December 4, 2024 – Cloudar, AWS Premier Consulting Partner and Managed Services Provider, announced today that they have achieved the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Digital Sovereignty Competency status. This specialization recognizes Cloudar as an AWS Partner that helps customers and the AWS Partner Network (APN) address customers’ digital sovereignty requirements while leveraging the power of AWS.

Achieving the AWS Digital Sovereignty Competency differentiates Cloudar as an AWS Partner that has demonstrated technical proficiency and proven customer success supporting the assured control and authority over data and infrastructure in the digital domain, including residency control, access control, resilience, survivability, and self-sufficiency. Cloudar is equipped to advise and architect for their customers’ sovereignty needs while leveraging AWS technology.

“Cloudar is incredibly proud to have earned the AWS Digital Sovereignty Competency” said Bart van Hecke, Co-Founder of Cloudar. “It reinforces our dedication to delivering secure, local cloud solutions that prioritize our clients’ data sovereignty and compliance needs.” 

Cloudar has helped customers like VDAB, the Flemish public employment service, meet their governance requirements through the implementation of a landing zone build on top of AWS Control Tower and AWS Identity Center. By leveraging these AWS solutions, VDAB can achieve compliance with EU data residency requirements and GDPR regulations, with all data securely encrypted using Customer Managed Keys. Cloudar’s solutions provide real-time compliance monitoring and automated controls, allowing VDAB to maintain operational efficiency while safeguarding sensitive public sector data.

AWS is enabling scalable, flexible, and cost-effective solutions from startups to global enterprises. To support the seamless integration and deployment of these solutions, the AWS Competency Program helps customers identify AWS Partners with deep industry experience and expertise across industries, use cases, and workloads to help grow their business.

About Cloudar

Cloudar is an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Premier Consulting Partner and Managed Services Provider with a 100% focus on AWS. They specialize in designing, building, and managing AWS infrastructure for businesses across a range of industries. With a deep commitment to innovation and security, Cloudar helps organizations fully leverage the power of the AWS cloud, providing tailor-made solutions for high availability, scalability, and cost efficiency.

As a trusted AWS partner, Cloudar offers end-to-end cloud solutions, from migration to continuous management and improvement, allowing businesses to focus on their core activities while Cloudar handles the complexity of the cloud.

Whether you’re looking to modernize your infrastructure, enhance your security posture, or accelerate your digital transformation journey, Cloudar is there to guide you every step of the way.

The post Cloudar Achieves the AWS Digital Sovereignty Competency appeared first on Cloudar.

We’re thrilled to announce that Cloudar will be attending AWS re:Invent 2024 in Las Vegas! As the biggest annual gathering for cloud enthusiasts, experts, and innovators, AWS re:Invent offers countless opportunities to learn, connect, and discover what’s new in the world of cloud technology. But with so much happening—from keynotes to hands-on labs, networking sessions to deep-dive discussions—it can sometimes feel overwhelming to navigate everything this event has to offer.

That’s why we initially developed our re:Invent Chatbot, a friendly assistant designed to make your re:Invent experience smoother and more enjoyable! While we’re excited to share the concept, due to AWS guidelines, the chatbot will not be available for use at this year’s event. However, the development of this tool still serves as a great example of how cloud-driven AI can transform the event experience.

Meet the re:Invent Chatbot – A Vision for Personalized Event Assistance

Even though the chatbot is offline for now, it’s an exciting demonstration of how technology can make large-scale events like AWS re:Invent easier to navigate. Whether you’re searching for the perfect session, need quick answers to FAQs, or just want help organizing your schedule, the chatbot was designed with the user in mind.

Here’s what the re:Invent Chatbot would have been able to do:

• Session Navigation: With hundreds of sessions happening at once, it’s easy to lose track. Our chatbot could help you quickly find sessions that match your interests or needs—just ask for recommendations, and you’d be pointed in the right direction.
• Answer FAQs: From event logistics to session details, the chatbot was equipped with a wealth of knowledge to answer questions on the fly.

Taking it Further: Imagine a Chatbot for Music Festivals

Let’s take the concept one step further. Imagine attending a large music festival with dozens of stages and hundreds of performers over a few days. It can be daunting to decide who to see and when. That’s where a Music Festival Chatbot could come in handy.

