AWS Monthly Review – April 2016

AWS is innovating fast. This is a summary of what happened during the 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 an 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 the 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 the 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 available in EU (Ireland). (Official Announcement)

Read On

• Learn more about AWS with our book Amazon Web Services in Action
• Avoid security credentials on GitHub
• Free ebook: Building and Deploying Applications on the Cloud
• Antivirus for S3 Buckets
• Manage AWS EC2 SSH access with IAM

Feedback

Anything missing? Looking forward to your feedback! @andreaswittig or andreas@widdix.de.