AWS Management Console
  
• Amazon services
  
• AWS Lambda documentation
  
• Amazon WorkDocs Administrative SDK
  
• AWS Cryptography announces AWS Encryption SDK for Python
  
• Amazon CloudWatch Events
  
• AWS Step Functions
  
• Amazon EC2 Run Command 
  
• Amazon EMR announces instance fleets for Amazon EC2 Spot instances and Spot blocks
  
• Amazon EMR release 5.4.0 and support for R4 instances now available
  
• Amazon ElastiCache Launches Enhanced Redis Backup and Restore with Cluster Resizing
  
• Amazon Aurora Cuts Entry-Level Pricing in Half with Support for T2.Small Instances
  
• Amazon Aurora Announces Encryption Support for Globally Distributed Database Deployments
  
• Amazon Aurora Supports Cross-Account Encrypted Snapshot Sharing
  
• AWS Database Migration Service Enables Individual Table Reload
  
• Deep Learning AMI release v1.2 for Ubuntu and Updated AWS CloudFormation Template Now Available
  
• Deep Learning AMI release v2.0 now Available for Amazon Linux
  
• Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) Available in Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region
  
• Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances
  

In the latest episode of AWS TechChat, hosts Dr Pete and Russ start off by announcing the new edge location in Philadelphia for Amazon CloudFront and the availability of Amazon Chime. They also take you through the latest services and feature updates around Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon API Gateway, AWS Organizations, Amazon Relational Database Service, AWS Schema, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Elasticsearch Service, New Quick Start, Amazon EC2, AWS Key Management Service, AWS Lambda, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon GameLift, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon QuickSIght, Amazon Rekognition and AWS Direct Connect.
 
Useful Links:

• New Edge Location in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania for Amazon CloudFront
• Announcing Amazon Chime: Frustration-free online meetings with exceptional audio and video quality
• Amazon Elastic Block Store Enables Live Volume Modifications with Elastic Volumes
• AWS Key Management Service now supports tagging of keys
• AWS Lambda Adds Enhanced Visibility into Stream-based Processing Operations
• Amazon API Gateway Integration with AWS Step Functions
• AWS Organizations Now Generally Available
• New Amazon EC2 Spot Advisor and Spot fleets now support Health Checks
• Amazon DynamoDB now supports automatic item expiration with Time-to-Live (TTL)  
• AWS Schema Conversion Tool Exports from Oracle and Teradata Data Warehouses to Amazon Redshift 
• Amazon Redshift now supports encrypting unloaded data using Amazon S3 server-side encryption with AWS KMS keys
  
• Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports additional instance types and up to 30 TB EBS capacity per domain
• Amazon QuickSight now supports Scheduled Refresh of SPICE data
• Estimate Age Range using Amazon Rekognition and View CloudWatch Metrics  
• New Quick Start deploys an architecture that supports HIPAA Phase 1 and 2 on the AWS Cloud
• Attach an IAM role to your existing Amazon EC2 instance
• AWS Direct Connect announces support for Link Aggregation
  

Hosts, Dr Pete and Russ kick off the latest episode of AWS TechChat with a round up on the AWS global Infrastructure, global network, price reductions and, number of new services and features we have launched. They will also take you through exciting announcements on Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) support for Amazon EC2 instances in Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), AWS Lambda, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon Elastic Container Service, Amazon Elasticsearch, Amazon Elastic MapReduce, Amazon Relational Database Services and Amazon Workspaces
 
Resources:

AWS Lambda
AWS:: Serverless::Function
AWS:: Serverless::Api
AWS:: Serverless::SimpleTable
AWS Serverless Application Model
Dead Letter Queues

AWS Elastic Beanstalk
AWS Elastic Beanstalk Support for Restoring Terminated Environments
AWS X-Ray 

BIG DATA
Amazon Elasticsearch
Amazon Elasticsearch Service 
Amazon Elasticsearch Service free tier now available on t2.small.elasticsearch instances
Elasticsearch 5 now available on Amazon Elasticsearch Service
Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports phonetic analysis

Amazon Elastic MapReduce
Apache Spark 2.1.0 and updates to Apache Hive and Hue now available on Amazon EMR release 5.3.0

Amazon Redshift
Amazon Redshift announces improved Workload Management console experience

Amazon Relational Database Service
Amazon RDS for Oracle Supports Outbound Network Access Using Custom DNS Servers
Amazon RDS for Oracle 
Amazon DNS service 
Easy Migration from RDS MySQL to Aurora
Amazon RDS for MySQL 
Amazon Aurora 
Amazon RDS now supports Read Replicas of Encrypted Database Instances across Regions
read replicas
Amazon RDS 
MariaDB
MySQL 
PostgreSQL 
AWS Key Management Service (KMS)

Dr Pete and Russ Nash continue their round-up of the best highlights of the new AWS services announcements made from re:Invent 2016. Wishing our listeners a most happy and safe holiday season.  