For example, you could tell the chatbot your favorite genres—let’s say you’re into electronic music, indie rock, and a bit of jazz on the side. The chatbot could take that input and instantly suggest a personalized lineup for you, complete with the times and locations of each performance. It could also help you with last-minute schedule changes or even recommend food trucks or merch stands nearby during set breaks.

Here’s what this Music Festival Chatbot could do:

• Personalized Lineup Recommendations: Based on your music preferences, the chatbot could suggest artists, DJs, or bands you might enjoy, even introducing you to new acts within your favorite genres.
• Time Schedule: Once your lineup is set, the chatbot could create a custom schedule for you which you could use throughout the event.

Just like our re:Invent Chatbot concept, this Music Festival Chatbot shows the potential of AI to personalize experiences, turning chaotic, multi-day events into seamless, curated adventures.

Why Build a Chatbot?

At Cloudar, we believe that technology should make life simpler, not more complicated. The re:Invent Chatbot embodies that philosophy. By leveraging cloud-based AI, we aimed to enhance attendees’ experiences, reducing the stress of juggling schedules or missing key moments.

Though the tool won’t be live this year, we hope it sparks inspiration for the many possibilities that cloud technologies can offer in the future. And, of course, we’ll be keeping this idea in our toolkit for future events.

Let’s Connect in Las Vegas!

We can’t wait to see you at AWS re:Invent 2024! If you’re attending, don’t hesitate to reach out—we’d love to grab a cold beer together and chat about all things cloud. Whether you want to talk about AWS, share your re:Invent experience, or discuss how tools like the re:Invent Chatbot could evolve, we’re always eager to connect.

The post Cloudar at AWS re:Invent 2024 – Your Guide to an Unforgettable Experience appeared first on Cloudar.

You can find them below, with a short explanation of why I think you should consider attending them.

Breakout sessions

SEC209 | Modernize authorization: Lessons from cryptography and authentication

Speakers: Eric Brandwine, Neha Rungta
Hurry level: There is still space.

You might have heard the phrase “there is no compressions algorithm for experience” and with a combined 23 years at AWS/Amazon between Eric Brandwine and Neha Rungta, this is absolutely true here. I have no doubt that they’ll be able to talk about some of my favorite topics (cryptography, authentication, authorization, the Cedar language, …) in a way that’s useful and understandable.

SEC236 | The AWS data-driven perspective on threat landscape trends

Speaker: Paul Bodmer
Hurry level: You’ll probably have to sit in the front row. There will be a recording

The description mentions “data-driven”, “real-world examples”, and “unique perspective”. AWS has been recently more open about the kind of threads they see, and this session will hopefully follow that trend.

SVS323 | I didn’t know Amazon API Gateway did that

Speakers: Eric Johnson
Hurry level: You’ll probably have to sit in the front row. There will be a recording

I have never regretted seeing a talk by Eric Johnson, and I love this title. Finding interesting ways to use AWS services is very helpful, and allows you to make more informed trade-offs when designing an application.

DOP209 | Governance and security with infrastructure as code

Speakers: Damian Silbergleith Cunniff (GoDaddy), Eric Beard, Kevin DeJong
Hurry level: You’ll probably have to sit in the front row.

I like the way cfn-guard approaches governance a lot, and it’s integrated in more services than you might expect. I also believe that having guardrails is operationally a better choice than building your own company-specific constructs, so I’m happy that they’ll also talk about the CDK.

STG315 | Amazon S3 security and access control best practices

Speakers: Meg Rose, Becky Weiss
Hurry level: You’ll probably have to sit in the front row. There will be a recording

Meg Rose and Becky Weiss gave one of my favorite sessions of re:Invent 2021 (STG315: Deep dive on Amazon S3 security and access management), and this year they’re back for another joint session. This will be a great way to get to know all the S3 security features, and how they work together.

Chalk Talks

SEC316-R1 | All things in life are temporary: An IAM credential journey [REPEAT]

Speakers: Meg Peddada, Alex Waddell
Hurry level: There is still space.

I saw a great chalk talk at re:Inforce about how IAM and STS work. In the meantime, more official documentation about concepts discussed during that talk, like “forward access sessions (FAS)”, has appeared. Getting an end-to-end look at what happens when you use an IAM credential will always be interesting, and helpful when writing policies.

NET316-R1 | Networking ask-me-anything talk [REPEAT]

Speakers: Jamie Wenzel, Andrew Gray
Hurry level: There is still space.

Doing an “ask-me-anything” is always a bit of a risk, but if we bring interesting questions, we should get interesting answers. Networking also lends itself very well to whiteboarding, so I expect a very interactive session, which is where chalk talks shine.

