Adventure Through the Amazon: AWS Week in Review

Wow! Twenty five (25) external and internal contributors worked together to create this edition of the AWS Week in Review. If you would like to join the party (with the possibility of a free lunch at re:Invent), please visit the AWS Week in Review on GitHub.

Monday September 12	The AWS Compute Blog explored Centralized Container Logs with Amazon ECS and Amazon CloudWatch Logs. The Backspace Blog wrote about front-end security of applications Shared Responsibility 3 – Identify and Destroy the Bots. John McKim wrote about Slack Webhooks with the Serverless Framework on AWS. Darin Briskman wrote about Creating a Simple Autocompletion Service with Redis: Part One of Two. The AWS Compute Blog wrote about Centralized Container Logs with Amazon ECS and Amazon CloudWatch Logs. The AWS Podcast released an episode covering a raft of AWS Service updates. FittedCloud blogged about How to optimize AWS EBS using LVM and reduce cost. The Cloudability blog explored use cases where the EC2 t2.medium could outperform the c4.large in a recent comparison article. FittedCloud blogged about How to optimize AWS EBS using LVM and Reduce Costs. The AWS Government, Education, & Nonprofits Blog wrote about how to Improve Operations and Increase Efficiencies with the AWS Cloud.
Tuesday September 13	The AWS Partner Network Blog explained How Signiant Uses AWS Lambda and Amazon DynamoDB to run its SaaS Solution on AWS. CloudCheckr wrote about Utilization is Key – Save money & run at peak performance Bo Bayles wrote about using Inspector and VPC Flow Logs for security monitoring at the Observable Networks blog. Rowan Udell wrote about testing Serverless (Lambda) functions locally. CloudHealth Technologies wrote about How Ziff Davis Manages Cloud environments Across all its Subsidiaries. Andrew Larkin presented a new Cloud Academy webinar: How to study for the AWS Solutions Architect Professional Certification. Andrew Larkin presented a new Cloud Academy webinar: AWS Certifications Special Guest – Greg Cockburn. Mackenzie Kosut wrote about Greenhouse of the future with AWS IoT and Intel Edison on our AWS Startup Collection. cloudonaut.io wrote about Getting started with AWS IoT and Tessel. The Public Sector Blog wrote about Ecosia: Planting Trees, One Search at a Time.
Wednesday September 14	We announced New Minor Versions, Logical Replication, DMS support, and More for Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. The Amazon Simple Email Service Blog asked Do Your Recipients Know Who You Are? The AWS Compute Blog talked about Authenticating Amazon ECR Repositories for Docker CLI with Credential Helper. The [databaseblog] showed you how to Migrate PostgreSQL Databases and Perform Ongoing Replication with the AWS Database Migration Service. Hudl's CTO spoke at the AWS Pop-up Loft \| New York on how they're helping the NBA & NFL. Red Hat wrote about Deploying OpenShift Container Platform 3 on Amazon Web Services. We announced the new Commit Visualizer to graph your commits in CodeCommit. Daniel Martins wrote about Five Months of Kubernetes [on AWS]. RedHat wrote about Deploying OpenShift Container Platform 3 on AWS. Ryan from Serverless Code wrote about Learning Lambda first, without the Serverless Framework. Tom Schenk, Chicago Chief Data Officer, talked about how the City of Chicago Uses AWS to Deliver Better Citizen Services with Open Grid.
Thursday September 15	The Amazon Mobile App Distribution Blog explained How to Build a Multi-Language Alexa Skill. The AWS Big Data Blog continued a series on Writing SQL on Streaming Data with Amazon Kinesis Analytics. The AWS Compute Blog showed you how to Maintain a Healthy Email Database with AWS Lambda, Amazon SNS, and Amazon DynamoDB. GorillaStack wrote about how to set up a local environment for serverless framework projects. Scott Lowe wrote about Using Vagrant with AWS. George Kontridze wrote about Lessons learned from using Docker Swarm mode in production on AWS. CloudHealth Technologies wrote about Migrating Business-Critical Applications From an Aging Data Center to the Public Cloud. Toni de la Fuente wrote about Prowler: an AWS CIS Security Benchmark Tool. A new video series called This is My Architecture was released. The Public Sector Blog wrote about Whiteboard with an SA: Amazon Virtual Private Cloud.
Friday September 16	We launched Earth on AWS: A Home for Geospatial Data on AWS. We announced the AWS Webinars for September. The AWS Compute Blog talked about Using Federation with Amazon ECR and showed you how to Migrate a Native JAVA REST API to a Serverless Architecture with the Lambada Framework for AWS. Andrew Crosio wrote about Service Oriented Architecture with AWS Lambda: A Step-by-Step Tutorial I was introduced to (and am intrigued by) Teridion, which Packet Pushers' Ethan Banks reviewed as Your “Internet Best Path Provider”.
Saturday September 17	D.C. Solution Factory published a video to show how to “visually” design and deploy a LAMP Stack in AWS. Johan Lundahl wrote about How to analyze your CloudFront access logs. Mike Flynn gave a strangeloop talk on Exploring Conversational Interfaces with Amazon Alexa and Go . Susan Potter gave a strangeloop talk on how to write a type provider in Idris which will read in VPC and subnet resource metadata from AWS and build a small library of functions that can enforce security, and availability policies for distributed systems deployments.
Sunday September 18	Autozane wrote about an automated way of configuring and enabing AWS CloudWatch Logs on Ubuntu using PackerIO and Terraform.

