Oct 07 - Oct 13 Updates

Last Week Cloud Platform Updates

October 14, 2024

Oct 07 - Oct 13 | AWS, Azure & GCP Updates

AWS has launched Console to Code, powered by Amazon Q Developer, now generally available. This tool allows users to easily generate code for console actions in formats like CLI, CloudFormation, and CDK, making it simple to transition from prototyping in the AWS Management Console to production-ready code. Console to Code captures actions performed in the console and converts them into reusable code that follows AWS best practices, streamlining the process of building automation pipelines and deploying reliable infrastructure.

The Mountpoint for Amazon S3 Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver now supports assigning distinct IAM roles to individual Kubernetes pods. This allows you to configure pod-specific access to S3 buckets or objects in Amazon EKS and self-managed Kubernetes clusters. Previously, a single IAM role was used for all pods in a cluster. With this update, you can enhance security in multi-tenant environments by ensuring each pod accesses only the data it needs, improving data isolation for tasks like machine learning and media transcoding.

AWS Network Load Balancer (NLB) now supports Amazon Application Recovery Controller's zonal shift and zonal autoshift features for cross-zone enabled load balancers. Zonal shift allows you to quickly redirect traffic away from an impaired Availability Zone (AZ) during issues like bad deployments or gray failures. Zonal autoshift automatically redirects traffic when AWS detects potential impact to an AZ. This feature improves resilience by ensuring traffic can be quickly and safely rerouted, minimizing downtime and impact. To configure, enable zonal shift in the NLB console or API and manage shifts via the Amazon Application Recovery Controller.

AWS introduces End User Messaging Social, allowing developers to communicate with end users on WhatsApp, the world’s most popular messaging app with over 2.7 billion users. This new feature enables rich messaging experiences with multimedia and interactive content. Developers can now integrate WhatsApp alongside SMS and Push notifications, expanding their messaging strategy to reach users through their preferred channels.

The ability to bring your own public IPv4 ranges using a global/regional configuration is already available in all public and US government regions.  We are announcing that you can now bring a “global” IPv4 range (as small as /24) to Azure that will be advertised from Microsoft WAN and then divide this range into multiple “regional” ranges (as small as /26) associated with a specific region. This allows you to onboard a single range that can be used across multiple regions for redundancy.

Manage your data more easily using the new custom column selector and filter history features in Azure Cosmos DB Data Explorer. You can customize your data views by selecting specific columns that matter most to you, streamlining your workflow. Additionally, you can quickly revisit and apply previous filters, saving you time and effort. These enhancements are designed to make your data exploration more efficient and tailored to your needs.

You can now use up to five physical shards on your vCore-based Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB clusters. An increased number of shards in a cluster enables you to host larger workloads. 

When you create a vCore-based Azure Cosmos DB for MongoDB cluster, you can select from one to five shards. As before, each physical shard gets the same compute (vCore count and amount of RAM) and storage (GiB and IOPS) configuration.

Using a greater number of physical shards can also help increase cluster performance for larger workloads that require multishard clusters because of better parallelization.

We're thrilled to announce that you can now modify a number of performance management server parameters in Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Flexible Server.   
You now have the ability to specify the maximum number of parallel apply workers per subscription, and modify temp_file_limit, logical_decoding_work_mem, idle_session_timeout, enable_incremental_sort, and log_hostname in Azure Database for PostgreSQL.

The default maximum egress for general-purpose v2 and Blob storage accounts has been increased from 120 Gbps to 200 Gbps in these regions.

Not all workloads in the cloud need the same resources, which is why organizations regularly optimize their architecture with a mix of technologies and service plans that best meet their current needs. To meet this need for varied workload sizes, we’ve developed the new memory-optimized series of Isolated v2 plans that are used for Azure App Service Environment v3. These I*mv2 plans are labeled as I1mv2, I2mv2, I3mv2, and so on.

These offerings provide the flexibility to scale your memory configuration without having to pay for additional cores. They also complement our existing line-up by creating more cost-effective options for workloads that need more memory to cache data or render a large page quickly, while working well using existing compute horsepower. They range from two virtual cores with 16 GB RAM in I1mv2 (compared to two cores, 8 GB RAM in I1v2) to 32 virtual cores with 256 GB RAM in the I5mv2.

You can now deploy and configure a multi-region Cloud Run service using a single gcloud CLI command, streamlining the process for multi-region deployments. This feature is currently in Preview.

Spanner now supports creating incremental backups through a customizable backup schedule. You can specify when backups are created and how long they're retained. Incremental backups, which store only data changes since the last backup, help reduce storage costs and are available on the Enterprise and Enterprise Plus editions.

Cloud SQL for SQL Server now automatically configures the max server memory (mb) flag based on instance size, optimizing memory allocation for SQL Server's internal pools. Additionally, you can now export transaction logs for point-in-time recovery (PITR) to Cloud Storage, a feature currently in Preview.

Artifact Registry now offers download rules in Preview, allowing you to restrict artifact downloads at both the repository and package levels.