AWS Cloud service makes a big impact on India's Cloud Growth

Amazon was the first who predicted the future of cloud computing way ahead than other tech giants who are in the cloud computing business so hence this has given Amazon the added advantage in the cloud service space. AWS is dominating the cloud market because of the quarter earnings jumped expediently from 46 % in 4th Quarter 2017 compared to the final quarter of 2016. This exceeded their revenues from their other four closest competitors which is Microsoft, Google, IBM, and Alibaba.

At the AWS Summit in Mumbai 2018, Chandrashekhar Sanholkar, General Manager of Amazon Internet Services which is the India subsidiary of the Amazon Group explains how Amazon Web Service is driving India’s cloud growth story.

Sanholkar said that when they had launched AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region in June 2016 they had observed a drastic growth in the number of customers adopting AWS Cloud services. He said that AWS offers the opportunity for the Indian customers by helping their business deliver faster service and also enable them to keep the data locally so that it can fulfill any data authorization requirements. He said that they pride over the rapid growth of innovation that has taken over few years in Indian region and they are looking forward to further innovate on behalf of the customers. He also added that they have prominent local partners including HDFC Life Insurance, NDTV, Tata motors, Druva, Shaadi.com and many more.

Many Startups and large enterprises are adopting AWS cloud services where at least 90 percent out of the 100 Indian startups use AWS. Sanholkar gave example as to how far the customers are using AWS services effectively whereas Practo connects 60 million patients to 200,000 doctors from 10000 hospitals and how Shaadi.com uses Machine Learning and AL from Amazon Web Service to scrutinize 67 billion event records to make 4 million matches.

He also said that there are large enterprises that are also equally taking the opportunity of AWS cloud service to keep up with the fellow competitors that’s why there are many enterprises from different sectors building their infrastructure on AWS. HDFC Standard Life has built a digital platform from AWS which is called Atom where all the digital workloads are being put on the Amazon Web Service. There are also other customers like Bajaj Capital and Bajaj Finance. Aditya Birla Capital a non-banking finance also putting their entire workloads on AWS. There is also Tata Motors and Titan Industries that have migrated their digital properties and business on AWS by doing some interesting stuff with IoT and Telemetry. He added that the list is endless and it will grow continuously.

Amazon Web Service is the first global cloud service that has been enlisted for delivering Public Cloud Service to the government customer in India. Cloud Service has become general in the Indian IT department where many sectors and enterprises are comfortable adopting AWS Cloud service with the aim of going through a digital transformation. Security threats are increasingly overwhelming thus it has made companies and organization vigilant over their next IT step which has made them choose AWS because of its superior security.

Amazon Web Service has a strong partner network with thousands of partner all around the world. Recently AWS has added over 10000 new partners to the APN where at least 60 percent of the APN partners are headquartered outside the United States. India’s has 5 PoPs in a different region and four AWS Direct Connect locations. This shows that India is growing stronger with the rising customer and partner base.

No doubt Amazon Web Service is making their mark in India with expedient Cloud Service offerings. AWS is looking forward to continuously invest in the India market because they are convinced of India’s strong growth potential. 

Amazon Simple Notification Service message filtering now adds support for Amazon CloudWatch Metrics

Amazon CloudWatch can be used to monitor the performance of the Amazon SNS service when utilizing the subscription filter policies. Simple Notification Service is a managed subscribe/publish messaging service for highly reliable and high throughput message delivery. The message filtering capability of Amazon SNS offloads message filtering logic from the publishers. This will simplify the subscribe/publish architectures. When you deploy the SNS solution the Amazon Cloud Watch metrics will monitor as to how many messages are filtered which is based on the filter policy and also how many are filtered due to invalid or missing message attributes. 

Application Load Balancer now makes it easier for the customer for simplified authentication of the applications

Application Load Balancer now adds support for easy authentication of user request when they want to access web-based applications via social identities such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon or enterprise Identity providers such as PingFederate and Active Directory. Now the developer can now focus on building their application for the customers by offloading the responsibility of authenticating to the Application load balancer where at the same time benefitting from its reliability, scale and availability. Application Load Balancer can also authenticate the by connecting with the Identity Provider. 

Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute Auto Recovery is now available for dedicated instances

Auto Recovery is an Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute features that is created to increase the instance availability. Auto Recovery is now also available for dedicated instances in all AWS Regions. With the latest update, you can now automatically recover the dedicated instances when the system impairment is detected. This feature reduces the need for manual intervention and it also recovers the instance on different underlying hardware. There are no additional charges for using Auto recovery in EC2.   

Amazon Elastic Container Service Agents now adds signing for additional security

The Amazon Elastic Container Service Agent is now digitally signed by using the Windows signatures and PGP. The Amazon ECS agent operates on each Elastic cloud compute instance in the Amazon Elastic Container Service cluster which is responsible for stopping, starting and monitoring containers in the instance. Earlier you had to download the ECS agent code to install the instance yourself or include it as a part of the Amazon Machine Image. With the latest update, you can now make sure that your containerized infrastructure is secure when you download the Elastic Container Service agent to install by yourself or include it as part of your own Amazon Machine Image. 

With the new quick start you can now deploy SAS Viya on the AWS Cloud

The new Quick Start is a reference architecture for customers who want to deploy the SAS platform on AWS cloud platform by using Amazon Route 53, Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudWatch. When the SAS platform is deployed on AWS you will get the SAS analytics, machine learning capabilities and data visualization in an AWS validated environment. The deployment will be automated by the AWS CloudFromation template which will about one hour. SAS Viya is a cloud in-memory analytics engine that uses fault-tolerant, scalable and elastic processing to address the complex analytical challenge. 

Amazon Rekognition is now HIPAA Eligible

Amazon Rekognition Videos and Image are now AWS HIPAA Eligible services. Amazon Rekognition is a service that makes it convenient to add video and image analysis to the applications. You can use the Amazon Rekognition to process the videos and images if you have a Business Associate Addendum in place with Amazon Web Services that contains protected health information. If you don’t have a Business Associate Addendum in place with AWS or any other question relating to running HIPAA regulated workloads on Amazon Web Service then you can contact AWS support. HIPAA eligibility service will be available to all the AWS regions where the Amazon Rekognition is available. 

