AWS Week in Review – September 19, 2016

Eighteen (18) 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 19	We announced that Lumberyard Beta 1.5 is Now Available. We announced an AWS CloudFormation Update, with YAML, Cross-Stack References, and Simple Substitution. We announced a Second Edge Location in Mumbai, India for CloudFront. We announced that AWS CloudTrail Now Records Amazon EC2 Spot Instance Launch and Termination Events. The AWS Compute Blog shared some Techniques and Tools for Better Serverless API Logging with Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda. The AWS Database Blog talked about Using Amazon RDS for Oracle as the Oracle SOA Suite Database. Paul Jaworski wrote about How to build a serverless NodeJS microservice on AWS Lambda FittedCloud blogged about a simple SSH/Power management tool for AWS Cloud Developers. Avi Wilesnky wrote about How Up Hail Used AWS to Evolve from a Side Project to a Business on our AWS Startup Collection. Michael Kelly wrote about enfocing tagging standards with AWS Config and Lambda. John McKim wrote about AWS IoT with the Serverless Framework. The A Cloud Guru blog wrote about Why AWS Certification is more valuable than ever The AWS Podcast released an episode with an interview about DDoS Protection. Dmitri Kalintsev wrote about Deploying Brocade Virtual Traffic Manager cluster in AWS through a CloudFormation template. Daniel Blumenthal wrote about Starter AWS Stack Using Terraform AWS Community Hero Eric Hammond interviewed his teen daughter about developing the CloudStatus Alexa skill with AWS Lambda. Pavel Kerbel wrote about AWS Redshift performance and errors handling. Kim Schmidt published 16 Videos and Quizzes on Amazon Aurora that is Video Chapter 1.0 of an upcoming 6-part series on Amazon Aurora. Solano Labs and Apica, APN partners, are hosting a joint webinar on 9/28 at 11am PDT showing Easy Continuous Deployment You Can Trust on AWS CodePipeline. The AWS Government, Education, & Nonprofits Blog wrote about Q&A with Planet OS: Learn about the OpenNEX Climate Data Access Tool. The AWS Enterprise Blog described The Journey Toward Cloud-First & The First Stages of Adoption. Flux7 talked about YAML and CloudFormation: Simplifying Template Creation.
Tuesday September 20	We announced an API Gateway Update, with New Features to Simplify API Development. We announced that AWS CloudHSM is now available in the US West (Northern California) AWS Region. We announced that Amazon Elastic Transcoder Now Publishes Operational Metrics to Amazon CloudWatch. We announced that Oracle UTL_Mail and July 2016 PSU Patches are now available for Amazon RDS for Oracle. Mehdi Kianpour wrote about Lambda Function for Alerting on a RDS Slow Query The AWS Big Data Blog explained how to detect and respond to data anomalies in real-time. CloudHealth Technologies published a blog on managing security in a fast-paced cloud environment. The AWS Big Data Blog explained how to detect and respond to data anomalies in real-time. J. Scott Johnson wrote about using your SSH config file to make SSH and SCP access to your EC2 instances easier. The AWS Government, Education, & Nonprofits Blog invited participants to Join the TfL Hackathon to Help Manage the Capacity of London's Transport Network. The AWS DevOps Blog discussed the OpsWorks September 2016 Updates. The AWS Startup Collection revealed How Up Hail Used AWS to Evolve from a Side Project to a Business. Salvatore Cordiano wrote about Event-driven serverless applications cloudonaut.io wrote about New CloudFormation Templates – VPC bastion host, Jenkins, Security AWS Config. Trek10 noted that CloudFormation YAML is Here, and it's Awesome.
Wednesday September 21	We announced Additional At-Rest and In-Transit Encryption Options for Amazon EMR. We announced a Quick Start Reference Deployment for Linux Bastion Hosts. The AWS Government, Education, & Nonprofits Blog wrote about Announcing Terrain Tiles on AWS: A Q&A with Mapzen. vBrownBag continues its AWS-SA associate certification exam study webinar series, this time covering Domain 2.0 Unigma shared some Best Practices for Monitoring AWS.
Thursday September 22	We announced an AWS Enterprise Support Update, with Training Credits, Operations Review, and Well-Architected. The AWS Compute Blog discussed Easier Integration with AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway. The AWS Startup Collection explained how Organizations Realize Transformative Benefits wiht MongoDB on AWS. The AWS Windows and .NET Developer Blog went on a posting spree and talked about Using Webpack and the AWS SDK for JavaScript to Create and Bundle an Application, announced General Availability of .NET Core Support in the AWS SDK for .NET, explained how to Configure AWS SDK with .NET Core, described Custom Elastic Beanstalk Application Deployments, announced Multiple Application Support for .NET and Elastic Beanstalk, showed you how to Customize ASP.NET Core Deployments, launched the AWS Tools for PowerShell Core Edition, and explored the new Argument Completion Support in AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell. The folks at the Cloudability Blog answered user-submitted questions about strategic planning for AWS Reserved Instances. Skyliner produced a video about using templates to set up a basic application, configured with Docker, ready to deploy HPC Wire wrote about distributing a HPC workload among AWS, local, and remote supercomputing resources Noah Zoschke wrote about architecting a private Docker build service on ECS and ECR. The AWS Government, Education, & Nonprofits Blog wrote about The Future of Policing: BJA Smart Suite Summit Recap. The AWS Government, Education, & Nonprofits Blog wrote about Whiteboard with an SA: AWS Code Deployment. Citus Data announced Citus MX on AWS: Scaling Postgres to over 500k writes per second AWS Community HeroOnur Salk wrote about AWS Application Load Balancer and Amazon ECS using dynamic port mapping Chris Keene blogged about joining Teridion as CEO to re-wire the internet for collaboration using AWS and other cloud infrastructure.
Friday September 23	We announced Two New Edge Locations in Frankfurt, Germany for Amazon CloudFront. The AWS Big Data Blog revealed the Amazon EMR-DynamoDB Connect Repository on AWSLabs GitHub. J. Scott Johnson wrote about how to use Capistrano to deploy Rails apps to AWS cloudonaut.io wrote about Connecting Kinesis Analytics with AWS IoT.
Saturday September 24	Rick Astley still Didn't Give You Up.
Sunday September 25	Forrest Brazeal wrote about how to look up running EC2 instances prices in the AWS Price List API. The Backspace Blog wrote about YAML and CloudFormation YAML and CloudFormation Yippee!!

