Dec 16 - Dec 22 Updates

Last Week Cloud Platform Updates

December 23, 2024

Dec 16 - Dec 22 | AWS, Azure & GCP Updates

Amazon Elastic Container Services (ECS) now supports network fault injection experiments for applications deployed on AWS Fargate. Using AWS Fault Injection Simulator (FIS), you can simulate network disruptions, including latency, blackholes, and packet loss, alongside existing resource stress tests like CPU and I/O stress.

AWS announces CloudFormation support for AWS Parallel Computing Service (PCS), enabling users to automate the creation and management of PCS clusters and streamline cluster administration tasks.

AWS Backup now supports dual-stack environments, allowing connectivity through IPv4, IPv6, or both. This enhancement includes support for AWS Backup API endpoints accessed privately via Amazon VPC using AWS PrivateLink, with dual-stack endpoints provided on a new AWS DNS domain name. Existing API endpoints remain available for backward compatibility.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) enhances its upgrade insights feature to include scans for cluster health and version compatibility issues. These checks now cover Kubernetes components like kubelet, kube-proxy, and EKS add-ons, providing warnings to ensure smoother cluster upgrades.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) introduces node health monitoring and automatic repair for EC2 instances in EKS clusters. This feature detects Kubernetes-specific health issues and automatically repairs unhealthy nodes, enhancing application availability and reducing operational effort for maintaining optimal cluster performance.

We are excited to announce the public preview of Azure Database for MySQL bindings for Azure Functions. With this new feature, Azure Functions can seamlessly interact with Azure Database for MySQL databases using input and output bindings. By simplifying the code required to read from and write to the database, these bindings significantly speed up the development time. You can create scalable, event-driven applications and serverless APIs using popular programming languages such as C#, Java, JavaScript, Python, and PowerShell.

HDInsight is now generally available in New Zealand North. Azure HDInsight is a managed, full-spectrum, open-source analytics service in the cloud for enterprises. You can use open-source frameworks such as Hadoop, Apache Spark, Apache Hive, LLAP, Apache Kafka, and more.

Risk and safety evaluations for images and multimodal content are now available in public preview in Azure AI Foundry. These evaluations can help organizations assess the frequency and severity of harmful content in human and AI-generated outputs to prioritize relevant risk mitigations in their generative AI applications. For example, these evaluations can help organizations assess content risks in cases where 1) text inputs yield image outputs, 2) a combination of image and text inputs produce text outputs, and 3) images containing text (like memes) generate text and/or image outputs.

Starting March 1, 2025, all Azure services will require using TLS 1.2 or higher. Support for TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 will end on March 1, 2025. To enhance security and provide best-in-class encryption for your data, we will enable Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.3 for Azure Event Grid on March 1, 2025.  

Amazon VPC now supports IPv6-only subnets and instances, available in Preview. This feature enables you to create subnets and instances exclusively using IPv6, aligning with modern networking requirements.

Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL now offers enhanced query insights for Enterprise Plus edition. These enhancements include extended metrics retention of up to 30 days, granular query plan details for deeper insights into query execution, and support for analyzing longer queries with a higher query length limit. This update provides advanced tools for optimizing database performance and troubleshooting queries.

BAs of December 20, 2024, documentation is available to guide you in using audit logs to troubleshoot Pub/Sub issues. These logs can help you identify who created, deleted, or modified Pub/Sub resources, track configuration changes to topics or subscriptions, and verify the existence and status of topics and subscriptions. This new resource streamlines issue resolution and enhances visibility into Pub/Sub operations.

Google Cloud has introduced finer-grained predefined IAM roles for Cloud Run: Cloud Run Service Invoker, Cloud Run Jobs Executor, and Cloud Run Jobs Executor With Overrides. These roles are designed to simplify granting least privilege access to production accounts interacting with Cloud Run resources, enhancing security and access control.