BlockShipping Company announced that they have choosen AWS as their cloud platform provider

BlockShipping is going to build a platform that will enable the global container shipping industry to possibly save USD 5.7 billion per year. They are also expected to decrease the global CO2 emission by at 4.6 million tons yearly. So to reach this goal they will need access to the enterprise-grade infrastructure and global scale right away. Peter Ludvigsen, CEO at BlockShipping said that they are pleased to choose AWS as their Cloud Platform provider and they are also pleased that AWS has invited them to join their start-up development program ‘AWS Activate’. AWS Activate programs provide resources to the start-up so that they can quickly get started with Amazon Web Services.

Peter Ludvigsen has worked in the Information Technology part of the container shipping industry from past 39 years. Peter had first started using AWS when he was working as Chief Information Officer for the global shipping platform INTTRA. With his earlier experience working with AWS has made him known about its capabilities and its expertise in the technology stack. But now as the start-up, they not only want to leverage from the capability but also get the access to support from Amazon Web Service global network and knowledge base via the AWS Activate program.

BlockShipping has teamed up with Nordiac AWS partner Keycore so to efficiently set up the Amazon Web Services infrastructure. AWS partner offer managed services that will help the company with their expertise and experience to find solutions for them. 

Blockshipping is planning to fulfil the development plan for the GSCP platform and they have already started to gain a global container carrier as the first user and customer of the Platform. Peter Ludvigsen said that they are proud to say that their Blockshipping Company has obtained confirmation from a Global Container carrier that will join their GSCP platform as their first customer.  

BlockShipping is a blockchain based GSCP platform which is the world’s first freight container registry and the first global platform that allows all the other players in the shipping industry to perform transaction related to the handling of containers.

With the growing security threats, over capacity, low freight rates and increasingly environment regulations it is been realised that they need efficiency, fundamental digital transformation and improved processes to ensure the profitability. They have now launched GSCP platform that will help to manage all kinds of transactions that will relate to container handling. So to provide this efficient process to the other players in the shipping industry they have now teamed up with Amazon Web Services so to offer improved solution relating to the GSCP platform. AWS will help BlockShipping for delivering efficient performance by enabling savings and global adoption with its cloud computing resources with high availability and scalability.

Amazon Aurora can now publish general, error logs and slow query to Amazon CloudWatch

The MySQL compatible edition of Amazon Aurora can be configured to publish general, error logs and slow query logs to Amazon CloudWatch Logs. Earlier you could only publish the audit logs. By publishing the aurora logs to the Amazon CloudWAtch it will allow the customer to maintain continuous visibility into database error, query performance, and database activity. Alarms for events that are recorded in the audit logs or general can be created to alert on the unwanted changes that is been made to the databases. CloudWatch logs offer a durable archive destination for the database logs and you can define the desired retention period. Read more about Aurora and Amazon Cloud on the AWS Database blog. 

Amazon SageMaker Algorithms supports Pipe Input mode for faster training jobs

With the built-in Amazon SageMaker algorithms, you can now operate training jobs with the built-in algorithms up to 35 percent faster with the Pipe input mode. By utilizing the pipe input mode the training jobs stream data directly from the Amazon S3 to the algorithm container on the training instance so to provider faster start time for the training jobs and also for better throughput. Most of the Amazon SageMaker algorithms work well when the optimized protobuf recordIO format is used for training data for speed optimization. 

Application Load Balancer now adds support for slow start mode for load balancing algorithm

With the latest update, Application Load Balancer now adds support a slow start mode that will allow you to add new targets without staggering them with the floods of requests. With the slow start mode, the targets will warm up before accepting the fair share of a request which will be based on the ramp-up period that you define. Slow start mode is very beneficial for applications that depend on the cache and require a warm-up period before responding to the request with the optimal performance. Slow start mode will be enabled by targeting group and it can be configured for a period of 30 sec to 15 minutes. The load balancer linearly will increase the number of the request which is sent to the new target in the target group or up to its fair share while doing the slow start ramp up window. 

Amazon AppStream 2.0 adds support for Administrative control for printing, clipboard and limiting file movement

With this latest update you can now control the data movement to and from the users Amazon AppStream 2.0 streaming sessions. You can now specify which users can be allowed to transfer data between the streaming applications and the local device via the copy or paste, download or print actions or file upload. You can get started with the new update by opening the AppStream 2.0 console and then create a stack. In the user settings, you can then enable. Step, disable and limit any of the File transfer, Clipboard or print to the local device options. 

Amazon Translate now also supported on AWS Mobile SDK for Android and iOS

Amazon Translate offers fact and high-quality language translation toolkit with affordability. Amazon Translate API is now supported in the AWS Mobile SDK for iOS and Android. You can now use the Amazon Web Services Mobile SDK to develop and publish the multilingual mobile applications easily and quickly with Amazon Translate. You can now enable cross-lingual communications by adding the real-time on-demand translation for common applications such as forum content, online reviews, and live chat. 

AWS Codebuild now adds support for Windows Builds

AWS CodeBuild has now added support for the Microsoft Window Server Platform and also pre-packaged build environment for .NET Core 2.0 on Windows. Earlier AWS CodeBuild only supported .NET Core on Linux. AWS CodeBuild offers pre-packaged build environments for supported frameworks to make it convenient to get started. With the latest update, you can now choose a pre-packaged .NET Core for Windows build environment to have AWS Codebuild build your code. If the application uses the .NET Framework then you can now include the Microsoft proprietary framework class libraries in the custom docker image. 

Amazon Inspector adds the ability to run security assessments on Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute without adding any tags

Amazon Inspector will make it convenient for you to automatically assess an application for deviations or vulnerability from best practices. Inspector has added this ability to run the security assessments on the Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute instance without any need to add tags to the instance. When assessments targets are created you can then choose an option to include all Elastic Cloud Compute instance in your account with the Amazon Web Services Region. Earlier you had to set up the security assessments by adding a tag to the instance you wanted to assess and then enter the tag into the assessment target but now you can choose the option simply to add all the instances when you are creating the single assessment. 