New & Notable Open Source

• ecs-refarch-cloudformation is reference architecture for deploying Microservices with Amazon ECS, AWS CloudFormation (YAML), and an Application Load Balancer.


• rclone syncs files and directories to and from S3 and many other cloud storage providers.


• Syncany is an open source cloud storage and filesharing application.


• chalice-transmogrify is an AWS Lambda Python Microservice that transforms arbitrary XML/RSS to JSON.


• amp-validator is a serverless AMP HTML Validator Microservice for AWS Lambda.


• ecs-pilot is a simple tool for managing AWS ECS.


• vman is an object version manager for AWS S3 buckets.


• aws-codedeploy-linux is a demo of how to use CodeDeploy and CodePipeline with AWS.


• autospotting is a tool for automatically replacing EC2 instances in AWS AutoScaling groups with compatible instances requested on the EC2 Spot Market.


• shep is a framework for building APIs using AWS API Gateway and Lambda.

New SlideShare Presentations

• Automated DevOps Workflows with Chef on AWS.


• Rackspace: Best Practices for Security Compliance on AWS.


• Getting Started with AWS Lambda and the Serverless Cloud.


• Introduction to Microservices.


• AWS CloudFormation Best Practices.


• Configuration Management with AWS OpsWorks.


• ClearScale: Continuous Automation with Docker on AWS.


• FireEye: Seamless Visibility and Detection for the Cloud.


• Releasing Software Quickly and Reliably with AWS CodePipeline.


• Running Microservices on AWS Elastic Beanstalk.


• Deep Dive on Microservices and Amazon ECS.


• Managing Your Infrastructure as Code.


• Automating Software Deployments with AWS CodeDeploy.


• Improving Infrastructure Governance on AWS.


• DevOps at Amazon: A Look at Our Tools and Processes.


