New Features and Benefits with AWS

Apps Associates prides itself on being a trusted partner for the management of critical business needs, providing strategic consulting and managed services for Oracle, Salesforce, integration, analytics and multi-cloud infrastructure.  As such we wanted to share the latest features, functionality and benefits of AWS with you. Please see highlights below.

EC2

Amazon EC2 now supports sharing Amazon Machine Images across AWS Organizations and Organizational Units – Previously, you could share AMIs only with specific AWS account IDs. To share AMIs with AWS Organizations, you had to explicitly manage sharing of AMIs with AWS accounts that were added to or removed from AWS Organizations. With this new feature, you no longer have to update your AMI permissions because of organizational changes.

Amazon EC2 now supports access to Red Hat Knowledgebase – Starting today, customers running subscription included Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Amazon EC2 can seamlessly access Red Hat Knowledgebase at no additional cost. The Knowledgebase is a library of articles, frequently asked questions (FAQs), and best-practice guides to help customers solve technical issues.

Introducing Amazon EC2 C6i instances – C6i instances are powered by 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code named Ice Lake) with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.5 GHz, offer up to 15% better compute price performance over C5 instances for a wide variety of workloads, and always-on memory encryption using Intel Total Memory Encryption (TME).  C6i instances provide a new instance size (c6i.32xlarge) with 128 vCPUs and 256 GiB of memory, 33% more than the largest C5 instance. They also provide up to 9% higher memory bandwidth per vCPU compared to C5 instances. C6i also give customers up to 50 Gbps of networking speed and 40 Gbps of bandwidth to the Amazon Elastic Block Store, twice that of C5 instances. Customers can use Elastic Fabric Adapter on the 32xlarge size, which enables low latency and highly scalable inter-node communication.

Introducing Amazon EC2 R6i instances – R6i instances are powered by 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code named Ice Lake) with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.5 GHz, offer up to 15% better compute price performance over R5 instances, and always-on memory encryption using Intel Total Memory Encryption (TME). R6i instances provide two new sizes (32xlarge and metal) with 128 vCPUs and 1,024 GiB of memory, 33% more than the largest R5 instance. They also provide up to 20% higher memory bandwidth per vCPU compared to R5 instances. R6i give customers up to 50 Gbps of networking speed and 40 Gbps of bandwidth to the Amazon Elastic Block Store, 2x that of R5 instances. Customers can use Elastic Fabric Adapter on the 32xlarge and metal sizes, which enables low latency and highly scalable inter-node communication.

RDS

Announcing Amazon RDS Custom for Oracle – Amazon RDS Custom for Oracle automates setup, operation, and scaling of databases in the cloud while granting access to the database and underlying operating system to configure settings, install patches, and enable native features to meet the dependent application’s requirements.

Announcing Amazon RDS Custom for SQL Server – Amazon RDS Custom is now available for the SQL Server database engine. Amazon RDS Custom for SQL Server automates setup, operation, and scaling of databases in the cloud while granting access to the database and underlying operating system to configure settings, install drivers, and enable native features to meet the dependent application’s requirements.

Storage

Amazon EBS Snapshots introduces a new tier, Amazon EBS Snapshots Archive, to reduce the cost of long-term retention of EBS Snapshots by up to 75% – EBS Snapshots Archive, a new tier for EBS Snapshots, to save up to 75% on storage costs for EBS Snapshots that you intend to retain for more than 90 days and rarely access.  You might have snapshots that you access every few months or years and do not need fast access to data, such as snapshots created at the end of a project or snapshots that need to be retained long-term for regulatory reasons. For such use cases, you can now use EBS Snapshots Archive to store full, point-in-time snapshots at a storage cost of $0.0125/GB-month*. Snapshots in the archive tier have a minimum retention period of 90 days. Retrievals from the archive tier will incur a charge of $0.03/GB* of data transferred.

Recover from accidental deletions of your snapshots using Recycle Bin – Recycle Bin for EBS Snapshots to recover from accidental snapshot deletions to meet your business continuity needs. Previously, if you accidentally deleted a snapshot, you would have to roll back to a snapshot from an earlier point in time, increasing your recovery point objective. With Recycle Bin, you can specify a retention time period and recover a deleted snapshot before the expiration of the retention period. A recovered snapshot retains its attributes such as tags, permissions, and encryption status, which it had prior to deletion, and can be used immediately for creating volumes. Snapshots that are not recovered from the Recycle Bin are permanently deleted upon expiration of the retention time.