AWS Elastic Beanstalk now support Apache HTTP Server v2.4 and Apache Tomcat v8.5

AWS Elastic Beanstalk applications can now be developed by using Apache Tomcat v8.5. Apache Tomcat v8.5 enhances the performance, stability and other notable highlights such as adding support for HTTP/2 and using the OpenSSL for TLS support with JSSE connectors. AWS Elastic Beanstalk now also supports and defaults to Apache HTTP Server v2.4 for all Tomcat environments. You can choose to operate Tomcat using the existing Apache HTTP server v2.2. Apache HTTP Server v2.4 offers to enhance asynchronous I/O support, reduced memory usage and improved performance. 

AWS Storage Gateway Virtual Tape Library has extended their back up application support with the NovaStor DataCenter

AWS Storage Gateway has now added support for NovaStor DataCenter version 6 and 7 with the Tape Gateway Virtual tape library. The Tape Gateway enables you to move the tape-based backup and archiving workflows into the AWS Cloud conveniently by utilizing applications such as NovaStor DataCenter. With the Tape Gateway, you can backup applications data locally to the appliance which will then move the data to Amazon Web Service and stores it in a Virtual Tape Library backed up by durable Amazon Simple Storage Service. Then you can conveniently archive backup to the Amazon Glacier for long-term retention on low cost and durable basis with the ability to retrieve virtual tapes in just 3 to 5 hours.

What is Amazon Sumerian?

Amazon Web Services at the AWS re: Invent 2017 announced the launch of Amazon Sumerian. Amazon Sumerian is a tool kit that does not need any expert specializing in programming or 3D graphics expertise. You can build Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and 3D experience for a wide range of popular hardware platform including web browsers, head-mounted displays, mobile devices and digital signs. 

AWS just recently announced that Amazon Sumerian is now generally available. You can create realistic virtual scenes and environments without any master specialized tool required for 3D modeling, audio editing, animation, or programming. Once you have a created you can then deploy it on multiple platforms without any need of writing any custom deal or code with specialized deployments systems and processes. 

Amazon Sumerian provides a web-based editor that you can use it easily and quickly to create professional and realistic quality scenes. The visual scripting tool allows you to build logic to control how the characters and the objects respond to the user actions. Sumerian enables you to create natural and rich interaction powered by the Amazon Web Services such as Amazon Polly, Lex, Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Lambda and AWS IoT. Sumerian was designed to be supported on various platforms. The Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality applications that you build in Sumerian will operate in browsers that support the WebGL or WebVR and also on popular devices such as HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, Android, and iOS. 

During the preview period, AWS was working on a wide spectrum of customers for putting Sumerian to the test and creating proof of the concept projects designed to specify an equally broad range of use cases including field service productivity, employee education, virtual concierge, brand engagement, design and creative and training simulations. Fidelity labs were the first to use the Amazon Sumerian host to build an engaging Virtual Reality experience. Cora the host lives within the virtual chat room and displays stock quotes, answer the question and pull up company charts about the company’s performance. This Proof of concepts utilizes Amazon Polly to apply text to speech and Amazon Lex for conversational chatbot functionality. 

Amazon Relational Database Service for Oracle now supports new X1 and X1e Instance Types

You can now use the X1 and X1e instance to operate Amazon Relational Database Service for Oracle. X1e instance type offers the highest ratio of memory to the vCPU among the Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute instance types. There are many Oracles based workloads are not CPU bound so now you can decrease the number of vCPUs in the deployment. The lower vCPU count will save you money by reducing the AWS bill by utilizing the lower cost instance and you can also maximize Oracle license utilizing by increasing the memory without increasing the processor license counts. 

AWS Budgets can be used as a resource for CloudFormation Templates, Stacks and StackSets

AWS Budgets can now be utilized as a resource for AWS CloudFormation templates, StacksSets and stacks. AWS budgets offer the customer the capability to set custom budgets that will alert you when the usage or cost exceeds the limit. Budgets can be created at an aggregate level or at a granular level. You can opt for receiving mails and Amazon Simple Notification Service alerts if you the user-defined budgets exceeds the thresholds. You can use AWS CloudFormation to create, delete and edit the budgets and you can integrate the budget into the automated infrastructure deployments.  

Amazon Relational Database Service now adds Preview environment

The Amazon Relational Database Service DB Preview Environment is now generally available by offering an environment for the AWS customers to conveniently release candidate, test beta and early production versions of the PostgreSQL database engine software with the flexibility and convenience of Amazon Relational Database Service. Customers can start testing new functions and features of PostgreSQL within days or weeks of new versions becoming available from the PostgreSQL community. The Amazon RDS DB Preview environment at the launch will offer release candidate, test beta and development versions of the next major version of the PostgreSQL. 

Amazon Macie adds a new dashboard that will make it easy for the customers to identify S3 objects

Amazon Macie offers a new dashboard for the customer for making it convenient to identify Amazon Simple Storage Service buckets accessible to the internet and also to the Amazon S3 objects with overly permissive access permissions. You have to go to the Macie console to access the new Macie dashboard. Select the dashboard tab and click on the “S3 public object by buckets” dashboard. After doing this you will receive a summary of how many of the Simple Storage Services are publicly available and the buckets in which they are stored. 

Amazon Elastic Container Service - Service Discovery now adds support for Bridge and Host Container networking modes

Amazon Elastic Container Service - Service Discovery can be utilized to discover and connect Amazon ECS tasks that use the host and the bridge networking modes. This will make it convenient to start using the ECS service discovery for containerized applications operating on Amazon ECS. Earlier, ECS service discovery only supported those task that is launched using the AWS Virtual Private Cloud Network mode which assigns the task a dedicated elastic networking interface.   

AWS announced five new Amazon Connect Integrations that will offer contact center solutions

The Amazon Web Services announced that have added Five new integration with eGain, HERE Technologies, Teleopti, ServiceNow and WEBTEXT. eGain Solve is an Omnichannel case management, AI-powered IVR, analytics and knowledge management. Teleopti Workforce Management is a Staffing, forecasting and optimization for contact centers. WEBTEXT Contact Center Messaging is a caller interaction that supports Facebook messenger and other messaging channels, MMS pictures and SMS text. HERE Location Suite offers services such as geovisualization, including transit, mapping, traffic, geocoding, routing and positioning. ServiceNow IT service management is powered by VoiceFoundry that is automated workflows to enhance the customer and employee experiences. 