SUP201 | Get the most out of AWS Support to achieve your business outcomes

Speakers: Peter Dachnowicz, Donald Quindardo
Hurry level: Don’t wait too long.

Knowing how to effectively engage AWS Support is one of the “secrets” that can make you solve problems a lot faster. The topics listed in the description sound very interesting, but I would also use this opportunity to ask things like “What is the fastest way to get a quota increase?”, “What’s the smartest way to engage a Technical Account Manager?”, and “What kind of artifacts should I include when I open a support case?”.

SEC217 | Explore the AWS sovereign-by-design approach

Speakers: Alex Meek-Holmes, Kathy Liu
Hurry-level: Don’t wait too long.

By the time this session happens, it will be a little over a month since AWS announced the “AWS European Sovereign Cloud”. There are a few details in the announcement post that give us a little insight into how it will work. Hearing things directly from AWS-people, and being able to ask questions should teach us even more about what is coming.

SVS203-R1 | Thinking serverless [REPEAT]

Speakers: James Beswick
Hurry-Level: Don’t wait too long.

Framing serverless as an approach to a business problem is super helpful, and this one has all the things you want in a serverless-related session: different services, customer focus, distributed systems, event-based architecture, …

This blog has been updated:

• Monday 6 November 2023: SVS323, DOP209, and STG315 have no more reservations available.
• Wednesday 8 November 2023: crossed out SEC236, un-crossed DOP209

The post There is still space available: Ben’s recommendations for re:Invent 2023 appeared first on Cloudar.

Using less to achieve sustainability

During AWS re:Invent 2022 in Las Vegas, I attended a few sessions on sustainability in the cloud. One of the things that stood out to me and has kept my mind occupied since is the question: “Are we taking the right course of action?” It’s clear that there is still a lot of work to do to make the cloud more energy sustainable.

The angle I don’t see tackled as much in the meantime shifting to a focus on efficiency. While people are warming up to pushing for high levels of resource efficiency through FinOps and GreenOps principles, there is also a case to be made to push for operational efficiency. I firmly believe that “use less” is key to achieving sustainability in various aspects.

Operating at scale

One of the big issues I still see in the IT landscape today is that a lot of organizations try to do everything in-house, which often leads to a lot of legacy set-ups, architecture lock- ins and technical debt. Compare it to doing Christmas shopping. Take a street with 10 cars. These 10 cars all drive off to various stores, on multiple trips, maybe coming back without finding the gifts they need. That’s a lot of emissions for maybe a handful of gifts. Now, imagine these 10 households all do their shopping online and let package delivery services handle the door-to-door process. One delivery van might deliver the same amount of gifts to that street and then some. It’s all a matter of consolidating tasks and handling them in an efficient way.

It’s not impossible to do cloud operations internally in an efficient way, but it requires a level of investment and dedication that is doesn’t always align with budgets, goals and bottom lines. Managed services providers strive for operational excellence and operational efficiency. We make sure that whatever we manage is kept in line with business needs in an efficient way. Like a delivery van, we consolidate knowledge and expertise and dedicate resources to carry out cloud operations 24/7, which we can do because we operate at scale. That scale also allows us to rapidly gain experience and continuously improve. We improve the operational efficiency of your cloud environment, which leads to achieving more with less.

Want to know more about how we can drive sustainability through maximum efficiency? Reach out to us!

The post Managed Services provide the sustainable edge appeared first on Cloudar.

FinOps: Consolidated tooling space

While there were no straightforward announcements done by AWS on the FinOps front, a lot of things were said and shown during the sessions. While we can’t make all of it publicly known yet, it is clear that AWS is consolidating their tooling space, which consists of three parts: Billing, Analysis and Visualization.

• Billing: AWS is strengthening the Billing Conductor they released earlier this year and releasing some features that were previously only available to customers through third-party tooling. The fact that they can push CURs for specific billing groups natively (though the cost remains steep), is interesting because it feeds nicely into their visualization tooling.
• Analysis: Cost Explorer had received a visual update just before re:Invent, but other than that no real announcements were made. We talked to some people about the checkboxes, and the general sense is that grouping by multiple layers will come out soon, making Cost Explorer even stronger in comparison to the current version.
• Visualization: the CUDOS or Cloud Intelligence Dashboards were omnipresent at re:Invent, and AWS is really investing in the tool. The fact that customers can use the separate CUR files of the AWS Billing Conductor to create different dashboards for different subsets of accounts is powerful. If this were to become a service or something that you don’t have to build and maintain yourself, it could really rival some of the existing tooling out there.