New & Notable Open Source

aws-rotate-key easily rotates AWS keys.

cognito-authenticator-cli retrieves AWS access keys from Cognito via the CLI.

saml-2-aws is a CLI tool which enables you to login and retrieve AWS temporary credentials using SAML with ADFS 3.x.

aws-tools are some useful tools to manage AWS.

cloudformation-simple-cli is a command line tool for installing, updating, and deleting AWS projects created via AWS CloudFormation.

cloudfront-signer is a Ruby gem for signing Amazon CloudFront private content URLs and streaming paths.

cog-cmd is a set of Cog commands for interacting with CloudFormation.

aws-node-kickoff initializes EC2 with a Node Server.

aws-proxy is a reverse proxy to AWS.

python-run-lambda consists of utilities for locally running and testing Python Lambda functions.

New SlideShare Presentations

AWSome Day Leeds.

Managing Data with Voume Velocity, and Variety with Amazon ElastiCache for Redis.

Deep Dive on Amazon DynamoDB.

Getting started with Amazon DynamoDB.

Getting Started with Amazon Redshift.

Deep Dive on Amazon Aurora.

Introduction to Amazon Aurora.

Getting Started with Amazon ElastiCache.

Database Migration – Simple, Cross-Engine and Cross-Platform Migration.

Amazon Relational Database Service Deep Dive.

Streaming Data Analytics with Kinesis Firehouse and Redshift.

New Customer Success Stories

City of Chicago used AWS for the flexibility and agility to launch OpenGrid, Chicago's highest profile technology release to date. OpenGrid is a real-time, open source situational awareness program intended to improve the quality of life for citizens and improve efficiency of city operations.

Dable develops Omni-channel Personalization Platforms that recommend products/contents customers might be interested in based on big data. The company uses AWS Lambda, Amazon Lambda, and Amazon Redshift to analyze data in real time so it can provide customers with recommended services in a short period of time and in the most cost-effective way.

Gett scales to keep up with 300 percent annual growth, saves $800,000 yearly, and gains new business insights using AWS. The company provides an online taxi reservation service used by millions of people in Europe, Israel, and the US. Gett runs its website and mobile web application on AWS, relying on Amazon EC2 Spot Instances to optimize costs.

Kyowa Hakko Kirin began using AWS with its production run for SAP ERP, an enterprise resource-planning software. Kyowa Hakko Kirin is a pharmaceutical company that manufactures and sells prescription drugs. As the company continues migrating nearly all its systems and data off of physical servers and into the cloud, it is making further progress and reducing costs through strategies such as using reserved instances and stopping unnecessary instances on weekends. The company is developing its cloud data center as a result.

National Bank of Canada's Global Equity Derivatives Group (GED) uses AWS to process and analyze hundreds of terabytes of financial data, conduct data manipulations in one minute instead of days, and scale and optimize its operations. GED provides stock-trading solutions and services to a range of organizations throughout the world. The organization runs its data analysis using the TickVault platform on the AWS Cloud.