AWS Deep Learning AMIs now comes with optimized TensorFlow 1.8 to deliver training on P3 instances and EC2 C5 instances

The AWS Deep Learning AMIs for Amazon Linux and Ubunty now comes with the optimization for TensorFlow 1.8 to offer higher-performance training for Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute C5 instances and P3 instances. TensorFlow 1.8 is built with the Intel’s advanced vector instructions, FMA and SSE instruction sets to increase vector and floating point computations. The AMIs is fully configured with the Intel MKL-DNN to speed up the math routines utilized in neural network training on Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute C5 instances. By enhancing the training performance for GPU based scenarios the AMIs consist of an optimized build of TensorFlow 1.8 fully configured with cuDNN 7 and NVIDIA CUDA 9 to take advantage of the mixed precision training on Volta V100 GPUs accelerating Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute P3 instances. 

AWS CodeCommit now adds support for Branch Level Permissions

AWS CodeCommit now allows customers to restrict who can commit changes to any branch or to the master branch. Earlier the customers could just control who could make changes to the repository but could not specify which branch within the repository. But now you can specify which actions are allowed and who has the permission to makes changes on a branch. This will make it convenient to configure a workflow where only the approve users can merge the pull request or commit changes to the sensitive branch.  

You can now use Amazon Polly Voices in Alexa Skills

Amazon Polly is an AWS managed service that can convert speech into lifelike speech which enables the developer to build applications that talk and create entirely new categories of speech-enabled products. You can now apply to participate in the developer preview that will enable you to utilize eight English Amazon Polly voices to narrate the Alexa skills. If the Alexa skill only utilizes a single voice today then changing voice or implementing a different voice will offer you to provide a more engaging experience with the customers. Developers in the preview can choose a different voice for any announcement by creating an output speech utilizing the structured speech markup language tags that are available via Alexa skills and selecting the Amazon Polly voice using the “voice” tag. 

AWS step function now adds support for higher throughput workflows

AWS Step functions make it convenient for the AWS customers to co-ordinate applications with variable loads and high event rates with the new support for Higher Throughput Workflows. The Higher Throughput workflows are been increased from 400 state transitions to 1000 state transitions per second with the burst capacity of 5000 transitions per second. The default start rate for Amazon Web Services Step functions state machine executions is also increase from 25 per second to 200 per second with the burst capacity of 100 starts in select regions. 

Amazon Inspector has now added support for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and Amazon Linux 2018.03

Amazon Inspector has now extended their security assessments to include Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and Amazon Linux 2018.03 for common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVE) Runtime Behaviour Analysis and Security Best Practices. To run security assessments you have to install the Amazon Inspector Agent on the preferred Elastic Cloud Compute instance and then configure the assessments in the Amazon Inspector Console and then run the assessment. Amazon Inspector is an on-demand security assessment service that will allow the AWS customers to validate the security configurations of the operating systems and applications which are deployed in the Amazon EC2 environments. Amazon Inspectors provides the flexibility to check the EC2 instance for any vulnerabilities and also evaluate the instance configurations against the security benchmarks at any time they need to. 

AWS Secrets Manager Console is now available in Traditional Chinese and Italian

Amazon Web Services makes it convenient for the customers to manage their secrets manager from the console by making the AWS Secrets manager console available in additional two languages which are Traditional Chinese and Italian. AWS Secrets Manager is a secret management service that lets you secure the access to the applications, IT resources, and services. This service allows you to retrieve, manage and rotate the database credentials, API keys and other secrets. By using the AWS Secrets Manager you can manage and protect secrets that are used to access resources in the AWS Cloud, on-premises or on third-party services. 

Guardian is utilising encrypted Elastic Cloud Compute root volumes on Amazon Web Services

The Guardian, a British daily newspaper company adopts Amazon Web Services Cloud for a variety of services for their website and the content management systems. They are constantly aiming to enhance their security practices so they have taken the decision to adopt the policy of encrypting everything by default so as to make their security protocol more strong. AWS services makes it convenient when utilizing Amazon Simple Storage Service buckets, Relational Database Service instances, EBS volumes or Dynamo tables. Encrypting the root volume of the Elastic Cloud Compute instance is non-trivial which is a  notable exception.

The Guardian said in their post that encrypting their root volume will change how they create and distribute the Amazon Machine Images. Their previous approach was to bake all of the Amazon Machine Image in a single Amazon Web Service accounting and then grant permission for all the other accounts to utilize them. But however, the Amazon Web Services which is encrypted can only be used in the account where they are created so now they have to create individuals encrypted Amazon Machine Image in each account that they want to use it.

They chose to create the lambda function called Image Copier in each account that fires when the new Amazon Machine Image is being created by AMIgo. Guardian find Lambda simple because it makes the encrypted copy of the Amazon Machine Image in the local AWS account and then adds tags to the new Amazon Machine Image to indicate the AMI which was copied.

A large number of complicated details needed would be omitted by using this simplified description.

Firstly, if one wishes to copy an AMI, permission has to be given by the other AWS account for both launching the AMI and accessing the EBS snapshot which has been associated with the AMI. To bake AMIs, the Guardians use Hashicorp’s Packer and also an upgrade was required to their current version to one that supported snapshot permissions.

Secondly, any tags that are associated with an AMI aren’t visible from other accounts restraining them from being copied with the AMI. But, tags are needed for keeping a track of the identity of every image. Hence, Guardian included a few sets of tags on the SNS topic for triggering the Lambda. Including these, two new tags were added; Encrypted and CopiedFromAMI. This will indicate that the AMI comes with an encrypted root volume along with the original AMI ID where it was copied from.

Thirdly, Guardians didn’t focus on making an encrypted copy of every single image that AMIgo bakes in every account containing the Image Copier Lambada. For solving this problem, every recipe in AMIgo contains a list of all target accounts which have also been sent through the message on the specified topic. When the message has been received by the Image Copier Lambda, it will first find out whether it comes from an account listed in the message. If so, it creates an encrypted copy and if not, it ignores the message.

