Starting today, all new Amazon WorkSpaces will use general purpose SSD Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes at no additional cost. SSD EBS volumes provide superior I/O performance when compared to magnetic volumes, which results in improved application start times, boot times and a better user experience when running applications sensitive to disk latency.
For customers in the AWS Free Tier, Amazon Elasticsearch Service now offers a choice of instance types between t2.micro.elasticsearch and t2.small.easticsearch instances. With this release, the service provides customers in the AWS Free Tier, free usage of up to 750 hours per month of a single-AZ t2.micro.elasticsearch or t2.small.easticsearch instance and 10GB per month of optional EBS storage (Magnetic or General Purpose). If you exceed the free tier limits, you will be charged the Amazon Elasticsearch Service rates for the additional resources you use. See offer terms for more details.
Datto is getting in a right mesh. The backup service vendor is buying Open Mesh to improve its managed service provider offering.…
Sysadmin Blog HPE recently purchased SimpliVity for $650m. Some folks, like me, think this was a heck of a bargain for HPE. Others – most notably SimpliVity's competitors – think SimpliVity wasn't worth all that much anyways.…
Analysis Amazon's cloud service AWS has replaced Oracle and VMware as Microsoft's chief rivals, the Windows giant's CEO Satya Nadella has said.…
The Amazon CloudWatch Events service is now available in the Europe (London) region.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk extends support to Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS). You can now create and mount Amazon EFS file systems from within Elastic Beanstalk environments. Using the Elastic Beanstalk extensions for Amazon EFS, you can more easily deploy and scale applications that require shared, scalable, and highly available persistent storage.
Your analytics and search applications can now benefit from Amazon Elasticsearch Service’s support for Elasticsearch 5 and Kibana 5. Elasticsearch is a popular search and analytics engine for log analytics, full text search, application monitoring, and more. Amazon Elasticsearch Service delivers Elasticsearch’s easy-to-use APIs and real-time capabilities along with the availability, scalability, and security required by production workloads.
Oracle has changed the way it charges users to run its software in Amazon Web Services, effectively doubling the cost along the way.…
Microsoft's cooking up something to do with virtual storage appliances spanning on-premises storage and Azure and will reveal all in April.…
Amazon EC2 Container Registry (ECR) now supports Docker Image Manifest V2, Schema 2 providing the ability to assign multiple tags per image, store Windows container images, and use the Open Container Initiative (OCI) image format. Visit the specification page to learn more about Manifest V2 Schema 2.
Microsoft is said to be developing a cross-platform shell to bring the desktop Windows antiques to non-PC devices of different shapes and sizes.…
Sysadmin Blog I have set myself a mission to create a cloud this year. Not a lab test version of something or other, but a real and usable cloud that I can sell to my clients. It's not built yet, but I intend to document my journey towards that end.…
Amazon Cloud Directory enables you to build flexible cloud-native directories for organizing hierarchies of data along multiple dimensions. With Cloud Directory, you can create directories for a variety of use cases, such as organizational charts, course catalogs, and device registries. While traditional directory solutions, such as Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services (AD LDS) and LDAP-based directories, limit you to a single hierarchy, Cloud Directory offers you the flexibility to create directories with hierarchies that span multiple dimensions. For example, you can create an organizational chart that can be navigated through separate hierarchies for reporting structure, location, and cost center.
You can now use upgraded versions of Apache Spark (2.1.0), Apache Hive (2.1.1), Apache Flink (1.1.4), Hue (3.11.0), and Apache Oozie (4.3.0) on Amazon EMR release 5.3.0. Apache Spark 2.1.0 resolves over 1,200 tickets, including better SparkR support for machine learning algorithms, improvements to Structured Streaming, and performance enhancements for Spark SQL. Hue 3.11.0 adds improvements to the SQL editor with a new autocompleter and a more advanced results grid. Flink 1.1.4, Hive 2.1.1, and Oozie 4.3.0 all have various improvements and bug fixes.
AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (Enterprise Edition), known as AWS Microsoft AD, is now available in the Asia Pacific (Seoul) Region.
An extended outage with IBM's Bluemix SoftLayer portal has customers fuming, and they say there is no way for them to tell Big Blue about it.…
AWS CloudTrail, a service that continuously monitors and logs your AWS account activity, now allows AWS Managed Services, AWS CodeCommit, and Amazon GameLift to be viewed in the API Activity History. These services were previously available in the S3 bucket log files and are now visible using the CloudTrail console API Activity History page. This allows you to search for create, modify, and delete event activity from these services using a set of predefined filters. For read-only API activity, go to your Amazon S3 bucket or Amazon CloudWatch Logs. Please visit AWS CloudTrail product page for more information.