[ARTIFICAL INTELLIGENCE ]
Amazon Polly – New Service

A service that turns text into lifelike speech. It supports 24 languages and 47 lifelike voices. Create apps that talk, enabling you to build entirely new categories of speech-enabled products. Learn More »

Amazon Rekognition - New Service

A service that makes it easy to add image analysis to your applications. With Rekognition, you can detect objects, scenes, and faces in images. You can also search and compare faces. Learn More »

Amazon Lex – New Service

A service for building conversational interfaces using voice and text. With Lex, the same deep learning engine that powers Alexa is now available to any developer, enabling you to bring sophisticated, natural language chatbots to new and existing applications. Learn More »

[ SECURITY ]
AWS Shield – New Service

AWS Shield is a managed DDoS protection service that safeguards your web applications using Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), Amazon CloudFront, and Amazon Route 53. Learn More »

[ COMPUTE ]
Lambda@Edge – New Feature

Lets you run code at CloudFront edge locations without provisioning or managing servers. This allows developers to deliver a low latency user experience for customized web applications. Learn More »

AWS Batch – New Service (Preview)

AWS Batch enables developers, scientists, and engineers to easily and efficiently run hundreds of thousands of batch computing jobs on AWS. Learn More »

[ DEVELOPER TOOLS ]
AWS CodeBuild – New Service

AWS CodeBuild builds and tests code in the cloud. CodeBuild scales continuously, so your builds are not left waiting in a queue. You are charged by the minute for the compute resources you use. Learn More »

AWS X-Ray – New Service
Helps developers analyze and debug production, distributed applications, such as those built using a microservices architecture. With X-Ray, you can understand how your application and its underlying services are performing to identify and troubleshoot the root cause of performance issues and errors. Learn More »

[ APPLICATION SERVICES ]
AWS Step Functions – New Service

Makes it easy to coordinate the components of distributed applications and microservices using visual workflows. Learn More »

[ MANAGEMENT TOOLS ]
AWS Personal Health Dashboard – New Service

Gives you a personalized view of AWS service health. You’ll get alerts when services you are using are impacted, and guidance to help keep your AWS resources healthy. Learn More »

[ CONTAINERS ]
Blox – Open Source scheduler for Amazon ECS

Blox is a collection of open source software that enables customers to build custom schedulers and integrate third-party schedulers on top of ECS. Learn More »

[ MOBILE SERVICES ]
Amazon Pinpoint – New Service

Amazon Pinpoint makes it easy to run targeted push notification campaigns to improve user engagement in mobile apps. You can use Pinpoint to define your target segments, run your campaign, and measure results. Learn More »

[ ANALYTICS ]
AWS Glue – New Service

A fully managed ETL service that makes it easy to understand your data sources, prepare the data, and load it reliably to data stores. It simplifies and automates data discovery, transformation, and job scheduling tasks. Learn More »

For the AWS and tech aficionados, Dr Pete and Russ Nash delivers some of the best highlights of the new services announcements made from re:Invent 2016. With more than 130 announcements made, episode #9 offers the most titillating updates that would leave any techy feeling like Christmas has come early!

[ COMPUTE ]
Amazon EC2 R4 - New Instance Type

• The latest generation of Memory Optimized instances which are 20% more price performant than R3 instances. Learn More »
  

Amazon EC2 T2 - New Instance Type

• You can now launch t2.xlarge and t2.2xlarge, the newest Amazon EC2 burstable-performance instances. Learn More »
  

Amazon EC2 I3 – New Instance Type

• I3 instances are the latest generation of Storage Optimized High I/O instances, featuring NVMe based SSDs for the most demanding I/O intensive relational, NoSQL, transactional, and analytics workloads. Learn More »
  

Amazon EC2 C5 – New Instance Type

• Next-generation compute optimized instance. Learn More »
  

Amazon EC2 F1 – New Instance Type

• A new compute instance with programmable hardware for application acceleration. With F1, you can directly access custom FPGA hardware on the instance in a few clicks. Learn More »
  

Amazon EC2 Elastic GPUs – New Feature

• Ability to add high performance graphics acceleration to existing EC2 instance types, with your choice of 1 GiB to 8 GiB of GPU memory and compute power to match. Learn More »
  

Amazon LightSail – New Service

• When sometimes you just want a server. A fast and easy way to get a virtual private server with the memory, storage and networking your project requires. Learn More »
  

[ ANALYTICS ]
Amazon Athena – New Service

• An interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using SQL. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage. You pay only for the queries you run. Learn More »
  

[ DATABASES ]
Amazon Aurora – New Features

• Now PostgreSQL compatible. Get up to twice the performance of the typical PostgreSQL database and the features you love in Amazon Aurora. Learn More »
  

[ INTERNET OF THINGS ]
AWS Greengrass – Software for Connected Devices

• Software that lets you run local compute, messaging & data caching for connected devices. Learn More »
  

[ STORAGE ]
AWS SnowBall Edge – New Service

• A petabyte-scale data transfer service with on-board storage and compute. Learn More »
  

