AWS Shield Advanced, a managed Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection service, now provides the global threat environment dashboard that shows DDoS trends and metrics across Amazon CloudFront, Elastic Load Balancing, and Amazon Route 53.
With the latest release of Amazon Athena, you can now run SQL queries on Geospatial data. To use the Geospatial functions in Amazon Athena, your data must be in WKT (Well-known Text) or WKB (Well-known Binary formats). You can use specialized data types such as point, line, polygon, multiline, & multi-polygon and calculate relationships such as distance, crosses, touches, overlaps, & disjoints between geometries. A full list of functions are available in the Athena documentation.
Openreach reckons its 580 communications providers "have welcomed the ambition" to increase the UK's woeful fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) coverage. However, some folk remain less impressed.…
You can now easily view the time stamps and duration for when agents log in and log out of Amazon Connect with the new Login/Logout report. This report provides you with the information you need to generate agent time cards for payroll.
Starting today, qualified educational customers can reduce their Amazon AppStream 2.0 user fee by 89% from $4.19 per user per month to $0.44. The user fee is required for every AppStream 2.0 user as part of the Microsoft Remote Desktop Services Subscription Access License (RDS SAL) fee.
AWS Direct Connect provides private, high bandwidth connectivity between customers’ network and AWS Cloud. The traffic sent over AWS Direct Connect connection stays within AWS private network instead of traversing the public internet.
IBM has updated Cloud Private to help customers get containerised and move into hybrid private/public cloud computing.…
Following the recent announcement of updates to the PostgreSQL database, we have updated Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL to support PostgreSQL minor versions 9.6.5, 9.5.9, 9.4.14, and 9.3.19. This release fixes three PostgreSQL security vulnerabilities and contains other bug fixes and improvements.
Nearly one-third of mobile users suffer poor or no indoor reception at home, according to a survey by price comparison site uSwitch.…
Another day, another cloud security mishap. Some company exposes recordings of your kids to the Internet and then comes under Senatorial scrutiny. A security firm managing security clearance information turns out to be insecure.…
Microsoft has let the world in on one of its key Azure management tools: a simulator designed to help prevent nearly 70 per cent of the bugs that cause network downtime.…
Verizon is leaning on America's broadband watchdog to stomp out any hope of state governments rolling out their own rules on net neutrality, privacy protections and other internet regulations.…
Nearly nine years ago, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the launch of Amazon CloudFront, its global Content Delivery Network (CDN). What started as a novel, high-performing edge network with 14 Points of Presence has now grown to support millions of viewers around the world. Today, we are excited to announce our 100th Point of Presence (89 Edge Locations and 11 Regional Edge Caches) in one of Amazon CloudFront’s fastest growing geographies, Japan. Our 100th Point of Presence (POP) is also the fifth Edge Location in Tokyo, and our sixth in Japan.
BT's struggling Global Services division has inked a deal with AWS to flog its cloudy services in a bid to reinvent itself as a "digital" business.…
AWS Storage Gateway is now HIPAA eligible. If you have an executed Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with AWS, you can now use Storage Gateway to store, backup and archive protected health information (PHI) on scalable, cost-effective, and secure AWS storage services, including Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier and Amazon EBS, which are also HIPAA eligible.
Microsoft has shut down new registrations for the Outlook Premium service, directing customers instead to an Office 365 subscription.…
America's comms regulator has signed off on the $34bn merger deal that will see ISP CenturyLink take over internet backbone Level 3.…
We are excited to announce that CloudWatch added support for Extended metrics retention, Percentile statistics on metrics, and High-Resolution Custom Metrics and Alarms in the AWS GovCloud (US) region.
The Amazon CloudFront team is happy to announce its 99th Point of Presence with the addition of a second Edge Location in Miami, Florida. Amazon CloudFront’s 99 Points of Presence includes 88 Edge Locations and 11 Regional Edge Caches. Our network spans across 50 cities in 23 countries around the world. To learn more about Amazon CloudFront and how to get started, please visit our webpage to see our upcoming webinars.
We’re pleased to announce a new set of AWS Deep Learning AMIs, which come pre-installed with deep learning frameworks optimized for the NVIDIA Volta V100 GPUs in the new Amazon EC2 P3 instance family.
