Nov 04 - Nov 10 Updates

Last Week Cloud Platform Updates

November 11, 2024

Nov 04 - Nov 10 | AWS, Azure & GCP Updates

AWS has updated the Well-Architected Framework, introducing comprehensive enhancements, including 14 refreshed best practices with a focus on the Reliability Pillar. This marks the first major update since 2022 and provides prescriptive guidance, expanded best practices, and updated resources to help customers build secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient workloads.

AWS has launched service versioning and deployment history for Amazon ECS services, allowing you to track application changes, monitor ongoing deployments, and debug failures more effectively. This feature provides a detailed view of deployment history and service revisions both in the AWS Management Console and via new APIs: listServiceDeployments and describeServiceDeployment. You can inspect each deployment’s status, start and end times, and service revisions before and after updates. Additionally, the describeServiceRevision API lets you view immutable service configuration details, including task definitions, container image digests, load balancer settings, and more.

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Groups (ASG) now offer strict availability zone balancing, giving customers better control over EC2 instance distribution across Availability Zones. Previously, achieving strict balance required custom code or multiple ASGs. This new feature simplifies provisioning, enabling balanced instance distribution across zones, and enhances application resiliency without custom modifications.

AWS CodePipeline has open-sourced its starter templates library, providing CloudFormation templates for various pipeline scenarios. This resource helps newcomers to CodePipeline understand the configuration of different stages and the resources provisioned. The templates offer a transparent, hands-on approach, serving as a foundation for building customized, advanced CI/CD workflows tailored to business needs.

Amazon CloudFront no longer charges for requests blocked by AWS WAF. This update eliminates both request fees and data transfer charges for blocked requests, applying automatically to all CloudFront distributions using AWS WAF. No changes are required to your existing applications.

Today, we are announcing the general availability of Azure cross-subscription Load Balancer. Cross-subscription load balancing enables the load balancers components to be located in different subscriptions. For example, the frontend IP address or the backend instances could be located in a different subscription from the one that the load balancer belongs to.

Announcing the general availability of Azure Load Balancer Health Status, a powerful feature designed to provide detailed information about the health of backend instances in your Azure Load Balancer backend pool.

The Health Status feature offers valuable insights into the state of health of your backend instances and specific reasons for their health status, including:

  • User-triggered issues

  • Platform-triggered reason codes

With this feature, you can now monitor and manage the health of your backend instances through detailed status reports. This improved visibility into the health of backend pool instances allows for easier troubleshooting and more efficient management of issues with your Load Balancer.

We’re announcing the general availability of User-Defined Route (UDR) Management in Azure Virtual Network Manager. This new feature simplifies managing complex routing behaviors by automating UDR orchestration. Through Azure Virtual Network Manager’s UDR management, users can easily set up routing configurations that define routing rules, allowing automatic deployment across virtual networks. This means users no longer need to manually create UDRs or use custom scripts—reducing errors and simplifying routing at scale.

The UDR Management feature enables users to structure routing rules into collections, each associated with specific network groups, making routing configurations reusable and consistent across subnets or virtual networks. Users can implement custom routing behaviors, such as directing traffic within a hub-and-spoke topology or routing specific traffic types through Azure Firewall. UDR Management thus ensures seamless, flexible routing that adapts to network changes without manual intervention.

You can now debug queries more efficiently with the improved error messaging in Azure Cosmos DB Data Explorer.

This release addresses common challenges, such as syntax errors, invalid operators, parameters, or typos that previously resulted in generic, truncated error messages. Now, detailed, user-friendly error messages are displayed in a separate panel below the query editor. They highlight the exact location of the error, making it easier for you to identify and fix issues quickly. Additionally, you can use the F8 keyboard shortcut to navigate through multiple errors seamlessly, saving you time and effort. The error messages are also formatted to align with developer expectations, following the format of compiler errors, which are widely understood in the industry.

This release introduces several enhanced features, including improved vacuum processes and dynamic logical replication, optimizing performance and flexibility for your databases. Dive into new JSON functionalities and detailed memory usage insights with PostgreSQL 17, enabling more efficient data management and query optimization. Start exploring these capabilities today to see how they can enhance your applications.

Azure File Sync support for managed identities is now in public preview.

Managed Identity eliminates the need for shared keys as a method of authentication to your Azure file shares by utilizing a system-assigned managed identity provided by Microsoft Entra ID.

When you configure managed identities for your Azure File Sync deployment, system-assigned managed identities will be used for the following scenarios:

  • Storage Sync Service authentication to Azure file share 

  • Registered server authentication to Azure file share

  • Registered server authentication to Storage Sync Service

100% Kafka compatibility: Kafka Streams and Kafka Transactions support are both in public preview in the Premium and Dedicated tiers. This means you can seamlessly integrate your Apache Kafka workloads with minimal configuration changes.

Portal-based Data Explorer: Event Hubs now offers a new portal-based feature to simplify testing and debugging, and generate insights.

You can now restore soft-deleted buckets in Cloud Storage. If a bucket is deleted with an active soft delete policy, it is retained for a specified duration, allowing you to restore it to a live state during this retention period. This feature helps protect against accidental deletions and provides a recovery option for critical data.

You can now view the size of backups for Cloud SQL instances across MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server, providing better insights into backup storage usage and management.

Cloud Storage import topics are now generally available in Pub/Sub, enabling seamless data ingestion from Cloud Storage into Pub/Sub. Additionally, you can enable Google Cloud platform logs to troubleshoot issues when using import topics, enhancing monitoring and debugging capabilities.

Global and regional external Application Load Balancers (excluding Classic) now support percentage-based request mirroring. You can use the mirrorPercent flag to specify the percentage of requests to be mirrored, allowing the mirrored backend service to receive only a portion of the traffic, with values ranging from 0 to 100.