Lastly, AWS CloudFormation StackSets are mainly used for deploying the Lambda function to all accounts for avoiding the inconvenience of doing it by hand and for auto-updating in the future.

AWS introduced Amazon EC2 C5d instances

Amazon EC2 C5d instances provide C5 instances which are installed with the local NVMe based SSD block-level storage that is physically connected to the host server. The application that needs high speed, image manipulation, media processing and low latency local storage like video encoding is ideal for such instances. An application that needs temporary storage of data such as applications that require caches and scratch files, batch and log processing can benefit from these instances. C5 customers can have additional storage choices for most of the compute workloads with the option of NVMe based SSD instance storage. 

You can now add a custom OIDC - providers with Amazon Cognito

Amazon Cognito makes it convenient for the developers to add OIDC providers that are not built currently to the service console like Ping identity and salesforce. Length sign-up form makes it difficult for the conversion of the users and registration process. The users can now log in with the existing OpenID account into the user pool with the new Cognito feature. With the new feature of the Amazon Cognito eradicates the need for the new users to create a site or app-specific passwords and user names. 

Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute Bare metal instance is now generally available

Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute bare metal instances offer direct access to your applications to the memory resources and processor of the underlying server. The base metal instance is preferred for workloads that need access to the hardware such as Intel VT- x or for an application that operates in a non-virtualized environment for support or licensing requirements. These instances are built on a nitro system which is a group of AWS built hardware offload and server protection elements that integrate to provide securely, high-performance networking and storage to Elastic Cloud Compute instances. Bare metal instances allow Elastic Cloud Compute customers to operate those applications that benefit from deep performance analysis tools, workloads not supported in the virtual environment, licensing restricted Tier 1 business-critical applications and specialized workloads that need direct access to the bare metal infrastructure. 

How can Amazon Simple Storage Service leverage your Business?

Amazon Web Services S3 is a Web Service that provides data storage which can be utilized to retrieve and store data for multiple use cases. Amazon Simple Storage Service can store any quantity of data from anywhere such as mobile apps and website, data from IoT sensors or devices and corporate applications. Amazon S3 has a great durability that stores data for millions of applications that are utilized by market leaders in different kinds of industry. Simple Storage Service offers extensive security and compliance abilities that meet strict regulatory requirements.

The customer’s gains flexibility to manage data with access control, compliance and cost optimization with Amazon S3. AWS allows the users to run analytics on the data at Amazon S3. Amazon manages the data with an object storage architecture that aims to offer high availability, low latency, and scalability at commodity costs. It stores arbitrary objects up to 5 terabytes in size which is then associated with 2 kilobytes of metadata. The objects are arranged into buckets with a unique user-assigned key. Objects and buckets can be listed, retrieved and can be created using SOAP interface or REST style HTTP interface. With BitTorrent Protocol and HTTP GET interface objects can be downloaded. 

Six reason why Amazon S3 is the best storage Service you can adapt for your Cloud Storage:-

Scalability, Availability, and Durability:

Amazon Simple Storage Service operates on the world’s largest global cloud infrastructure and it is built from the ground up to provide customer 99.00 percent of durability. Data is distributed automatically on a minimum of three physical facilities that are separated geographically within an Amazon Web Services Region and Amazon S3 also replicates the data automatically on any other AWS Region.

Query in Place:

Amazon S3 enables users to operate big data analytics on the data without migrating the data into a separate analytics system. Amazon Athena provides access to a large number of unstructured data to anyone who knows SQL on-demand query. Amazon RedShift Spectrum allows you to run queries covering both S3 data and warehouse data. AWS is the only offers Amazon Simple Storage Service which retrieves only the subset of the data that you require from the S3 object which will enhance the performance of most of the applications that repeatedly access the data from the Amazon S3 by up to 400 percent.

Comprehensive Compliance and Security Capabilities:

Amazon S3 is the only cloud storage platform that has added support for three different forms of encryption. Simple Storage Service provides practical integration with AWS CloudTrial to monitor, retain and log storage API call activities for auditing. Amazon S3 is the only cloud storage service which is integrated with Amazon Macie which uses the machine learning to classify, protect and discover automatically sensitive data in Amazon Web Services.  Simple Storage Service supports the compliance and security standards certifications including EU Data Protection Directive, FISMA, PCI-DSS, FedRAMP and HIPAA/HITECH that will help fulfill compliance requirements for virtually every regulatory agency all around the world.

Easy migration:

In Amazon S3 you can choose from the vast range of option to migrate the data into or out of S3. It is reliable and simple API that makes it convenient to migrate data over the internet. Amazon S3 transfers Acceleration is optimal for data uploads on large geographical distance. AWS Direct connect offers steady high bandwidth and low latency data transfer for transferring large amounts of data to Amazon Web Services utilizing a dedicated network connection. AWS Snowball and AWS Snowball Edge appliance can be used for petabyte data transfer or AWS Snowmobile for large datasets. Amazon Web Service Storage Gateway offers a virtual or physical data transfer appliance to use it on-premises so that to conveniently move file or volumes in the AWS Cloud.

Flexibility in Management:

Amazon S3 provides the most flexible storage managed and administration capabilities where the storage administrators can report visualize and classify data usage trends to improve service levels and reduce costs. In Amazon S3 the objects can be tagged with customizable and unique metadata so that the customers can control and view storage consumption, security and cost separately for each workload. S3 inventory delivers analytics operations, metadata for maintenance or compliance and scheduled reports about the objects. S3 can analyze object access pattern to create lifecycle policies that automate retention, deletion and tiering. The customer can log activities, invoke workflows and define alerts all without any requirement of managing any additional infrastructure.

Largest Ecosystem with the supported platform:

Amazon S3 is integrated with most of the Amazon Web Services where Amazon S3 ecosystem consists of tens of thousands of independent software vendor partners, consulting, and systems integrators. AWS Marketplace provisions 35 categories and more than 3500 software listings from over 1100 ISVs that are already configured to be deployed on the AWS Cloud. AWS Partner Network partners have adapted their software and services to work with Amazon S3 for solutions like disaster recovery, Backup and Recovery and Archiving. Unlike AWS no other cloud provider has more partners with solutions that are configured already to work with the service. 