Amazon WorkSpaces now supports multi-factor authentication when users access their WorkSpaces from PCoIP Zero Clients running the PCOIP firmware version 6.0.0 (or newer). This allows administrators to require an additional factor of authentication when users are accessing their WorkSpaces from a PCoIP Zero Client device. This update also removes the need to use the PCoIP Connection Manager to connect to WorkSpaces, making it easier for you to use PCoIP Zero Clients in your organization.
Special report Schools across the United States are sounding the alarm on what looks suspiciously like an effort by the federal telecoms regulator to undermine efforts to build new broadband networks.…
Starting today, you can launch instances in the R4 family when using Amazon Aurora (MySQL). R4 is the next generation of memory-optimized instances and improves upon the popular R3 instances with a larger L3 cache and faster memory.
Amazon Aurora (MySQL) now supports the asynchronous key prefetch (AKP) feature which can speed up join queries by more than an order of magnitude.
Networking vendor Gigamon has agreed to sell itself to private equity concern Elliot Management, for around US$1.6bn.…
Cisco's decided to save the world from all-flash arrays by giving it a new 32G Fabric Switch, an upgraded Nexus 93180 and data galore.…
Vodafone Australia is market testing a product called “nbn extras” that will see it offer voice-over-WiFi or a virtual landline that redirects to mobile phones.…
Google parent Alphabet announced on Thursday a better-than-expected quarter, driving up its share price.…
Microsoft is crediting its Azure and Office cloud operations with helping to drive a better-than-expected start to its fiscal year.…
Defying subdued predictions, Amazon on Thursday reported healthy third-quarter earnings of $0.52 per diluted share, based on net income of $256m, on par with $0.52 per diluted share and $252m a year ago.…
Analysis The internet policy world is scrambling as one of the most critical and fiercely contested aspects of the global domain name system – its registration system – has started to fall apart.…
Starting today, you can open Microsoft Office, .pdf, and .txt files directly from the Amazon WorkDocs web client using the default application installed on your computer. When you save your changes, the file is automatically updated on Amazon WorkDocs. With this feature, you no longer need to manually download, save, and upload files when using the web client.
Amazon EC2 Systems Manager Parameter Store now supports versioning for each parameter.
Amazon EC2 Systems Manager now supports the ability to run any script or Systems Manager Document stored on GitHub or Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).
AWS Batch now supports user tags that will automatically propagate to Spot instances launched by your Managed Compute Environments. This makes it easier for AWS Batch customers to track ownership, drive their cost accounting processes, implement compliance protocols, and to control access to Spot instances via IAM policies.
Amazon ElastiCache for Redis now supports encryption in-transit and at-rest for secure internode communications to help keep personally identifiable information (PII) safe. The new encryption in-transit feature enables you to encrypt all communications between clients and Redis server as well as between the Redis servers (primary and read replica nodes). The encryption at-rest feature allows you to encrypt your backups on disk and in Amazon S3. Additionally, you can use the Redis AUTH command for an added level of authentication.
Amazon RDS for MySQL now supports MySQL Community Edition minor versions 5.5.57, 5.6.37 and 5.7.19 in all AWS Regions. These new versions include a number of fixes and functionality improvements for the MySQL database engine.
You can now configure your Amazon Kinesis Analytics applications to send real time analytics to up to three destinations in the AWS Management console. You can use this feature to send notifications in response to a high anomaly scores on applications, update a live leaderboard from a group ranking of mobile app data, and much more in the same application.
We are excited to announce the availability of Amazon EC2 P3 instances, the next-generation of EC2 compute-optimized GPU instances. P3 instances are powered by up to 8 of the latest-generation NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs and are ideal for computationally advanced workloads such as machine learning (ML), high performance computing (HPC), data compression, and cryptography. They are also ideal for specific industry applications for scientific computing and simulations, financial analytics, and image and video processing.
HMRC's Permanent Secretary has defended the department's decision to ditch a local cloud slinger in favour of tax-efficient multinational Amazon, citing bumper savings.…
Amazon Pinpoint now supports the Apple PushKit framework, and includes expanded support for collapse keys, message priority, and Time to Live (TTL) for Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) and Apple Push Notification Service (APNs).
Databricks, the biz that created Spark, has added a third pillar to its Unified Analytics Platform aimed at unifying data management.…
Performance Insights is a new feature of Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) that helps you quickly detect database performance problems and take corrective action. Performance Insights has now been released in open preview.
Amazon Aurora is a fully managed relational database that combines the performance and availability of commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases. In April 2017, we announced an open preview of the PostgreSQL-compatible edition of Amazon Aurora. The service is now generally available to all customers.
