AWS Monthly Review - April 2016

Andreas Wittig – 29 Apr 2016

AWS is innovating fast. This is a summary of what happened during past month.

Announcements and News

  • CloudFormation adds support for EC2 Dedicated Hosts, improves handling of ECS and allows you to specify a name for a Lambda function. (Official Announcement)
  • Define CloudWatch event rules with CloudFormation. (Official Announcement)
  • Kinesis Firehose adds Elasticsearch as additional target for your streaming data. Other supported targets are S3 and Redshift. (Official Announcement)
  • Two important feature announcements regarding Kinesis Streams: time-based shard iterators and shard-level metrics. (Official Announcement)
  • Device Farm adds possibility to access iOS testing devices remotely for debugging and manual tests. (Official Announcement)
  • Managed Platform updates for Elastic Beanstalk perform minor updates automatically within defined maintenance windows. (Official Announcement)
  • Cognito adds possibility for self-controlled user sign-up and sign-in. (Official Announcement)
  • Transfer Acceleration allows you to transfer data to S3 over Internet a lot faster. Edge Locations are used to optimize data transfer. (Official Announcement)
  • New EBS HDD volume types optimized for Big Data workloads (e.g. EMR): Throughput Optimized HDD (st1) and Cold HDD (sc1). (Official Announcement)
  • CloudFormation adds support for API Gateway. (Official Announcement)
  • New runtime for Lambda: Node.js 4.3. Functions can make use of standard callback now! (Official Announcement)
  • Config Rules now available in 4 regions: US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), EU (Frankfurt), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo). Allowing you to check your infrastructure against your compliance rules. (Official Announcement)
  • Machine Learning improved: model data shuffling. (Official Announcement)
  • New features for Route 53 health checks: metric based health checks, failover for private hosted zones, and configurable health check locations. (Official Announcement)
  • API Gateway supports Swagger definition import out-of-the-box. (Official Announcement)
  • Container Registry availbale in EU (Ireland). (Official Announcement)

Andreas Wittig

Andreas Wittig

I’ve been building on AWS since 2012 together with my brother Michael. We are sharing our insights into all things AWS on cloudonaut and have written the book AWS in Action. Besides that, we’re currently working on bucketAV,HyperEnv for GitHub Actions, and marbot.

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