Right now these three parts are developed by three teams and not really coupled together. They function differently, are priced and billed differently and require quite a lot of custom development to get to a level where third party tools are out of the box. The fact that you can’t carry over billing groups into a restrictive view in Cost Explorer or automate reporting from a Cost Explorer report (the sending of the report that is), are some basic functions that we still miss. Still, AWS is investing in the native tools and investing properly, with attention to feedback from the user community. This is great to see!

GreenOps: Still a long road ahead

On the sustainability front, it was nice to hear AWS pledge on water positivity by 2030. But there is still much work to be done to make the cloud greener. The current reporting on carbon emissions is not up to standard yet, and it does not integrate with for example a QuickSight dashboard or other dashboarding tools. A discussion on what information is really relevant concerning sustainable resource efficiency is also necessary. Why don’t we start looking at the energy consumption of AWS resources? If AWS data centers are truly carbon neutral by 2025, is this not something we should start incorporating in our logged metrics?

While re:Invent gave us a great feeling in terms of FinOps and AWS’s awareness of cost analysis and cost optimization tools, GreenOps seems like it has yet to earn a serious seat at the table aside from having a reporting tool available and some key pledges to improve their ecological footprint.

What did you take away from re:Invent, or what changes in the world of cloud computing would you like to see? Together we can build a sustainable future!

The post re:Invent 2022: General takeaways on FinOps & GreenOps appeared first on Cloudar.

As a woman in tech still at the beginning of my career, I fell perfectly within their category and was lucky enough to be selected to attend. (Huge “Thank You!” there to the responsible communities!) It was my first time attending a conference of this size, and it was seriously impressive. I prepared by filling my calendar to the brim with interesting sessions and workshops from the catalog, as well as a good amount of networking events – some which were provided by “We Power Tech” itself.

I arrived in Vegas later than expected due to a storm, so unfortunately I missed the WPT Orientation on Sunday night.  A shame, I heard it was good! My first morning was mainly filled with figuring things out: from as simple as buying a US sim card to registering for the conference and finding a way to get around – the easiest (but not the fastest) turned out to be walking by the way. At the start of the afternoon my first planned sessions came around. I specifically loved the Chalk Talks. The sessions were very interesting as well from a technical perspective, but I really liked the way the chalk talks let you interact with the speaker(s) and audience.

Then we had the first keynote, an amazing experience altogether. Just to see so many like-minded people fit into one room, knowing that it’s still just a fraction of the conference attendees, was spectacular. Content-wise I tried to focus on what could be interesting to implement at the customers I’m currently working for. The bulk of the day ended up mostly being networking and a coworker invited me to join some meetings with AWS teams. As a conclusion I attended the WPT drinks and the BeNeLux drinks. Both allowed me to meet some very interesting new people and catch up with others.

Aside from the many other sessions I attended, one of the highlights was the “Women in Identity, Security, and Privacy” gathering. Although I had the feeling the accent was less on AWS and more on identity, security and privacy (a bit out of line with my other sessions) it was very interesting. There were a couple lighting talks giving by women in these lines of work, and it was just a very interesting group of people to mix with. This year was the first time they were organizing it, and I would love to see repeat sessions of this at the next re:Invents.

All in all, it was a wonderful experience, and I would love to go again! It was refreshing to be part of such a large community, and although women were clearly still underrepresented, to always feel included.

The post AWS re:Invent 2019 – Women in Tech appeared first on Cloudar.

Last year, we paid enough attention during the sessions to tell about announcements that were not covered during the keynotes or in the AWS blog. This year we are doing the same. Here are 3 announcements of things to come and a list of 15 announcements you might have missed, because they didn’t get any keynote or blog attention.

Client VPN

With thanks to Michael for the tip

During one of the breakout sessions, the presenter showed a slide announcing that client VPN will be available by the end of this year. This will be an AWS managed VPN that should work with every OpenVPN client and allow them to connect to VPCs. Increasing the ways to connect to VPCs is a great thing and it will allow us to stop managing yet another service ourselves.

