It seems like only yesterday I was last writing the Week in Review post, at the end of January, and now here we are almost mid-way through March, almost into spring in the northern hemisphere, and close to a quarter way through 2023. Where does time fly?!
Last Week’s Launches
Here’s some of the launches and other news from the past week that I want to bring to your attention:
New AWS Heroes: At the center of the AWS Community around the globe, Heroes share their knowledge and enthusiasm. Welcome to Ananda in Indonesia, and Aidan and Wendy in Australia, our newly announced Heroes!
General Availability of AWS Application Composer: Launched in preview during Dr. Werner Vogel’s re:Invent 2022 keynote, AWS Application Composer is a tool enabling the composition and configuration of serverless applications using a visual design surface. The visual design is backed by an AWS CloudFormation template, making it deployment ready.
What I find particularly cool about Application Composer is that it also works on existing serverless application templates, and round-trips changes to the template made in either a code editor or the visual designer. This makes it ideal for both new developers, and experienced serverless developers with existing applications.
My colleague Channy’s post provides an introduction, and Application Composer is also featured in last Friday’s AWS on Air show, available to watch on-demand.
Get daily feature updates via Amazon SNS: One thing I’ve learned since joining AWS is that the service teams don’t stand still, and are releasing something new pretty much every day. Sometimes, multiple things! This can, however, make it hard to keep up. So, I was interested to read that you can now receive daily feature updates, in email, by subscribing to an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic. As usual, Jeff’s post has all the details you need to get started.
Using up to 10GB of ephemeral storage for AWS Lambda functions: If you use Lambda for Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) jobs, or any data-intensive jobs that require temporary storage of data during processing, you can now configure up to 10GB of ephemeral storage, mounted at /tmp, for your functions in six additional Regions – Asia Pacific (Hyderabad), Asia Pacific (Jakarta), Asia Pacific (Melbourne), Europe (Spain), Europe (Zurich), and Middle East (UAE). More information on using ephemeral storage with Lambda functions can be found in this blog post.
Increased table counts for Amazon Redshift: workloads that require large numbers of tables can now take advantage of using up to 200K tables, avoiding the need to split tables across multiple data warehouses. The updated limit is available to workloads using the ra3.4xlarge, ra3.16xlarge, and dc2.8xlarge node types with Redshift Serverless and data warehouse clusters.
Faster, simpler permissions setup for AWS Glue: Glue is a serverless data integration and ETL service for discovering, preparing, moving, and integrating data intended for use in analytics and machine learning (ML) workloads. A new guided permissions setup process, available in the AWS Management Console, makes it simpler and easier to grant access to AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Roles and users to Glue, and use a default role for running jobs and working with notebooks. This simpler, guided approach helps users start authoring jobs, and work with the Data Catalog, without further setup.
Microsoft Active Directory authentication for the MySQL-Compatible Edition of Amazon Aurora: You can now use Active Directory, either with an existing on-premises directory or with AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory, to authenticate database users when accessing Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition instances, helping reduce operational overhead. It also enables you to make use of native Active Directory credential management capabilities to manage password complexities and rotation, helping you stay in step with your compliance and security requirements.
Launch of the 2023 AWS DeepRacer League and new competition structure: The DeepRacer tracks are one of my favorite things to visit and watch at AWS events, so I was happy to learn the new 2023 league is now underway. If you’ve not heard of DeepRacer, it’s the world’s first global racing league featuring autonomous vehicles, enabling developers of all skill levels to not only compete to complete the track in the shortest time but also to advance their knowledge of machine learning (ML) in the process. Along with the new league, there are now more chances to earn achievements and prizes using an all new three-tier competition spanning national and regional races. Racers compete for a chance to win a spot in the World Championship, held at AWS re:Invent, and a $43,000 prize purse. What are you waiting for, start your (ML) engines today!
AWS open-source news and updates: The latest newsletter highlighting open-source projects, tools, and demos from the AWS Community is now available. The newsletter is published weekly, and you can find edition 148 here.
For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New at AWS page.
Upcoming AWS Events
Here’s some upcoming events you may be interested in checking out:
AWS Pi Day: March 14th is the third annual AWS Pi Day. Join in with the celebrations of the 17th birthday of Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and the cloud in a live virtual event hosted on the AWS on Air channel. There’ll also be news and discussions on the latest innovations across Data services on AWS, including storage, analytics, AI/ML, and more.
.NET developers and architects looking to modernize their applications will be interested in an upcoming webinar, Modernize and Optimize by Containerizing .NET Applications on AWS, scheduled for March 22nd. In this webinar, you’ll find demonstrations on how you can enhance the security of legacy .NET applications through modernizing to containers, update to a modern version of .NET, and run them on the latest versions of Windows. Registration for the online event is open now.
You can find details on all upcoming events, in-person and virtual, here.
New Livestream Shows
There’s some new livestream shows that launched recently I’d like to bring to your attention:
My colleague Isaac has started a new .NET on AWS show, streaming on Twitch. The second episode was live last week; catch up here on demand. Episode 1 is also available here.
I mentioned AWS on Air earlier in this post, and hopefully you’ve caught our weekly Friday show streaming on Twitch, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Or, maybe you’ve seen us broadcasting live from AWS events such as Summits or AWS re:Invent. But did you know that some of the hosts of the shows have recently started their own individual shows too? Check out these new shows below:
- AWS on Air: Startup! – hosted by Jillian Forde, this show focuses on learning technical and business strategies from startup experts to build and scale your startup in AWS. The show runs every Tuesday at 10am PT/1pm ET.
- AWS On Air: Under the Hood with AWS – in this show, host Art Baudo chats with guests, including AWS technical leaders and customers, about Cloud infrastructure. In last week’s show, the discussion centered around Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Mac Instances. Watch live every Tuesday at 2pm PT/5pm ET.
- AWS on Air: Lockdown! – join host Kyle Dickinson each Tuesday at 11am PT/2pm ET for this show, covering a breadth of AWS security topics in an approachable way that’s suitable for all levels of AWS experience. You’ll encounter demos, guest speakers from AWS, AWS Heroes, and AWS Community Builders.
- AWS on Air: Step up your GameDay – hosts AM Grobelny and James Spencer are joined by special guests to strategize and navigate through an AWS GameDay, a fun and challenge-oriented way to learn about AWS. You’ll find this show every second Wednesday at 11am PT/2pm ET.
- AWS on Air: AMster & the Brit’s Code Corner – join AM Grobelny and myself as we chat about and illustrate cloud development. In Beginners Corner, we answer your questions and try to demystify this strange thing called “coding”, and in Project Corner we tackle slightly larger projects of interest to more experienced developers. There’s something for everyone in Code Corner, live on the 3rd Thursday of each month at 11am PT/2pm ET.
You’ll find all these AWS on Air shows in the published schedule. We hope you can join us!
That’s all for this week – check back next Monday for another AWS Week in Review.
AWS Pi Day – Join us on March 14th for the third annual