We are halfway through 2021! And as the country and world start to open back up again, the brilliant minds at AWS continue to improve and release new and innovative services.
AWS focused a lot of attention this month on its container offerings and added features that make it easier to manage and optimize your AWS infrastructure. Services such as AWS Outposts allow you to extend your technology footprint across AWS accounts and even physical data centers, with new capabilities to use Amazon EC2 capacity reservations to control spend. AWS also continues to focus on development, allowing you to use CloudWatch Application Insights to monitor your containerized applications, migrate applications to AWS more easily, and release new digital courses to get you up to speed on developing against Amazon DynamoDB.
AWS Outposts and Amazon EMR now support EC2 Capacity Reservations
This is a long requested feature, and AWS has delivered. You can now create and manage reserved capacity on Amazon EC2 instances in your AWS Outposts environment via the AWS Management Console, the SDK, and the CLI. You can also share Capacity Reservations on Outposts with other AWS accounts within your organization, giving you a great deal of flexibility across your AWS footprints.
Amazon EMR also now supports EC2 On-Demand Capacity Reservations (ODCRs). You can use ODCRs when creating clusters, or completing uninterrupted cluster rotation.
To learn more about EC2 Capacity Reservations on AWS Outposts, check out the official announcement. The official announcement for Amazon EMR is here.
You can now use Amazon CloudWatch Application Insights to monitor your containers
Amazon CloudWatch Application Insights now allows for monitoring, alarms, and dashboards for applications deployed in containers using Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), and Kubernetes on EC2. This new feature allows you to capture metrics, telemetry, and logs to monitor and optimize your containerized applications.
Find more information on this new Amazon CloudWatch feature here.
Predictive Scaling as a Native Scaling Policy now available on Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
Predictive Scaling lets you proactively scale out your Auto Scaling group, to be ready for anticipated demand. This policy uses built-in AI capabilities to learn from past traffic patterns to launch Amazon EC2 instances in advanced of predicted demand. Predictive Scaling is best for applications that experience predictable spikes and any pattern of steep demand changes.
To learn more about this new Auto Scaling feature, you can read the announcement here.
Amazon announces General Availability of AWS App Runner
AWS App Runner is a managed container application service that eases the process of building, deploying, and running containerized applications and APIs using a robust and easy-to-use graphical interface. You provide your source code and container image or deployment pipeline, and AWS App Runner builds and deploys the application automatically, using load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring.
AWS App Runner allows even inexperienced developers to get up to production quickly and efficiently. More information on this announcement can be found here.
AWS Announces General Availability of AWS Application Migration Service
AWS Application Migration Service (AWS MGN) is a new service that allows you to migrate applications to AWS without modifying the application, architecture, or the servers the application runs on. AWS MGN automates most lift-and-shift tasks, and continuously replicates your source servers, allows for non-disruptive testing prior to cutover, and does not require server reboots or other changes to your source infrastructure.
(Note that if you’re currently using CloudEndure Migration or Server Migration Service (SMS), AWS encourages you to shift to AWS MGN for future migrations.)
More information on AWS MGN is available here.
AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) now supports log filtering
The AWS WAF team have added the capability to filter on web requests, allowing you to keep only the information you want to keep for later analysis.
You can read the official announcement here.
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