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• Ryan Lucas (@ryron01) fills in for Peter as we review the latest batch of cloud news. AWS re:Invent 2019 is just a month away and there’s no shortage of announcements this week either. 

This week’s highlights

• AWS re:Invent 2019 session catalog is live. If you haven’t gotten into the panels you want, you’ll have to get on a waitlist. We’re also considering a podcast meetup! Please let us know if you’d be up for that. Reach out on Twitter or through the contact form. 
• Look at migrating from Oracle. It may take some time and effort to accomplish, but the savings Amazon’s had are results that bear an attempt at repeating.
• You might be in luck if you have an open-source project. AWS is offering promotional credits to promote certain open-source work.
  Amazon completes massive migrations from Oracle After moving 75 petabytes of data involving 100+ teams, Amazon has finished migrating the last database of their first-party programs from Oracle to AWS services. The slashes in operational costs and latency may have the Amazon teams happy, but Oracle will definitely be watching to see if their other customers will be tempted to follow suit. A 90 percent reduction in cost would be an enticing prospect to switch providers of any service, and half the latency is nothing to sneeze at either.

  Amazon looks to be taking some of those savings and turning them right back around into more projects. Of note, they will be offering promotional credits to those working on open-source projects, especially if you are working in Rust. If you manage to get a whole year of funding through Amazon that will mean more time working on what you really care about and less trying to keep the grants coming in every quarter or, worse, every month.

  Rounding out AWS news, we discussed four other stories:

  1. VPC security groups come to Firewall Manager. Finally. You’d think this would be included day one, but at least it’s here now. Maybe soon it’ll be updated to include federated access?
  2. New M5n/R5n EC2 instances will offer up to 100 Gbps networking speeds. If you need to move around larger sets for machine learning, for instance, the price is reasonable.
  3. EC2 instances will also be available in Arm-based bare metal form. The bare metal probably won’t grant much of an efficiency edge anymore, but hey, maybe it will help meet especially strict compliances.
  4. AWS announced that  another 18services have been FedRAMP authorized. If you’re working in the federal government, you now have a total of 48 AWS services available to you. The announcement comes off the back of Oracle gaining FedRAMP authorization for a handful of services. Way to laugh in Oracle’s face, AWS!

  Google offers new cloud architecture trainings 

  In an effort to meet user needs, Google Cloud is offering two architecting training paths, available on-demand or in a classroom setting. One class focuses on Compute Engine, the other concentrates on Google Kubernetes Engine. It’s interesting that Google has split this off into an either/or — both are important to know. 

  Google announces beta for new security measures for cloud infrastructure 

  A new feature called Security Health Analyticsaims to give even non-security personnel the ability to see an overview of misconfigurations and whether or not compliances and benchmarks are being met. An ounce of prevention may be worth a pound of detection and remediation, but it still has its place. Hopefully you’ll have set yourself up not to need this, but as an extra tool it’s still good to have.

  Azure and CIS partner to offer security guidance

  Microsoft and the Center for Internet Security are soliciting feedback on v1.0.0 of their new benchmark. So if you disagree with anything currently showing in your Azure Security Center, now is the time to get your voice heard. Otherwise, expect to see CIS’s best practices factor into benchmarks for Azure Security Center soon, with the inputs of everyone who does choose to participate. Hopefully implementing the new benchmarks won’t break your application!

  Azure Monitor’s Application Insights adds new application types

  Microsoft Azure announced the release of the Application Insights for ASP.NET Core 2.8.0 for web applications and the Application Insights for .NET Core Worker Service 2.8.0 for non-web applications. Particularly noteworthy is that the new Event Counters allow you to observe new metrics, including Allocation Rate and others. The Event Counters are also cross-platform. 

  The lightning round this week

  “Wait, didn’t we already have that? ” was the refrain as we hit the headlines. 

  Shouldn’t we already be able to see details about our billing from Amazon RDS? Didn’t Amazon GuardDuty already detect these threats? What do you mean I couldn’t already set environment variables on CodeBuild build jobs? Didn’t Amazon QuickSight already have Analytical Capabilities? As the industry pushes out product and project one after the next, we’re left with some jarring reminders of all the catch-up there is left to play afterward.

  Other headlines discussed:

  • Amazon ECS adds support for G4 Instance types
  • Amazon ElastiCache launches self-service updates for Memcached and Redis Cache Clusters
  • Amazon Inspector adds CIS Benchmark support for Windows 2016
  • AWS Console Mobile Application Launches Federated Login for iOS
  • Amazon ECS now Supports ECS Image SHA Tracking
  • Amazon API Gateway now supports access logging to Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose
  • Amazon Redshift Improves Performance of Inter-Region Snapshot Transfers
  • New Digital Course on Coursera – AWS Fundamentals: Migrating to the Cloud