AWS CodeBuild now adds support for VPC endpoints

Amazon users will now be able to access AWS CodeBuild from their Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) by using VPC endpoints. A large number of AWS customers prefer to run their applications within a VPC, mainly to bring security and privacy to their content. Earlier, users could connect to CodeBuild from their VPC by using an internet gateway or a VPN connection, Now via VPC endpoints; AWS users do not need public IP addresses and also the traffic between the VPC and Codebuild will not leave the AWS network. Get started by selecting “AWS CodeBuild” in the Amazon VPC console and learn more on using VPC endpoints with CoduBuild by referring to its documentation.

AWS organization makes it easier for you to control access to the AWS Resources

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) will now make it easier for users to have the access and control over their AWS resources, simply by utilizing their AWS organization of the IAM principals. Users can now use a new condition key, aws:PrincipalOrgID, stated in the permission policy which requires all the IAM principals to access your resources from the account within the organization. Let us take the example of an Amazon S3 bucket policy which would be needed by you for restricting any access to the principals related to any AWS accounts in the organization. With the aws:PrincipalOrgID condition, you can set a particular value to your organization ID as a condition in your policy. 

Amazon Chime is now available on their new web application browser

Users will now be able to access Amazon Chime from their browser. This new web application brings makes joining meetings easier from any other device having a supported browser including Linux or ChromeOS, without directly downloading or installing the app. This web application will permit users to use Amazon Chime on more devices, keeping them connected and productive. Users can start by simply navigating towards the Amazon Chime web application or click on the meeting link sent as a meeting invitation. Joining meetings don’t require an Amazon Chime account.  Users will be able to use their computer audio, explore shared screens, access and participate in the ongoing meeting chat. A registered Amazon Chime account will bring you features such as group chats, ad-hoc calls, scheduling meeting, meeting host controls, and provide notifications to join scheduled meetings through the auto-call feature.  Chime can be tried for a free 30-day trial period via the Amazon Chime trial page.

Verizon now migrates 1000 of applications to the AWS Cloud - AWS is a preferred cloud service provider

Amazon Web Services has announced a new company that is ready to adopt AWS Cloud Managed Services. Verizon is going to migrate 1000 of applications and databases backend systems into AWS Cloud. Verizon Company earlier had acquired Terremark thinking to have its own organic growth but that plan didn’t work out for them. After that, they sold some data center to Equinox and offloaded its cloud to IBM. But Verizon also did some work in AWS Cloud so with their expedient offerings they were confident with Amazon Web Services.

It has named AWS as a preferred choice but not the only cloud because they want to pick out the service from different cloud tech giants which can benefit them.

Verizon will be migrating the production databases to Amazon Aurora MySQL Relational database service. The oath is a Verizon subsidiary company formed in 2017. It wasn’t a difficult decision for them to make because Oath’s other subsidiary company are already on AWS that is Tumblr, HuffPost, and AOL.

Atte Lahtiranta, Oath’s CTO said that AWS innovative technologies have leveraged their business and that is why they have planned to extend their strategic relationship. Verizon is been on AWS Cloud for a long time since 2015 where they had migrated most of its consumer and business applications in the Amazon Cloud. They have taken this decision so that to reduce the cost and improve their agility with the use of cloud computing resources.

Mahmoud El-Assir, Verizon's SVP of Global Technology Service said that implementing AWS has improved their speed, innovation, and efficiency within the engineering array. It has helped them to deliver best and efficient customer experience.

This deal with Amazon Web Service will eventually benefit both the party with the growing competition in the cloud market. Even though AWS is the lead Cloud leader in the cloud computing market, there are other rivals who are also doubling their gains over the last years. Now companies and business are gradually transitioning from the traditional stand-alone data center to the hybrid cloud applications.

Mike Clayville, AWS Vice President of Worldwide Commercial Sales said that they are looking forward to working with Verizon to transform their business and innovate on behalf of their customers so that they can focus on the core part of their business. Verizon Team with AWS expertise and cloud services will help them provide unlimited customer satisfaction.

It is to be understood that Verizon has made a smart decision in making a move to the AWS Cloud to improve their service and save cost. Cloud computing is driving the business into innovation and has helped many businesses save on cost.

In just a Single Click AWS Systems Manager allows you to collect inventory on all the Managed Instances

AWS Systems Manager makes it convenient for the customers to collect inventory from all the managed instance in the AWS Region in just a click. All the new and the existing managed instance with the AWS region in the AWS account are set up to collect inventory with the AWS Systems Manager Inventory service. The instances will automatically start collecting the inventory that is based on the AWS Systems Manager Inventory configuration when new managed instances are there in the account. AWS Systems Manager offers you the control and visibility of the infrastructure on Amazon Web Services. System Manager offers a unified user interface so the operation data can be viewed from various AWS services and enables you to automate the operational task on all AWS resources. 

AWS announced that Amazon Sumerian is now generally available

Amazon Sumerian is an AWS managed service that enables developers to build and launch Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) and 3D application easily and quickly without any need of having any specialized programming or 3D graphics expertise. Amazon Sumerian offers an integrated editor, library, asset, APIs and virtual characters, called Sumerian Host which is designed for development and deployment of the applications. Applications that are created by using the Amazon Sumerian are launched in a compatible browser which allows developers to create widely and publish once. Scenes can be viewed from the compatible Virtual Reality Headsets such as HTC Vive, HTC Vive Pro, and Oculus Rifts, Android mobile devices and Augmented Reality compatible iOS devices, digital signage, and laptops. Amazon Sumerian is now available. 

Elastic Cloud Compute Spot Instances now has added support for Red Hat BYOL

You can now use the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Premium Subscription with the Amazon Elastic Cloud Comput Spot Instances. It will easy for the enterprise customers to migrate their working in the AWS Cloud and can leverage the deep cost savings that are offered by the spot instances. Spot Instance provides spare computer capacity in the Amazon Web Services Cloud which is available at 90 percent discount compared to the Elastic Cloud Compute On-Demand Instances. You can visit the Red Hat Website to get more information on Red Hat Cloud Access for Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2). 