• AWS Enterprise Summit Netherlands:
  
  
  
  • Keynote.
  
  
  • Starting Your Journey in the Cloud.
  
  
  • Creating a Landing Zone for Application Migration.
  
  
  • Big Data Architectural Patterns & Best Practices.
  
  
  • Infosec by Design.
  
  
  • Cost Optimisation at Scale.
  
  
  • AWS IoT.
  
  
  • WorkSpaces & WorkMail.
  
  
  • Enterprise Applications on AWS.
  
  


• AWS September Webinar Series:
  
  
  
  • Test Android and iOS apps on Real Devices with AWS Device Farm.
  
  
  • Migrate your Data Warehouse to Amazon Redshift.
  
  
  • Log Analytics with Amazon Elasticsearch Service.
  
  
  • Real-Time Data Processing Using AWS Lambda.
  
  
  • Getting Started with Cognito User Pools.
  
  
  • Monitoring Containers at Scale.
  
  
  • Deep Dive Amazon Redshift for Big Data Analytics.
  
  

New Customer Success Stories

• NetSeer significantly reduces costs, improves the reliability of its real-time ad-bidding cluster, and delivers 100-millisecond response times using AWS. The company offers online solutions that help advertisers and publishers match search queries and web content to relevant ads. NetSeer runs its bidding cluster on AWS, taking advantage of Amazon EC2 Spot Fleet Instances.


• New York Public Library revamped its fractured IT environment-which had older technology and legacy computing-to a modernized platform on AWS. The New York Public Library has been a provider of free books, information, ideas, and education for more than 17 million patrons a year. Using Amazon EC2, Elastic Load Balancer, Amazon RDS and Auto Scaling, NYPL is able to build scalable, repeatable systems quickly at a fraction of the cost.


• MakerBot uses AWS to understand what its customers need, and to go to market faster with new and innovative products. MakerBot is a desktop 3-D printing company with more than 100 thousand customers using its 3-D printers. MakerBot uses Matillion ETL for Amazon Redshift to process data from a variety of sources in a fast and cost-effective way.


• University of Maryland, College Park uses the AWS cloud to create a stable, secure and modern technical environment for its students and staff while ensuring compliance. The University of Maryland is a public research university located in the city of College Park, Maryland, and is the flagship institution of the University System of Maryland. The university uses AWS to migrate all of their datacenters to the cloud, as well as Amazon WorkSpaces to give students access to software anytime, anywhere and with any device.

Upcoming Events

• September 27 (Webinar) – Automating Compliance Defense in the Cloud.


• September 28 (Webinar) – Addressing Amazon Inspector Assessment Findings.


• September 27-29 (Seoul, Korea) – AWS Korea Monthly Webinars – Cloud Security Special.


• September 28 (London, UK) – Meetup #22 of the AWS User Group UK in London.


• September 28 (Seoul, Korea) – Gaming on AWS Conference.


• September 29 (Ipswich, UK) – Meetup #1 of the new Ipswich AWS User Group.


• September 29 (Cork, Ireland) – AWS AWSome Day.


• September 29 (Cork, Ireland) – Meetup #2 of the AWS User Group Network Meetup in Cork.


• September 29 (Katowice, Poland) – Meetup #17 of the AWS User Group Poland in Katowice.


• September 29 (Sofia, Bulgaria) – Meetup of the AWS Bulgaria User Group in Sofia.


• October 10 (Oslo, Norway) – AWS User Group Norway: Say Hello to Alexa!.


• October 10 (Seoul, Korea) – AWS Partner-led Hands-on Labs.


• October 13 (Seoul, Korea) – AWS Enterprise Summit.


• October 13 (Warsaw, Poland) – Meetup of the Public Cloud User Group in Warsaw, Poland.


• October 14 (Seoul, Korea) – AWS Lambda Zombie Workshop.

Help Wanted

• Linux Cloud Engineer at Red Wire Services (100% AWS Role, AWS Advanced Consulting Partner).


• Teridion Sales Engineer (Cloud Optimized Routing for SaaS).


• AWS Careers.

Stay tuned for next week! In the meantime, follow me on Twitter and subscribe to the RSS feed.