Black Cat Security
Amazon Interactive Video Service, Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), Announcements, AWS BatchAWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), AWS Serverless Application Model

AWS Week in Review – March 27, 2023

This post is part of our Week in Review series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!

In Finland, where I live, spring has arrived. The snow has melted, and the trees have grown their first buds. But I don’t get my hopes high, as usually around Easter we have what is called takatalvi. Takatalvi is a Finnish world that means that the winter returns unexpectedly in the spring.

Last Week’s Launches
Here are some launches that got my attention during the previous week.

AWS SAM CLI – Now the sam sync command will compare your local Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM) template with your deployed AWS CloudFormation template and skip the deployment if there are no changes. For more information, check the latest version of the AWS SAM CLI.

IAM – AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) has launched two new global condition context keys. With these new condition keys, you can write service control policies (SCPs) or IAM policies that restrict the VPCs and private IP addresses from which your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance credentials can be used, without hard-coding VPC IDs or IP addresses in the policy. To learn more about this launch and how to get started, see How to use policies to restrict where EC2 instance credentials can be used from.

Amazon SNS – Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) now supports setting context-type request headers for HTTP/S notifications, such as application/json, application/xml, or text/plain. With this new feature, applications can receive their notifications in a more predictable format.

AWS Batch – AWS Batch now allows you to configure ephemeral storage up to 200GiB on AWS Fargate type jobs. With this launch, you no longer need to limit the size of your data sets or the size of the Docker images to run machine learning inference.

Application Load Balancer – Application Load Balancer (ALB) now supports Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol version 1.3, enabling you to optimize the performance of your application while keeping it secure. TLS 1.3 on ALB works by offloading encryption and decryption of TLS traffic from your application server to the load balancer.

Amazon IVS – Amazon Interactive Video Service (IVS) now supports combining videos from multiple hosts into the source of a live stream. For a demo, refer to Add multiple hosts to live streams with Amazon IVS.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New at AWS page.

Other AWS News
Some other updates and news that you may have missed:

I read the post Implementing an event-driven serverless story generation application with ChatGPT and DALL-E a few days ago, and since then I have been reading my child a lot of  AI-generated stories. In this post, David Boyne, explains step by step how you can create an event-driven serverless story generation application. This application produces a brand-new story every day at bedtime with images, which can be played in audio format.

Podcast Charlas Técnicas de AWS – If you understand Spanish, this podcast is for you. Podcast Charlas Técnicas is one of the official AWS podcasts in Spanish, and every other week there is a new episode. The podcast is meant for builders, and it shares stories about how customers have implemented and learned AWS services, how to architect applications, and how to use new services. You can listen to all the episodes directly from your favorite podcast app or at AWS Podcasts en español.

AWS open-source news and updates – The open source newsletter is curated by my colleague Ricardo Sueiras to bring you the latest open-source projects, posts, events, and more.

Upcoming AWS Events
Check your calendars and sign up for the AWS Summit closest to your city. AWS Summits are free events that bring the local community together, where you can learn about different AWS services.

Here are the ones coming up in the next months:

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Week in Review!

— Marcia

Uncategorized

Connected Sheets for Looker now available for all Looker-hosted instances

What’s changing

In 2020, we introduced Connected Sheets on Google Sheets, to help you analyze, visualize, and share billions of rows of data from your spreadsheets. Since then, we’ve made numerous improvements to the feature, including the recent announcement that you can now explore Google Cloud hosted Looker instances using Connected Sheets.
Today, we’re expanding upon this by making Connected Sheets available for Looker instances hosted on non-Google Cloud providers like AWS and Azure. 
"Connected

Getting started 

  • Admins: 
  • End users: 
    • If enabled by your admin, follow these steps to explore Looker data using Connected Sheets: 
      • In a Google Sheet navigate to “Data” > “Data connectors” > “Connect to Looker” > enter in the URL of a Looker instance, for example: https://example.looker.com. You will then need to authorize Sheets to access your Looker data. After you connect to an Explore, you can see the available data and continue your analysis in Google Sheets. 
      • Visit the Help Center to learn more about Connected Sheets for Looker. 

Rollout pace 

  • This feature is available now for all users. 

Availability 

  • Available to Google Workspace Essentials, Business Starter, Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Essentials, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus, Education Fundamentals, Education Plus, Education Standard, the Teaching and Learning Upgrade, Frontline, and Nonprofits 
  • Not available legacy G Suite Basic and Business customers 
  • Available to users with personal Google Accounts 

Resources 

Uncategorized

Google Workspace Updates Weekly Recap – March 24, 2023

1 New update

Unless otherwise indicated, the features below are fully launched or in the process of rolling out (rollouts should take no more than 15 business days to complete), launching to both Rapid and Scheduled Release at the same time (if not, each stage of rollout should take no more than 15 business days to complete), and available to all Google Workspace and G Suite customers.


Enhancing the Google Drive mobile experience on Android tablets
We’re optimizing the Google Drive app for tablet displays through several modernizations, including shifting the navigation bar to the side, optimizing visual components to take advantage of the larger screen, and making it easier to see file details for a selected file. | Rolling out to Rapid Release domains now; launch to Scheduled Release domains planned for April 3, 2023.

Previous announcements

The announcements below were published on the Workspace Updates blog earlier this week. Please refer to the original blog posts for complete details.

Improvements to content organization in Google Docs
We’re rolling out improvements to the formatting and customization options for tables of contents in Google Docs. We’re also reorganizing the options included in the table properties sidebar in Docs to make it easier for you to find and utilize table formatting options. Learn more. 


Add or remove client-side encryption from a Google Doc
You can now choose to add client-side encryption to an existing document or remove it from an already encrypted document (File > Make a copy > Add/Remove additional encryption). This update gives you the flexibility to control encryption as your documents and projects evolve and progress. | Learn more.

Completed rollouts

The features below completed their rollouts to Rapid Release domains, Scheduled Release domains, or both. Please refer to the original blog post for additional details.