Amazon will make it easier for the customer to put their services on blockchain with a new partnership

Amazon Web Services is making it easier for the customers to use the blockchain with a new partnership with a start-up company. AWS will team up with the new start-up called Kaleido which is originally known as Consensys. AWS customers will get easy access to the same technology which also supports bitcoin. 

Founder of Kaleido, Steve Cerveny said that customers can focus on their current scenario and now worry about becoming PhDs in cryptography instead they will provide them the simple platform to build their company on the blockchain. 

The blockchain is a technology that records the transaction on distributed, public ledger which eliminates the involvement of the third party. It is considered as a faster and more secure technology by many. AWS said that introducing Kaleido to the customer is going to help the customer to get their work done faster and not let them worry about managing blockchain all by themselves. Blockchain SaaS solution will be available on the AWS Marketplace which will help the customers quickly advance their blockchain projects.

Amazon Web Service is subsidiary of Amazon company that provides a paid subscription for Cloud computing services to customers, companies, and governments. AWS is a using partnership strategy instead of building service from the ground up. Steve Cerveny said in an interview that AWS was looking for a partner to help get blockchain into the AWS customers hands. They are putting in the AWS marketplace which will encourage their customers to use it directly from the AWS portal.

Founder of Ethereum blockchain platform, Joseph Lubin said that AWS made the biggest move in getting into the blockchain solutions. He said that it is a heavy duty full stack way of getting a company into the blockchain technology solutions. It can help the Amazon over expand their business by using supply chain as an example. He also added that Consensys which has more than 50 blockchain project has observed a great demand around this technology. Lubin said that three years ago they used to get calls from companies who didn't have much idea about this technology but at this point now many know about this technology and using this to leverage their business.

Facebook and Microsoft are other tech giants who are also trying to explore the use case for blockchain. Facebook had announced last week had announced that they are going through a reorganization which will include the use of blockchain technology and also aims to address the privacy concerns. HSBC, IBM, Deloitte, Accenture and JB Morgan are also other corporate companies that are working on blockchain technology. 

The CloudStax NoSQL DB can be deployed for Apache Canssandra with New Quick Start

The Quick Start will now automatically deploy CloudStax NoSQL DB for Apache Cassandra into a unique available architecture on AWS, using the Amazon ECS for container orchestration and the CloudStax FireCamp for stateful service management. CloudStax will remove all the complexity which is associated with the deployment and management of Apache Cassandra. It comes with high-performance, high scalability and reduces costs with the NoSQL database will enable you to manage large amounts of data. The deployment takes 30 minutes and will help in enhancing the reliability for using Cassandra for production deployments. With Quick Start utilizing multiple Availability Zones for getting high availability, detecting failures automatically and recovering Cassandra nodes to help bring enhanced security and isolation for Cassandra. 

Amazon introduces the IoT Device Simulator

The IoT device simulator is a solution through which all customers are enabled to create and simulate hundreds of virtual connected devices, without any configuration hassle, physical management of the device or developing time-consuming scripts. This solution will also include a pre-built automotive module through which vehicle telemetry data can be simulated using a powertrain simulator. With the deployment of a device simulator API, the Amazon API Gateway is leveraged for invoking the solution’s microservices. It will provide the business logic for performing operations on virtual devices and other device types, record simulation metrics, and perform administration tasks.  It also deploys Amazon ECS containers which are provisioned by AWS Fargate containing a simulated engine for running simulations. 

Amazon GameLift will target tracking for autoscaling

The newly introduced Amazon GameLift will provide quick deployment, scaling and managing all the dedicated game servers at lower costs within the cloud as well as delivering low-latency for multiplayer gaming experience globally. With gamers typically utilizing just 50% of their peak server capacity on an average basis, GameLift will reduce the wasted time, capacity and costs by automatically turning off the game servers while they remain unused and also add new ones when additional players arrive. With the introduction of Target Tracking, a new autoscaling option has been added to obtain the best performance easily without the need for any complex rules. Amazon GameLift Target Tracking will remove any need for creation of complex rules and improve the optimization of the server capacity by simply setting a steady percentage target for any available gaming sessions. It adjusts to any fluctuations in the load patterns and also minimizes rapid fluctuations in capacity.

AWS Machine Learning can help enterprises keep thier Future ready

Head Emerging Technologies for AWS, Oliver Klien says that the digital age business should simplify and assure comfort for their consumers. Customer should be able to connect with you through various channels may it be online, call center, mobile phone, we chat, facebook messenger or chatbot. You will need to open the pathway for your customer to easily connect with you with comfort. Machine Learning can help enterprises innovate and improve their service. 

Machine learning creates seamless experience such as virtual reality, augmented reality, through voice and connectivity. Enterprises can create frictionless customer experience with a 360-degree view of your customers no matter what channel it is. 

Oliver Klien said in the interview that there is a constant evolution of the space which is the most exciting part for him. Machine Learning is nothing new for AWS because they are working on it for past 20 years with Amazon. They have done Data mining for years but the only difference now is the amount of data they have today. He also spoke about Artificial Intelligence saying that AI was present since the 1950s but now with Cloud computing, it has become now easier to process large amounts of data and get insights with the help of neural network which is difficult for the engineers to normally to do so. 

If you don’t use deep learning on the neural network then it will be difficult to solve problems relating to computer vision and natural language understanding. The availability of such technologies is powerful where smartphones have become generic and everything is connecting eventually. IoT is one the example as to how it connects to various devices to collect data and process it for further analytics and improvisation. Machine Learning is the main element for driving further into the technological excellence. 

There are many layers to the Machine Learning services where the first layer is about offering machine learning models for the end developer where they have to spend time in building any of that. The Second layer will be offering platform specific services that help the company to deploy their own machine learning models. A data scientist can have a specific idea about how he wants to build a machine learning model so AWS provides frameworks such as PyTorch, MXNet, Scikit, Microsoft CNTK and TensorFlow which is available through service like Amazon SageMaker. You just have to submit the model and not worry about how the infrastructure is getting optimized or how the training works. 