Analysis Remember The Big Switch – the book by Nicholas Carr which said that IT would become a utility-like service delivered through a socket in the office wall?…
AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (Standard Edition), also known as AWS Microsoft AD (Standard Edition), is a managed Microsoft Active Directory (AD) that is optimized for small and midsize businesses (SMBs). Now, customers running typical SMB workloads can use AWS Microsoft AD (Standard Edition) to create a cost-effective, highly available, and managed Microsoft AD in the AWS Cloud.
You can now create AWS Glue entities such as jobs, triggers, development endpoints, and crawlers using CloudFormation templates. You can also create AWS Glue Data Catalog objects, such as tables and partitions, via CloudFormation templates. To learn more, please visit the CloudFormation documentation.
AWS Batch now emits CloudWatch Events as your jobs transition from one state to another. In the past, in order to obtain updates on the state of a running AWS Batch job, customers have had to rely on periodically polling the state of each job using the AWS CLI or an SDK. With the new AWS Batch event stream feature, it is now possible to retrieve near real-time, event-driven updates on the state of your AWS Batch jobs. Events are delivered through Amazon CloudWatch Events, and can be routed to any valid CloudWatch Events target, such as an AWS Lambda function or an Amazon SNS topic.
Comment Satellite broadband operator Viasat is telling the world it will sue Ofcom over recent changes to rival firm Inmarsat's licence allowing that company to build a vital part of a planned EU in-flight Wi-Fi network.…
Are we taking the internet for granted? And by "internet" we mean the actual global networks of computers that share vast quantities of information every second by using the same basic protocols.…
Microsoft has announced its first Azure instances running Intel's Skylake silicon, a move that means Amazon Web Services will be the last of the big four clouds to run Intel's latest silicon.…
You can now launch R4, db.t2.xlarge, db.t2.2xlarge, and db.m4.16xlarge instances types when using Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for Oracle.
A man left on bail for more than seven years has hit out at Vodafone's role in his court case as alleged victim and examiner of vital computer evidence.…
You can now record configuration changes to AWS CodeBuild projects with AWS Config. CodeBuild is a fully managed build service that compiles source code, runs tests, and produces software packages that are ready to deploy. With Config, you can now view a list of your CodeBuild projects and track project configuration changes such as changes to the configuration source, service role, environment image, tags, timeout settings, and artifacts. You can also view the configuration of your project at any point in time in the past using the Config timeline page. For more information, please see CodeBuild documentation here.
Amazon QuickSight users can now add combo charts to their analyses and dashboards. Combo charts are useful for visualizing data of different scales, such as product revenue ($) and units sold (#), in a single visualization. Data can be visualized as bars or lines, with two axes to display separate scales for each. Combo charts are available in both Standard and Enterprise Editions of Amazon QuickSight.
Folk with mobiles on Vodafone, EE and Three are being stung by an average £22 per month for staying on their contracts after their handsets have been paid off, according to Citizens Advice.…
In a move that will delight factory workers developers everywhere, Microsoft has added more graphical user interface features to Azure Data Factory V2.…
Starting today, you can use cost allocation tags to manage your costs in Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS). You can now use tags to categorize your queues, so you can easily identify their purpose and track their costs. For example, you can use tags to identify all the Amazon SQS queues for a particular department, project, or application. Once you have tagged your queues, you can use the AWS Tag Editor console to filter and search for queues with specific tags. You can also sign up to include usage and cost details for particular tags in your AWS account bill.
You can now use Amazon Athena in the EU (Frankfurt) region. Amazon Athena is an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL. Athena is serverless, so there is no infrastructure to manage, and you pay only for the queries that you run.
AWS Direct Connect has landed in three new cities – Vancouver, Manchester and Perth. Cologix VAN2, Vancouver provides dedicated access to the Canada (Central) AWS Region and to public AWS resources in other North America AWS Regions. Equinix MA3 in Manchester provides dedicated access to the EU West (London) AWS Region and NextDC Perth P1 to the Asia Pacific (Sydney) AWS Region.
Amazon Redshift Spectrum is now available in the Europe (Ireland) and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) AWS Regions. Redshift Spectrum is a feature of Amazon Redshift that enables you to analyze all of your data in Amazon S3 using standard SQL, with no data loading or transformations needed.
