Cloud Computing Digest: The Latest Announcements

Despite it still being the beginning of the year, we've got lots of announcements from leading providers and the cloud-native community, so let’s review the most exciting ones below.

AWS

• AWS Backup was introduced as an all-in-one solution, with the support of EBS, S3, EFS, Dynamo, RDS, and Storage Gateway Volumes, which enables it for on-premises cloud computing as well.

• AWS Worklink is a new service which minimizes the hassle of exposing internal web applications to corporate users. The main feature is integrated authentication and mobile device support.

• Network Load Balancer gets very demanded TLS Termination support, which allows offloading this work from your backend. Additionally, NLB supports automated certificates deployment via ACM.

• Site-to-Site VPN gets support for IKEv2, which increases the list of compatible network appliances and simplifies multi-cloud integration. For instance, there should be no need to spin up an EC2 for establishing IPsec tunnel with Azure VPN Gateway.

• AWS Ops Automator gets support for EC2 Vertical scaling. Previously, it was also possible with custom scripts, however, having this out-of-the-box and integrated with ALB makes developers' lives simpler.

GCP

• Cloud Pub/Sub gets a Replay feature, which brings the exciting possibility of catching and “rewinding” traffic that causes an error during debugging and bug fixing.

• Cloud Firestore, a NoSQL FirebaseDB-based service, is announced as generally available.

• Google adds WebSockets beta support for App Engine Flexible, thus enabling streaming and full-duplex communication that is often required for highly interactive frontends and allows avoiding polling overhead.

Azure

• Account failover is now in public preview for Azure Storage, allowing developers to replicate all the storage account data to a secondary region and making it primary afterward.

• Cost Management, Azure’s cloud cost analysis and budgeting service, is now generally available for enterprise usage.

Cloud-Native

• Rancher 2.2 adds Multi-Cluster application support, allowing not only the management of multiple Kubernetes clusters, but also the holistic deployment of an app on top of them as a single entity.

• The Linux Foundation launches the new LF Edge to establish a unified open source framework for edge computing.

Reading of the Week

• "How Uber Monitors 4,000 Microservices," a case study from CNCF.

• "Encrypting Kubernetes secrets with Cloud KMS" by Alex Tcherniakhovsky

• Janakiram MSV writes about Canary deployments with AWS App Mesh and EKS.