AWS Monthly Review — March 2016

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

Announcements and News

• Happy Birthday AWS, 10 years of Cloud Computing. (AWS Blog Post)
• Referencing Security Groups in peered VPCs is possible even if the VPCs belong to different accounts. (Official Announcement)
• Long EC2 instance and reservation IDs are default for new accounts in US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), US West (Northern California), EU (Ireland), and EU (Frankfurt). (Official Announcement)
• t2.nano available in all public regions. (Official Announcement)
• API Gateway and Lambda available in EU (Frankfurt). (Official Announcement)
• EC2 Container Registry Available in US West (Oregon) and US East (N. Virginia). (Official Announcement)
• New Metering Service for AWS Marketplace allows to charge software based on usage. (Official Announcement and AWS Blog Post)
• New CloudWatch metrics providing insight into EC2 Spot fleets. (Official Announcement and AWS Blog Post)
• ElastiCache allows on-the-fly engine upgrades for Redis. (Official Announcement and AWS Blog Post)
• New CloudWatch metrics for EC2 instances show the number of incoming and outgoing network packets (NetworkPacketsIn and NetworkPacketsOut). (Official Announcement)
• Enhanced Monitoring for RDS instances with Postgres engine adds additional metrics collected by agents on the database instances. (Official Announcement)
• Preview before updating a stack with new change sets for CloudFormation. (Official Announcement and AWS Blog Post)
• Additional checks for Trusted Advisor: leaked EC2 access keys, EC2 reserved instance expiration, and more. (Official Announcement)
• CloudWatch Events add SQS as possible target. An event is able to trigger Lambda, SNS, or SQS now. (Official Announcement)

Read on

• Learn more about AWS with our book Amazon Web Services in Action
• Avoid Sharing Key Pairs for EC2
• Optional Parameter in CloudFormation
• Introducing the Object Store: S3

Feedback

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