If you threw money at the blockchain startup Tezos during its $232m initial coin offering fundraising round in July, here's something you can learn for future investments.…
Enterprise giant SAP has reported an increase in both revenues and operating profits for the latest quarter – but execs were forced to explain a slowdown in cloud bookings.…
"Basically the message is Vodafone is back," says UK chief executive Nick Jeffrey, a message he's so eager to convey at a breakfast briefing hosted by the company that it almost sounds as if the lady doth protest too much.…
AWS Marketplace customers can now subscribe to and purchase software solutions from popular software vendors, which contain multiple Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) from the same vendor. In addition, software vendors may now create listings that combine multiple server roles or product offerings into new predefined solutions that are specifically designed to improve security, availability or performance. Customers can then browse these new solution listings and subscribe to them with a single click.
Verizon will have to reach between its couch cushions for $17.7m to shoo away allegations it overcharged New York schools for phone lines and broadband.…
Amazon EC2 Spot now supports encryption of EBS volumes. Ec2 Spot will create encrypted EBS volumes at launch so you no longer have to boot from an encrypted snapshot or an encrypted AMI. To use this new feature, specify "Encrypted: true" as the encryption behavior within block device mappings, when submitting a Spot request. When you specify "Encryption:true", Spot will encrypt the EBS volume at the launch time and create encrypted volumes. If you already have an encrypted EBS volume in use then specify the snapshot ID without the "Encrypted" flag and Spot will continue to create encrypted volumes in your existing encrypted EBS snapshot.
Today, we’re pleased to announce an update to the AWS Deep Learning AMI.
Openreach has today offered its communication providers an alternative to the Ofcom-proposed Dark Fibre Access (DFA) product, which a court ruling slapped down three months ago.…
Fibre ISP Hyperoptic has been slammed by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) for releasing an advert that looked like an official contract from BT.…
You can now launch Amazon Redshift clusters on our second-generation Dense Compute (DC2) nodes. DC2 is designed for demanding data warehousing workloads that require low latency and high throughput. They feature powerful Intel E5-2686 v4 (Broadwell) CPUs, fast DDR4 memory, and NVMe-based solid state disks (SSDs). We’ve tuned Amazon Redshift to leverage the better CPU, network, and disk on DC2 nodes, providing up to twice the performance of DC1 at the same price. Our DC2.8xlarge instances now provide twice the memory per slice of data and an optimized storage layout with 30% better storage utilization.
You can now easily set up access to Amazon Elasticsearch Service from your VPC without having to configure and maintain firewall rules and IP-based access policies for each domain. This new feature lets you keep all traffic between your Amazon VPC and Amazon Elasticsearch Service within the AWS network instead of traversing the public Internet. VPC support for Amazon Elasticsearch Service enhances security, simplifies network administration and is available today at no additional cost.
CloudHSM is a cloud-based hardware security module (HSM) that enables you to easily generate and use your own encryption keys on the AWS Cloud. With CloudHSM, you can manage your own encryption keys using FIPS 140-2 Level 3 validated HSMs. CloudHSM offers you the flexibility to integrate with your applications using industry-standard APIs, such as PKCS#11 and Java Cryptography Extensions (JCE). CloudHSM is also standards-compliant and enables you to export all of your keys to most other commercially-available HSMs. It is a fully-managed service that automates time-consuming administrative tasks for you, such as hardware provisioning, software patching, high-availability, and backups. CloudHSM also enables you to scale quickly by adding and removing HSM capacity on-demand, with no up-front costs.
Analysis Security software supplier Symantec is moving 105 Norton data centre applications to Microsoft's Azure cloud.…
Amazon Web Services is trying to lure more Windows developers by rolling out Windows private servers via its Lightsail service.…
Delivering high-quality applications is a critical priority for mobile application developers. As part of their development and quality assurance process, developers can work with emulators that come with their IDE and/or connect to a real device to their machines. However, it is impractical for developers to maintain a large set of local devices. Amazon Device Farm allows developers to test and debug their applications against a large set of real devices in the cloud.
Starting today, Amazon Lightsail customers can launch Windows virtual servers easily and for a low, predictable price. Lightsail makes starting with Windows on AWS simple by allowing customers to launch pre-configured Windows instances with a few clicks and directly connect to them via RDP through the intuitive Lightsail web console. Customers can also track metrics, create snapshots, and manage DNS records and static IPs associated with their Windows instances.
