Oct 13 - Oct 20 Updates

Last Week Cloud Platform Updates

October 21, 2024

Oct 13 - Oct 20 | AWS, Azure & GCP Updates

The AWS Lambda console now integrates Amazon CloudWatch Logs Live Tail, enabling real-time log streaming and analytics directly within the Lambda console. This feature provides developers and operators immediate visibility into Lambda function behavior, allowing for faster testing, debugging, and troubleshooting. Previously, users had to access logs through the CloudWatch console, but now logs can be viewed and analyzed in real time as they become available, reducing the time to validate changes and speeding up troubleshooting for critical errors.

Amazon DynamoDB has introduced a new feature in the DynamoDB console allowing users to favorite frequently used tables for quicker access. Customers can now mark tables as favorites and easily view them on the console’s tables page, improving efficiency in managing and monitoring commonly accessed tables. This feature is available in all AWS Regions at no additional cost.

AWS CodePipeline V2 now supports automatic retries for failed stages. When a stage fails due to any action within it, you can configure the pipeline to automatically retry the stage. You can choose to retry from the first action or from the failed action. This feature is especially useful for handling transient errors, allowing pipeline execution to retry instead of failing entirely.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports Python 3.12 on AL2023 environments. Python 3.12 brings enhanced error messaging, Linux perf profiler support, improved interpreter speed, and better usability of f-strings. Elastic Beanstalk continues to provide an easy way to deploy and manage applications without handling the underlying infrastructure.

You can now launch Amazon EC2 Spot Instances using Ubuntu Pro based AMIs, benefiting from five additional years of security updates from Canonical. Ubuntu Pro instances are billed on a per-second basis, with charges appearing in the EC2 section of your AWS bill. Spot Instances offer up to a 90% discount compared to On-Demand pricing and are ideal for fault-tolerant applications such as big data, containerized workloads, CI/CD, and high-performance computing. They can be easily managed through AWS services like Amazon ECS, EMR, and third-party tools like Terraform and Jenkins.

Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition now supports local write forwarding, allowing read replicas to forward write requests to the writer instance. This simplifies scaling read workloads while maintaining read-after-write consistency. With this feature, applications can send both read and write requests to a read replica, and Aurora will handle forwarding writes to the writer instance. It eliminates the need for complex application logic to separate reads and writes. Local write forwarding is supported on Aurora PostgreSQL versions 14.13, 15.8, 16.4, or higher.

The Cobalt 100 VMs consist of our new general purpose Dpsv6-series and Dplsv6-series and our memory optimized Epsv6-series VM series. They offer up to 50% better price-performance than our previous generation Arm-based VMs, making them an attractive option for a wide range of scale-out and cloud native Linux-based workloads, including data analytics, web and application servers, open source databases, caches, and more. 

The Azure Cobalt 100 VMs deliver up to 1.4x CPU performance, up to 1.5x performance on Java-based workloads and up to 2x performance on web servers, .NET applications and in-memory cache applications compared to the previous generation Azure Arm-based VMs. These VMs also support 4x local storage IOPS (with NVMe) and up to 1.5x network bandwidth compared to the previous generation Azure Arm-based VMs.

VM watch, now in preview, is a standardized, lightweight, and adaptable in-VM service offering for virtual machines and virtual machine scale sets. It runs health checks within the VM at configurable intervals and sends the results via a uniform data model to Azure. These health results are consumed by Azure's production monitoring AIOps (AI Operations) engines for regression detection and prevention.

Related ProductsAzure Elastic SANAzure VMware SolutionAzure Elastic SAN for Azure VMware Solution (AVS) is now generally available. Azure Elastic SAN offers AVS customers an Azure deployed, fully managed, VMware Certified storage area network (SAN) that can achieve massive scale, is easy to manage, and has redundancy built in at a low TCO. If you are looking for a native Azure Storage experience or want to scale your storage capacity independently from your performance to get the lowest TCO and highest scale, Azure Elastic SAN lets you expand your storage instead of scaling the clusters.

With this integration, we add an important tool for optimizing workloads, whether they are large-scale databases requiring high storage capacity, or performance-intensive, mission-critical applications.

  • Customer-Managed Encryption Keys (CMEK): Spanner now supports CMEK for databases in custom, dual-region, and multi-region instance configurations, providing enhanced data security.

  • Database Split Usage Statistics: Spanner introduces usage statistics for database splits, along with a System insights dashboard to help identify hotspots on affected rows.

  • Directed Reads (GA): Directed reads are now generally available, allowing you to route read-only transactions and single reads to specific replica types or regions in multi-region instances, offering more flexibility for data access.

You can now use the Google Cloud Console to create Regional external Application Load Balancers and Regional external proxy Network Load Balancers in Premium Tier. Previously, these load balancers were only available in the Standard Tier via the Console.

Artifact Registry now supports setting standard Artifact Registry repositories as upstreams for remote repositories in supported formats. This allows for more flexible and efficient management of dependencies and artifacts across repositories.

You can now use the Cloud Monitoring API to configure metric-based alerting policies that send notifications when incidents are closed, providing better visibility and tracking of incident resolution.