For more information on CloudTrail:
Our latest Quick Start automatically deploys Symantec Protection Engine (SPE) version 7.5.5 for Cloud Services on the AWS Cloud. The Quick Start was created by AWS in partnership with Symantec, to integrate solutions and services from both companies.
This new Quick Start automatically deploys an Alfresco One cluster on the AWS Cloud. The Quick Start was created by AWS in partnership with Alfresco Software, to integrate solutions and services from both companies.
In December 2016 we added support for Outbound Network Access from Amazon RDS for Oracle instances. This change enabled your database to communicate with external servers and send emails using the utl_smtp package. Name resolution during outbound network access always used Amazon’s DNS service in your VPC. Today we are adding support for custom DNS servers.
Amazon Redshift Workload Management (WLM) enables you to flexibly manage priorities within workloads so that short, fast-running queries don't get stuck in queues behind long-running queries. Today we are announcing an improved WLM experience in the Amazon Redshift console. The new features include in-line validations, simpler error messages, and more so you can easily create WLM queues and manage workloads. For more information, see Workload Management in the Amazon Redshift Database Developer Guide.
AWS customers can now directly access more than 150 free and paid desktop apps using a new integrated AWS Marketplace experience. AWS Marketplace for Desktop Apps enables customers to discover and subscribe to Microsoft Windows-based applications using the familiar AWS Marketplace website, without having to first log in to the Amazon WorkSpaces console.
We are pleased to announce that Application Load Balancers now support native Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) in an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). With this ability, clients can now connect to the Application Load Balancer in a dual-stack mode via either IPv4 or IPv6.
You can now use blue/green deployments with AWS CodeDeploy. Now, you can choose from two deployment types when using CodeDeploy. The existing deployment type supported by CodeDeploy is now known as an in-place deployment.
EC2 instances in Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) now offer native support for the IPv6 protocol worldwide. Last month, IPv6 in VPC was launched in the US East (Ohio) region. We now support IPv6 in all AWS regions, except regions in China.
We are pleased to announce that we’ve added a new edge location in Munich, Germany for Amazon CloudFront. The Munich location is our third location in Germany (joining Frankfurt and Berlin), and our 7th edge location in Germany bringing the total number of worldwide edge locations to 69. To see a list of Amazon CloudFront global edge locations, please see our edge location list here.
To learn more about Amazon CloudFront, register and attend a monthly office hour session that includes Q&A with Amazon CloudFront Engineers and Product Managers.
We are excited to announce the release of Amazon Lumberyard Beta 1.7, which includes 403 new improvements, fixes, and features to Amazon’s free, cross-platform 3D engine that enables you to create the highest-quality games, connect games to the vast compute and storage of the AWS Cloud, and engage fans with Twitch.
Dropbox says it was responsible for an attempted bug fix that instead caused old, deleted data to reappear on the site.…
AWS CloudTrail now enables you to receive alerts if you misconfigure any resources required to deliver CloudTrail logs. Using Personal Health Dashboard, you get a view into the performance and availability of the AWS services underlying your AWS resources, and the CloudTrail integration adds proactive notifications of any misconfigurations that affect your CloudTrail service. These AWS Personal Health Dashboard notifications provide you with relevant and timely information to help you diagnose the issues and take immediate action to restore your CloudTrail functionality. For example, you will now be able to receive alerts of misconfigured Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket policies that prevent delivery of your CloudTrail logs and troubleshoot SNS notification failures due to SNS topic policy misconfigurations. Please visit AWS Personal Health Dashboard and AWS CloudTrail product pages for more information.
For more information on CloudTrail:
You can now use Docker 1.12 on your Amazon ECS container instances. Read our documentation to learn how to use the latest Amazon ECS-optimized AMI.
Amazon ECS now supports a state for container instances that can be used to drain a container instance in preparation for maintenance or cluster scale down. The draining state prevents new tasks from being started on the container instance and notifies the service scheduler to move tasks that are running on the instance to other instances in the cluster.
You can now view code changes made between a commit and a parent commit from the AWS CodeCommit console. The change includes a list of files modified between commits, and a color-coded rendering of the specific code changes made to each file. You can view your code changes side by side (Split view) or inline (Unified view). CodeCommit also lets you hide or show whitespace changes.