Faster VPC cold starts in Lambda

With thanks to Will for the tip

Some day in 2019, AWS will announce they’ve changed the way your AWS Lambda functions connect to your VPC. Instead of using a local NAT per Function to connect it to an ENI in your VPC, it will be using a remote NAT that can be reused for different Functions. This should improve scaling with better cold start times and lower the latency over the connection. Although the list of reasons to run your Lambda Functions inside a VPC has gotten a little bit smaller with the Data API for Aurora Serverless, there will always be workloads that can benefit from this.

Version 2 of the AWS CLI

The developer blog already announced this in september, but thanks to the session DEV322, and a lot of hard work from the team building it, worth mentioning here. There are a lot of features coming, like  more consistent return codes and timestamps, a new installer for OSX and Linux, more and easier ways to configure credentials, wizards that make getting started with services easier (just like in the console), autocompletion for resource names, more high level commands (like the current s3 commands that translate cp/mv/ls to the right api commands), and more.

You can try it right now, by getting the beta version from GitHub.

Upgrade path to Control Tower

At Cloudar we’ve been implementing the Landing Zone Solution, both for our own accounts as for some of our customers. When AWS announced Control Tower, we were happy to learn that AWS is turning this into a service that will be usable by all their clients. At re:Invent, we were able to confirm that AWS will make it possible for current users of Landing Zone to migrate to Control Tower. This means you don’t have to wait on the release of Control Tower to work on your multi-account setup.

Other announcements you might have missed:

If you only followed the keynotes, and the AWS blog, you might have missed these announcements:

• AWS IoT Device Tester, Now Available
• Amazon FreeRTOS Adds New Features
• Introducing the AWS Amplify Console
• AWS IoT Greengrass Extends Functionality with Connectors to External Applications, Hardware Root of Trust Security, and Isolation Configurations
• AWS Announces Amazon S3 Object Lock in all AWS Regions
• Announcing AWS Key Management Service (KMS) Custom Key Store
• Amazon QuickSight adds support for dashboard embedding and APIs
• Amazon Translate Now Supports Customized Translations
• The AWS Developer Tools Improve Continuous Delivery Support for AWS Fargate and Amazon ECS
• Amazon EFS now Supports Access Across Accounts and VPCs
• Amazon EFS now Supports 1000 File Systems per Account
• Amazon Lightsail Now Supports Resource Tagging
• Amazon Lightsail Now Provides an Upgrade Path to EC2
• Introducing AWS App Mesh – Service Mesh for Microservices on AWS
• You can now share VPC Subnets with other accounts

The post AWS Re:Invent 2018: More announcements coming appeared first on Cloudar.

We’ve written them down for you here

CloudFormation Drift Detection

This first one was talked about in DEV317 – Deep Dive on AWS CloudFormation (video – slides).

Drift Detection is a CloudFormation feature that will be released (soon) in 2018 and will make it possible to view and detect changes made outside of CloudFormation to resources managed by CloudFormation.

This will make it possible to be confident that the changeset that CloudFormation wants to execute actually matches the changes that will occur. It will also help you to proactively investigate why there were changes outside of CloudFormation in the first place.

Service Discovery (for ECS)

The second announcements was a complete session: CON403 – Introducing Service Discovery for Amazon ECS (no slides/video yet).

Service Discovery consists of two parts, a new feature in Route53 and a new feature in ECS and will be released in Q1 2018 (the description if the talks even mentions January).

In Route53 there will be a new API to create Namespaces, define Services and register Instances (in this case instances means ECS tasks) under them. These services can be queried via DNS. R53 supports A records (returning up to 8 ips per query) and SRV records (for ip + port combinations).

ECS can use these APIs to register your tasks. It will even go a step further and not only use the Route53 Healthchecks, but also update Route53 on ECS events like service scaling and task health.

Both management and service registery APIs will be availble from Route 53, so you can also build your own integration for workloads outside of ECS

The post AWS Re:Invent 2017: More announcements coming. appeared first on Cloudar.

The second ‘real’ Re:Invent day started with a keynote from Werner Vogels (did you notice his Alice in Chains t-shirt?) and another batch of announcements.

A full overview of all the new services can be found via https://aws.amazon.com/new/reinvent/, but we noticed a few trends:

Trend 1: Serverless architecture

The announcement of the ECS Registry and the new ECS CLI with Docker Compose support shows that AWS wants to support customers with the containerisation of their apps, however, when Werner said “No server is as good as no server“, we knew the direction his keynote was heading.