Amazon EC2 now allows customers to switch the tenancy of existing VPCs from dedicated to default instantly, by using the AWS CLI/SDK. Dedicated tenancy ensures all EC2 instances that are launched in a VPC run on hardware that's dedicated to a single customer.
Today, we are excited to announced new Geographic (Geo) Match Conditions in AWS WAF. This new condition type allows you to use AWS WAF to restrict application access based on the geographic location of your viewers. With geo match conditions you can choose the countries from which AWS WAF should allow access.
Today, we are excited to announce Regular Expression (regex) support in AWS WAF. Regex complements the string match conditions previously available in AWS WAF, allowing you to match more sophisticated request patterns when inspecting and filtering web requests.
Amazon Elasticsearch Service now lets you enable slow logs, which provide valuable information for optimizing and troubleshooting your search and indexing operations. The slow logs are published to the Amazon CloudWatch Logs service and can be turned on or off at will. You only need to pay for the CloudWatch charges that you incur based on your usage. No additional Amazon Elasticsearch Service fees apply.
The British government is looking for places to chuck £25m it has set aside for 5G trials.…
Anyone wanting to log in or sign up to cloud-based email marketing service SendGrid is out of luck as an unspecificed glitch has taken its services offline.…
Interview Grant Shapps seems far from crestfallen after his disastrous attempt to lead a coup against Prime Minister Theresa May.…
Elastic Beanstalk allows you to add, delete, or update user defined tags leveraging API, SDK, Management console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), or Elastic Beanstalk Command Line Interface (CLI).
Cisco's popped out version 3.0 of its software-defined networking Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) product, but there's a more significant update coming early next year.…
Citrix has opened a new cloud region somewhere inside the European Union.…
Juniper Networks has issued preliminary results for its third quarter and the news is bad: forecast revenue of between US$1,290m and $1,350m won't happen and the company instead believes it will score between $1,250m and $1,260m.…
You can now create Amazon EMR clusters with I3 instances, the next generation of Amazon EC2 Storage Optimized instances. This is available for Amazon EMR clusters with release 5.9.0 and later. For pricing information, please visit: http://ift.tt/2eczCmW
This new Quick Start automatically deploys an outbound web filtering proxy on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud, using the Sophos Unified Threat Management (UTM) virtual appliance. In addition, it uses Sophos Outbound Gateway to extend security to multiple virtual private clouds (VPCs).
Today Amazon Web Services and Microsoft announced a new deep learning library, called Gluon, which allows developers of all skill levels to prototype, build, train and deploy sophisticated machine learning models for the cloud, devices at the edge and mobile apps.
Workday says it's got APIs in its pocket and is ready to join the PaaS party HR-centric enterprise SaaS concern Workday will enter the platform-as-a-service business.…
Today we’re announcing enhancements to Amazon RDS Reserved Instances (RIs) that make them more flexible and easier to use, helping you get the most out of your RI discount. RIs give you the option to reserve a database instance for a one or three year term, and in turn receive a significant discount compared to on-demand instance pricing.
Amazon EC2 Container Registry (Amazon ECR) now allows you to create rules to automate image cleanup across your Amazon ECR repositories.
You can now specify whether column names returned by SELECT statements are uppercase or lowercase. With this feature, you can now set a session-based parameter to enable your case-sensitive applications to easily query Amazon Redshift. For more information, see describe_field_name_in_uppercase in the Amazon Redshift Database Developer Guide.
The LISTAGG aggregate function orders the rows for each group in a query according to the ORDER BY expression, then concatenates the values into a single string. With the new DISTINCT argument, you can now eliminate duplicate values from the specified expression before concatenating the values into a single string. For more information, see LISTAGG Function in the Amazon Redshift Database Developer Guide.
Email is one of the most effective channels for customer engagement, but generic, one-size-fits-all emails typically have lower engagement rates. Amazon SES now includes the ability to create email templates, which you can use to send personalized emails to your customers.
AWS CodeStar, which enables you to quickly develop, build, and deploy applications on AWS, now integrates with GitHub. Starting now, each AWS CodeStar project template will provide you an option to use GitHub as your version control system for the software projects you build with AWS.
AWS CodePipeline can now execute pipelines in response to push-based triggers from AWS CodeCommit. Previously, CodePipeline checked CodeCommit periodically to see if there was a change. Now, CodeCommit will send an Amazon CloudWatch Event when a change is committed to trigger a pipeline execution in CodePipeline.