Starting today, you can easily create cross-region read replicas for your Amazon RDS for MariaDB, MySQL and PostgreSQL database instances encrypted at rest with AWS Key Management Service (KMS). Previously, you could create cross-region read replicas for unencrypted database instances only, and the only option for creating copies of encrypted database instances was to copy encrypted DB snapshots to the target region. Now, you can create cross-region read replicas for your encrypted database instances in just a few clicks on the AWS Management Console.
The Cabinet Office wants government departments to buy public cloud rather than services from the Public Services Network (PSN).…
Cloud host Rackspace and storage vendor NetApp are fighting a patent holder who's targeted some of tech's biggest names in the notorious Eastern District of Texas.…
Amazon Redshift now supports Zstandard (ZSTD) column compression encoding, which delivers better data compression thereby reducing the amount of storage and I/O needed. With the addition of ZSTD, Amazon Redshift now offers seven compression encodings to choose from depending on your dataset.
AWS CodeBuild is now available in the US East (Ohio) AWS region.
Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) today announced that Amazon EC2 Spot Instances now support dedicated tenancy. Customers can now use Spot instances to run high scale workloads in a single-tenant manner on physically isolated hardware within a VPC. Using dedicated Spot instances, customers can satisfy security, privacy, or other compliance requirements for their high scale workloads while saving up to 90% off On-Demand pricing.
Amazon AppStream 2.0 is a fully managed, secure application streaming service that allows you to stream your desktop applications from AWS to any device running a web browser, without rewriting them. Available today, Image Builder makes it easy to import your applications to AppStream 2.0 so that you can publish them for users to access. You can import, install, and test your applications on an image builder instance, and then create images that are used on your streaming instances. You can add any application that installs and executes on the Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 operating system, without any modification or customization.
An alliance that dominated the PC industry is entering the world of fluffy white stuff and open source: Microsoft Azure is the first public cloud to include an Intel initiated and container-oriented Clear Linux OS.…
Amazon EC2 R4 instances are now available in the following regions: Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Singapore), South America (São Paulo), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Canada (Central), and EU (London).
You can now add tags to your Amazon DynamoDB tables for improved usage categorization and more granular cost reporting. Tags are simple, user-customizable key and value pairs that are supported by many AWS services. For example, you can tag DynamoDB tables for your different development environments — development, staging, and production — to see your spend for each.
You’ve always been able to migrate an Amazon RDS for MySQL database to Amazon Aurora by taking a snapshot and restoring it into an Aurora cluster. But how does the Aurora database catch up to updates that happened since the snapshot was taken? This used to require setting up replication manually between the two databases. Starting today, it can be handled through a simple AWS Management Console interface. The console will take a snapshot, restore it and replicate the remaining changes all in one step, making migration to Amazon Aurora easier than ever. To learn more, please see Jeff Barr's blog.
Google is once again facing allegations that its cloud for education has been used to harvest and sell information on school kids.…
The updated Amazon WorkDocs sync client makes it easier to free up storage space on your PC or Mac. Now you can stop syncing content that has been shared with you by simply deleting the relevant files or folders in your Amazon WorkDocs “Shared with me” folder on your computer. This action updates your Selective Sync settings automatically, and removes the content from your computer. Content is not deleted from your Amazon WorkDocs account; you can still access this content at any time using the Amazon WorkDocs web client and your other computers, and you can re-enable sync using the Amazon WorkDocs Selective Sync settings. In addition, the Amazon WorkDocs sync client performance has been improved, and now offers faster sync using less CPU and memory.
We are pleased to announce we have added CA Arcserve Backup to the AWS Storage Gateway compatibility list. You can backup and archive from CA Arcserve Backup r17 using the Storage Gateway virtual tape library (VTL) to scalable, cost-effective, secure Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier.
You can now use the AWS CloudFormation console to list stacks that are importing output values from another stack. Output values are used in cross-stack references, which let you import and export values between stacks without the need for hard-coding resource IDs in stack templates or passing input parameters. Visit here to learn more.
This Quick Start deploys a standardized AWS environment for workloads classified as United Kingdom (UK) OFFICIAL. The Quick Start supports guidance and controls that help public sector organizations manage risks and ensure security when handling information assets classified as UK-OFFICIAL.
Oracle will open a cloud region in the UK that's based in London and plans to have three data centres serving the region by mid-2017.…
Salesforce partner Sage Group has signed a trio of firms to its emerging X3 business ERP platform.…
Abacus-shuffling outfit IDC has updated its Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker with sales data for Q3 2016 and predictions for spend in 2017.…
AWS CloudTrail now supports filtering on the Event Source attribute when looking up events in your API activity history. This allows you to narrow your search results by the specific AWS services you are interested in. For example, you can now filter results to only show IAM activities such as role creation and policy application by filtering on iam.amazonaws.com in the Event Source attribute.