“No server is easier to manage then NO server”, @werner#reinvent pic.twitter.com/LKccX3svd9

— Mark Nunnikhoven (@marknca) October 8, 2015

So we got a lot of improvements for Lambda (we found even more new features in the blog posts): Python support, versioning of functions, scheduled jobs (bye bye cron jobs), … and new ways to use them with Mobile Devices and IoT devices.

Trend 2: Enabling developpers

Aside from launching all these awesome services, AWS is also putting more focus on getting people started with them. The first example of this was the AWS Mobile Hub, which allows developers to create a sample application with a few clicks (batteries included). We’ve tried this out and we are impressed. It took more time to download the Android SDK than to create an app with Facebook Authentication (backed by AWS Cognito), Mobile Analytics (including tracking of monetisation and custom events) and even functions running in the cloud (with Lambda).

The IoT announcement also fits into this category. No need to figure out how to make (embedded) devices communicate in a reliable and scalable manner, just let AWS do the heavy lifting.

Sessions

There are a lot of breakout sessions, and it’s not possible to attend them all, but there are already a few sessions on youtube and we will catch up with all the sessions we missed once they’re online.

Networking

Re:Invent is more than a bunch of announcements, it is also the perfect place to meet with vendors; clients and other AWS users. There is a big Expo Hall, but we also took our own advice and made appointments to have some private meetings with partners &customers, so we could discuss our use cases more in depth. More informal networking was possible at the Re:Play party, were they even containerised the party:

Amazon containerized the party! #replay #reinvent pic.twitter.com/I7iFgJD9l7

— Mahesh Ramchandani (@m_sharp) October 9, 2015

The post AWS Re:Invent 2015: Day #4: More announcements. appeared first on Cloudar.

As there’s really too much going on at AWS re:Invent to blog about everything, we’ll try to highlight the most import stuff of the day.

re:Invent keynote with Andy Jassy

A fully packed conference room with about 19000 AWS ninja’s and/or customers…. WOW!
Andy Jassy gave us an insight in the new AWS growth metrics: $7.3 billion in annual revenue which is way more than the $5.97 billion figure provided in Amazon’s most recent earnings statement. I guess we could say, things are going just fine at AWS :-).
For two hours Jassy was able to keep attention among attendees and made several product and other announcements.
We’ll highlight the new announcements in a moment, but allow us to say that we were a little bit disappointed that there was no announcement about the public availability of the long awaited Elastic File System (EFS). But hey, wait a minute … tomorrow there’s another Keynote presented by dr. Werner Vogels, I guess there will be more announcements to come.
 
For those of you want to watch the complete keynote; Check it out below!
 

 

New Services and Features Announcements

(product info taken from https://aws.amazon.com/new/reinvent/)
 

Amazon QuickSight (Preview)

Amazon QuickSight is a very fast, cloud-powered business intelligence (BI) service that makes it easy to build visualizations, perform ad-hoc analysis, and quickly get business insights from your data. Amazon QuickSight uses a new, Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine (“SPICE”) to perform advanced calculations and render visualizations rapidly. Amazon QuickSight integrates with AWS data services, enables organizations to scale to hundreds of thousands of users, and delivers fast and responsive query performance via SPICE’s query engine.

Amazon Kinesis Firehose

Amazon Kinesis Firehose is the easiest way to load streaming data into AWS. It can capture and automatically load streaming data into Amazon S3 and Amazon Redshift, enabling near real-time analytics with existing business intelligence tools and dashboards you’re already using today. It is a fully managed service that automatically scales to match the throughput of your data and requires no ongoing administration.

Amazon Elasticsearch Service

Amazon Elasticsearch Service is a managed service that makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale Elasticsearch on AWS. Elasticsearch is a popular open-source search and analytics engine for use cases such as log analytics, real-time application monitoring, and click stream analytics. With Amazon Elasticsearch Service, you get direct access to the Elasticsearch open-source API so that code and applications you’re already using with your existing Elasticsearch environments will work seamlessly.

Amazon Kinesis Streams Extended Retention

Amazon Kinesis, which we are now calling Amazon Kinesis Streams, stores incoming data for a period of 24 hours by default. Amazon Kinesis Streams can now retain your streaming data for up to 7 days. You can dynamically configure the data retention time period from the Amazon Kinesis console. For more information about extended data retention, visit Changing Data Retention Period. For extended data retention pricing, visit Amazon Kinesis Pricing.