You can train your machine learning models with AWS services such as Analytics service, data warehousing, storage services, etc. Once Machine Learning is accessible to someone then interesting things can be built out of it which has happened the same with the use of Cloud Computing. Machine Learning drives innovation where people can in just some clicks build and deploy their application. So when machine learning will be more available to the people it will become easy for innovation to be at a speedy rate. 

When asked what pitfalls should enterprise avoid while adopting Machine Learning. He said that the enterprise should know what they are using these services for. If they are not sure about it then it would total waste of time. 

Amazon Aurora allows you to move back in time so that you can undo any error quickly

Amazon Aurora which comes with MySQL compatibility will provide users quicker access to recover from common errors such as deleting the wrong row or dropping the wrong table. Through Backtrack, users can move any database to a prior point without restoring from a backup and complete it within seconds. Enabling Aurora Backtrack in the RDS management console, the duration to retain data records is identified and you have to pay for the space used by these records.  Backtrack is useful for the development and test, especially in the situation where the test either deletes or invalidates data. With backtracking to the original database state, it’s ready for another test run. Aurora will also combine performance and availability of high-end commercial databases with open source databases making it simple and cost-effective to utilize.

AWS database migration service has now added support for R4 instances types

The AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) will support Memory-Optimized R4 instances for migrations and all ongoing replications. The new R4 instances come with more memory per vCPU which can be utilized to migrate or replicate all workloads which are memory bound, typically the ones with high Transactions per Second which have to be migrated in near real time. This launch will see DMS support 3 instance types namely Burstable T2 type instances, Compute-Optimized C4 instances and Memory-Optimized R4 instances.  It is essential to perform a thorough and detailed research to choose the right instance type while migrating with DMS.

AWS has announced the availability of Lumberyard Beta 1.14 now

The newly announced Lumberyard Beta 1.14 comes with more than 200 improvements containing new features and a major update towards the engine’s visual scripting environment. Variable Manager pane can be utilized for creating and managing variables, a set of variable nodes as well as adding them to your Script Canvas graph. Bookmarks will help you add shortcuts to a specific location on the Script Canvas graph for quick access. New components include the Wind Volume for creating volumes affected by wind; the Sky Cloud component for the realistic creation and detailed effects; and the Force Volume component to be utilized for application of physical force to the objects. It comes with Support for Visual Studio 2017. 

Amazon Connect now adds support for Keypad Input with Amazon Lex Chatbot

Customers can use the touch tone keypad for contact flows by using Amazon Lex chatbot. Earlier customer had to interact with Amazon Lex chatbots in Amazon Connect contact center via voice input. Keypad input offers flexibility for the customer to specify what they want and to interact with the contact center in a format that they are most comfortable in. Keypad input works with the existing Amazon Lex chatbots that are already created for contact center. Amazon Lex chatbots interpret dual tone multi-frequency signaling or the spoken utterances entered on a keypad and Amazon Lex uses them to understand the caller’s intent.  

With Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose you can stream Real-Time Data in Apache Parquet or ORC Format

AWS has added support for Apache ORC and Apache Parquet formats in Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose so this will enable you to stream real-time data into Amazon Simple Storage Service for analytics and cost-effective storage. Apache Parquet and Apache ORC formats are columnar data formats that enable you to store and query data more cost-effectively and efficiently. Kinesis Data Firehose delivery stream can be set up to automatically convert data into ORC or Parquet format before delivering to the S3 bucket. You don’t have to do any coding and you can query S3 data much faster with Amazon Redshift spectrum and Amazon Athena which will save cost and storage. 

AWS introduced Real-time Internet of Things device monitoring with Kinesis Data Analytics

Real-Time Internet of Things Device Monitoring with Amazon Kinesis Data analytics can help you monitor IoT device connectivity and activity easily in real-time. It will automatically deliver services that will be needed to record and visualize device connectivity and activity metrics for your IoT devices. Real-Time IoT visualizing metrics in reality will let you focus on adding new metrics instead than underlying infrastructure operations. Customers who don’t have a method to record and visualize IoT device metrics can leverage from this solution by providing valuable insights that can help in decision making to further increase the performance, availability, and reliability of the IoT devices. 

Ryanair Irish Airline shifting all its data to the AWS Cloud

Irish Airline Ryanair is shifting the majority of its data centers and migrating his infrastructure to Amazon Web Services. Ryanair Airline already runs various workloads on AWS Public Cloud including Ryanair.com and Ryanair rooms but now they are planning to go all in AWS in over the next three years. 

They are rebuilding and transforming legacy systems into the cloud-based by standardizing them on AWS services including machine & deep learning and databases. Ryanair is planning to build a data lake on Amazon Simple Storage Service are still in progress by using the Amazon Kinesis to stream data and help it gather insights from wider business data and customers. The firm is already using Amazon Lex to route customer support requests. 

The AWS Machine Learning solution lab is getting utilized to develop an application to feature surges in demand for certain forecast and flights schedule changes. But this will be only for little use when the airports suffer from computer glitch which normally happens time to time. 

“By migrating from Microsoft SQL server to Amazon Aurora we will be able to run on the largest email marketing campaigns in Europe with high performance at just fraction of the cost,” Ryanair said. With Amazon Aurora, they can send out 22 million emails a day about sales events or travel bookings. At the start of its entrepreneur journey, he was tights on its budget and cost so they hired a couple of teenagers to build their first website. And whenever they heard any good ideas they use to keep them away so to keep control over their cost. But over the years they learnt that it is a time to embrace tech so to gracefully be ahead or keep pace with its competitors. 

Mike Clayville, AWS Vice President of Global commercial sales said that many businesses are deploying their new applications to the cloud by default and they are looking ways to migrate as many as an existing application as they can as soon as possible. 

Cloud computing in its early years was questionable but now it has become a revolution in the technology itself. Many businesses are adopting cloud services for scaling their IT applications so to increase their availability and scalability. AWS Cloud in that aspect has come forward and has then to be innovative and introduced many new features, updates and new services every day, every month and every year. Every business wants to earn profit, growth and save additional expenses. Amazon Web Services is helping many businesses innovate new IT products and software with quality and durability offered with it. No doubt AWS is dominating Cloud Market because of its exceptional service offered with pay as go method which helps business save cost.