Amazon CloudWatch Logs has received a Provisional Authority to Operate (P-ATO) at the FedRAMP High Baseline within the AWS GovCloud (US) region. This enables government customers to utilize Amazon CloudWatch Logs to process the government’s most sensitive unclassified data.
Starting today, you can audit your Amazon Aurora database cluster with minimal impact to performance. Auditing allows you to log a customer-specified spectrum of events and publish these logs in a way that can be consumed either manually or using another application. This will help you with log analysis, auditing user actions, setting up alarms for security-related events, and more.
IBM says it will partner with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on a study of whether blockchain technology could be used to securely transfer medical information.…
Amazon Relational Database Service has received a Provisional Authority to Operate (P-ATO) at the FedRAMP High Baseline within the AWS GovCloud (US) region for the Amazon RDS for MySQL, Oracle and PostgreSQL services.
Two former Microsoft employees have sued the Windows giant seeking compensation for the mental trauma of screening child sex abuse photos, murder videos, and other extreme content flowing through the company's online services.…
AWS CodeCommit is now integrated with AWS CloudTrail, enabling you to more easily track changes made to your CodeCommit repositories through API calls or Git operations. CloudTrail captures these changes and delivers the log files to an Amazon S3 bucket you specify. Learn more in our documentation.
Cloud storage gateway supplier Panzura has raked in a $32 million E-round of funding as incoming CEO Patrick Harr proves his worth on the growth front.…
Amazon Relational Database Service has received a Provisional Authority to Operate (P-ATO) at the FedRAMP High Baseline within the AWS GovCloud (US) region for the Amazon RDS MySQL, Oracle and PostgreSQL services.
Elastic IP Migration enables you to migrate unassociated Elastic IP Addresses in EC2-Classic to EC2-VPC and back if needed. This allows you to retain the same public Internet facing Elastic IP Addresses after migrating your workload into a VPC.
British-based infrastructure services-slinger UKCloud says it is “fighting back” against the giants of industry by slashing the price of online storage.…
AWS Service Catalog allows organizations on AWS to create and manage catalogs of IT services that are approved for use on AWS resources. These IT services can include everything from virtual machine images, servers, software, and databases to complete multi-tier application architectures. AWS Service Catalog allows you to centrally manage commonly deployed IT services, and helps you to achieve consistent governance and meet your compliance requirements, while enabling users to quickly deploy only the approved IT services that they need.
AWS Service Catalog is currently available in the US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (Oregon), Canada (Central), Europe (Ireland, Frankfurt, and London) and Asia Pacific (Sydney, Singapore and Tokyo) Regions. For more information, see the AWS Service Catalog product page.
AWS Batch is now available for all customers. AWS Batch enables developers, scientists, and engineers to easily and efficiently run hundreds of thousands of batch computing jobs on AWS. AWS Batch dynamically provisions the optimal quantity and type of compute resources (e.g., CPU or memory optimized instances) based on the volume and specific resource requirements of the batch jobs submitted. With AWS Batch, there is no need to install and manage batch computing software or server clusters that run your jobs, allowing you to focus on analyzing results and solving problems. AWS Batch plans, schedules, and executes your batch computing workloads across the full range of AWS compute services and features, such as Amazon EC2 and Spot Instances.
There is no additional charge for AWS Batch. You only pay for the AWS resources (e.g. EC2 instances) you create to store and run your batch jobs. AWS Batch is available in the US East (N. Virginia) region.
To learn more, please visit the AWS Batch Product Page.
Amazon Inspector is pleased to announce support for security assessments on Ubuntu 16.04 within Amazon EC2. You can now run assessments for Common Vulnerabilities & Exposures (CVE), Amazon Security Best Practices, and Runtime Behavior Analysis. To run vulnerability assessments for Ubuntu 16.04, simply install the Amazon Inspector AWS Agent on the desired EC2 instance, configure your assessment in the Amazon Inspector console, and run your assessment.
The cloud wars won't be won on price – but customers are waking up to the costs, according to Google.…
AWS's database migration service (DMS) is storming along according to its head Andy Jassy, who offered a rare data point on the company's development last week.…
Rutgers University is struggling to pay its bills on time amid a prolonged outage of its Oracle-powered management systems. It is claimed this IT failure led to power outages within its campus after supplies were cut off due to non-payment.…