AWS SnowMobile – New Service

• An exabyte-scale data transfer service used to move extremely large amounts of data. Learn More »
  

[ DESKTOP & APP STREAMING ]
Amazon AppStream 2.0

• Allows you to stream desktop apps securely from the AWS cloud directly to users on the device of their choice, eliminating the need to rewrite desktop apps for the cloud. Learn More »
  

[ MANAGEMENT TOOLS ]
Amazon EC2 Systems Manager – New Service

• A management service that helps you automatically collect software inventory, apply Windows OS patches, create system images, and configure Windows and Linux operating systems. Learn More »
  

Our hosts geek out with Adrian De Luca, Head of Solution Architecture for partners and ecosystem for Asia-Pacific. They chat about all things related to AWS partners, including the different levels and types (in the vicinity of tens of thousands world-wide) and their key role in shifting workloads onto the AWS cloud and providing exceptional experience for customers that are scaling on AWS. They also cover some great partner activities happening across the globe as well as some recent key announcements made with IBM, CommVault, VMware and Atlassian. Happy listening!

• Find AWS partners, visit AWS Partner Network
• Find out about training and accreditation for AWS Partners
• The “app store” for the enterprise, visit: AWS Marketplace
• QuickStart links: Atlassian, Microsoft, SAP HANA
• Find out more about how you can run VMware workloads on AWS
• Email aws-anz-amazon@amazom.com to find out more about AWS Bootcamps

By popular demand, Dr Pete and Russ Nash serves up a mammoth update covering the latest technical news and announcements from AWS, covering:

• The 38th AWS availability zone opening in East Ohio US
• New P2 instance type for Amazon EC2, Grace Hopper + GPU specs
  
• Deep Learning AMI
• Aurora + Lambda
• EMR, HDFS and Snowball
• AWS Server Migration Service
• DevOps with new CloudFormation extensions
• PowerShell everywhere + AWS Powershell Core on Linux/Mac, C++ SDK
• And a huge focus on IPv6 DNS, S3, WAF, including a trick and tips segment for using ipv6
  

Stay up to date on the cloud topics that matter to you most. Dr Pete and Russ Nash chat about Aussie Rules Football and the last 10 years of AWS with Dr Werner Vogels, VP and CTO of Amazon.com during his recent trip to Australia.

Stay up to date on the cloud topics that matter to you most. Dr Pete and Russ Nash offers up a monstrous round-up of AWS news and services updates, spanning from performance enhancements, price reductions and software dev updates. Tune in to get across the most significant updates from AWS.

Topics covered:

• Reader End Point for Amazon Aurora
• Amazon RDS for Oracle and SQL
• Announcing Application Load Balancer for Elastic Load Balancing
• Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) now supporting additional Docker features
• Amazon ECR update
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk support updates
• Amazon EMR 5.0 Release
• Introducing Amazon Kinesis Analytics
• Amazon Elasticsearch Service now supports Elasticsearch 2.3
• And more!
  

A special guest joins Dr Pete and Russ in this episode, which is sure to excite the developers among you! Developer-at-heart, Adam Larter, Specialist Solutions Architect from AWS, chats to our hosts about the latest news impacting the developer community from AWS. Covering hot topics like AWS IoT, the serverless framework and the growing momentum of AWS Lambda & API Gateway since launching in 2014. Adam also offers up tips to how you can get started by leveraging AWS SDKs to develop, create and manage applications built on AWS. Take advantage of a great number of resources available to help you get started (listed below) – there’s never been a better time to build!

Getting Started:
· AWS SDK
· AWS Lambda
· AWS IoT
· AWS Documentation

Learn more:
· Visit the AWS Developer Blog
· View course info on Developing on AWS

Dr Pete and Russ deliver another rich round-up of recent AWS news. They cover India's recent AWS Region launch, the latest services and feature updates around EC2 with Elastic Network Adaptor, Run Command, Elastic File System (EFS), Python Serverless Microframework for AWS, as well as Mobile Hub, Lumberyard, Database Migration, Aurora and a whole lot more. They are also joined by a special guest from APAC Certification and Training,
Ash Willis. Ash joins our hosts to chat about honing your cloud skills, and best practice tips to get you started on your AWS certification journey. All this and more - be sure to tune in!

In this episode, Dr Pete and Russ run through a round-up of the latest AWS updates, including: EC2 longer instance IDs, EC2 console screenshots, RDS Multi-AZ for SQL Server, RDS cross region replication for Aurora, the new EMR release including Apache Tez and Apache Phoenix, new high throughput EBS volume types and S3 Transfer Acceleration. They also take a closer look at the applications and benefits of resource tagging. All this and and more – be sure to tune in!

AWS TechChat debuts with discussions on the exciting AWS announcements made at AWS Summit Sydney (27 – 28 April, 2016). Dr Pete and Russell Nash are joined by Ajay Nair and Stefano Buliani from the AWS product team, to chat about the significance of large-scale data transport solution, AWS Snowball, and the upcoming launches of AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway and what this means to Australian and New Zealand customers.