AWS Database Migration Service (Preview)

AWS Database Migration Service helps you migrate databases to AWS easily and securely. With AWS Database Migration Service, the source database remains fully operational during the migration, minimizing downtime to applications that rely on the database. The AWS Database Migration Service can migrate your data to and from all widely used commercial and open-source databases. The service supports homogenous migrations such as Oracle to Oracle, as well as heterogeneous migrations between different database platforms, such as Oracle to Amazon Aurora or Microsoft SQL Server to MySQL. To help make heterogeneous migrations easier, the AWS Database Migration Service includes a Schema Conversion Tool that converts the source database schema and code, including views, stored procedures, and functions, to a format compatible with the target database. Any code that cannot be automatically converted gets clearly marked to help you identify where manual re-coding is required.

Amazon RDS for MariaDB

Amazon RDS makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale MariaDB deployments in the cloud. With Amazon RDS, you can deploy scalable MariaDB databases in minutes with cost-efficient and resizable hardware capacity. Amazon RDS frees you up to focus on your application by managing time-consuming database administration tasks including backups, software patching, monitoring, scaling, and replication.

Amazon Aurora Now Available in AWS Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Region

Amazon Aurora is now available to customers in AWS Asia Pacific (Tokyo) region. Amazon Aurora is a MySQL-compatible relational database management system (RDBMS) that combines the speed and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases. Amazon Aurora provides up to five times better performance than MySQL at a price point one tenth that of a commercial RDBMS while delivering similar performance and availability.

AWS Import/Export Snowball

AWS Import/Export Snowball (Snowball) is a petabyte-scale data transport solution that uses secure appliances to transfer large amounts of data into and out of AWS. Using Snowball addresses common challenges with large-scale data transfers including high network costs, long transfer times, and security concerns. Transferring data with Snowball is simple, fast, secure, and can be as little as one-fifth the cost of high-speed Internet.

AWS WAF

AWS WAF is a web application firewall that helps protect your web applications from common web exploits that could affect application availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources. AWS WAF gives you control over which traffic to allow or block to your web application by defining customizable web security rules. You can use AWS WAF to create custom rules that block common attack patterns, such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting, and rules that are designed for your specific application. New rules can be deployed within minutes, letting you respond quickly to changing traffic patterns. Also, AWS WAF includes a full-featured API that you can use to automate the creation, deployment, and maintenance of web security rules.

Amazon Inspector (Preview)

Amazon Inspector is an automated security assessment service that helps improve the security and compliance of applications deployed on AWS. Amazon Inspector automatically assesses applications for vulnerabilities or deviations from best practices. After performing an assessment, Amazon Inspector produces a detailed report with prioritized steps for remediation. To help you get started quickly, Amazon Inspector includes a knowledge base of hundreds of rules mapped to common security compliance standards (e.g. PCI DSS) and vulnerability definitions. Examples of built-in rules include checking for remote root login being enabled, or vulnerable software versions installed. These rules are regularly updated by AWS security researchers.

Amazon EC2 Dedicated Hosts (coming soon)

An Amazon EC2 Dedicated Host is a physical server with EC2 instance capacity fully dedicated to your use. Dedicated Hosts can help you address compliance requirements and reduce costs by allowing you to use your existing server-bound software licenses. Dedicated Hosts gives you additional visibility and control over how instances are placed on a physical server, and you can continually use the same physical server over time. As a result, Dedicated Hosts enable you to use your existing server-bound software licenses and address corporate compliance and regulatory requirements.

AWS Config Rules (Preview)

AWS Config Rules is a new set of cloud governance capabilities that allow IT Administrators to define best practices for provisioning and configuring AWS resources and then continuously monitor compliance with those guidelines. AWS Config Rules lets you choose from a set of pre-built rules based on common AWS best practices or custom rules that you define. AWS Config Rules helps you ensure compliance through continuous monitoring and provides a new dashboard to track compliance status. Using Config Rules, an IT Administrator can quickly determine when and how a resource went out of compliance.

Amazon Web Services & Accenture: A Partnership in the Cloud

Amazon’s joint venture with Accenture, the world’s largest consulting firm now gives AWS the opportunity to compete with legacy heavyweights like IBM & HP. AWS and Accenture will invest heavily the following years, including training of 1500 (!) people in the first year.
To be honest, we are not really sure what to think of this alliance yet, but I guess time will tell ….
To learn more about this new partnership announcement, just download the brochure here
 

Pub Crawl

Do we really need to say more about this? 🙂

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