Amazon S3 Glacier storage class is now Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval; storage price reduced by 10% and bulk retrievals are now free – The Amazon S3 Glacier storage class is now named Amazon S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval, and now includes free bulk retrievals in addition to a 10% price reduction, making it optimized for use cases such as backup and disaster recovery. S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval is now even more cost-effective, and the free bulk retrievals make it ideal for when you need to retrieve large data sets once or twice per year and do not want to worry about the retrieval cost.

Announcing the new Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval storage class – the lowest cost archive storage with milliseconds retrieval – With S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval, you can save up to 68% on storage costs compared to using the S3 Standard-Infrequent Access storage class, when your data is accessed once per quarter. S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval delivers the fastest access to archive storage, with the same throughput and milliseconds access as the S3 Standard and S3 Standard-IA storage classes.

Networking

Network Load Balancer now supports TLS 1.3 – Network Load Balancer (NLB) now supports version 1.3 of the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol, enabling you to optimize the performance of your backend application servers while helping to keep your workloads secure. TLS 1.3 on NLB works by offloading encryption and decryption of TLS traffic from your application servers to the load balancer, and provides encryption all the way to your targets.

AWS Network Firewall is now SOC compliant -AWS Network Firewall is now SOC 1, SOC 2, and SOC 3 compliant. You can now use AWS Network Firewall for use cases that are subject to System and Organization Controls (SOC) reporting. AWS SOC reports are independent third-party examination reports that demonstrate how AWS achieves key compliance controls and objectives.

AWS price reduction for data transfers out to the internet – Each month, the first terabyte of data transfer out of Amazon Cloudfront, the first 10 million HTTP/S requests, and the first 2 million CloudFront Functions invocations will be free. Free data transfer out of CloudFront is no longer limited to the first 12 months. In addition, the first 100 gigabytes per month of data transfer out from all AWS Regions (except China and GovCoud) will be free.

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) announces Network Access Analyzer to help you easily identify unintended network access – Amazon VPC Network Access Analyzer is a new feature that enables you to identify unintended network access to your resources on AWS. Using Network Access Analyzer, you can verify whether network access for your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) resources meets your security and compliance guidelines. With Network Access Analyzer, you can assess and identify improvements to your cloud security posture. Additionally, Network Access Analyzer makes it easier for you to demonstrate that your network meets certain regulatory requirements.

AWS Transit Gateway introduces intra-region peering for simplified cloud operations and network connectivity – AWS Transit Gateway supports intra-region peering, giving you the ability to establish peering connections between multiple Transit Gateways in the same AWS Region. With this change, different units in your organization can deploy their own Transit Gateways, and easily interconnect them resulting in less administrative overhead and greater autonomy of operation.

Introducing AWS Cloud WAN Preview – With Cloud WAN, you use a central dashboard and network policies to create a global network that spans multiple locations and networks—eliminating the need to configure and manage different networks individually using different technologies. Your network policies can be used to specify which of your Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) and on-premises locations you wish to connect through AWS VPN or third-party software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) products, and the Cloud WAN central dashboard generates a complete view of the network to monitor network health, security, and performance. 

Console/General/Internal

Amazon EC2 now offers Global View on the console to view all resources across regions together – Global View provides visibility to all your resources in a single pane of glass across AWS regions. It helps monitor resource counts, notice abnormalities sooner rather than later, and find stray resources.

AWS Transit Gateway Network Manager launches new APIs to simplify network and route analysis in your global network – AWS Transit Gateway Network Manager launched new APIs that enable you to perform automated analysis of your global network and allow you to build your own topological views for visualization purposes. You can get an aggregated view of your global network resources, analyze routes, and retrieve telemetry data across AWS regions.

–     Michael Foret: VP Infrastructure/Cloud Services

About Apps Associates

Apps Associates provides services for all things Oracle on AWS. Our team manages the entire AWS environment, enabling significant cost savings, increased agility, and zero business disruption or downtime.  Apps’ technical teams provide expert AWS consulting throughout the entire migration and post-migration process. From Dev Ops, to Managed Services we have you covered.

For Dev Ops Services, we provide expertise in CI/CD, Jenkins, GitHub, Ansible, Python, Terraform, and AWS Cloud formation. AWS components are built/managed by automation with custom Shell / Python code to automate the deployment. We can customize the deployment process based on the application structure and stack, and we can reuse scripts and codes to ensure effective utilization of resources and time.

Our Managed Services is based on our next generation monitoring platform that uses statistical and Machine Learning algorithms to reduce alarm fatigue and focus attention on real issues that need attention.  Staffed by AWS certified engineers, our managed services teams are ready to support you anytime, all the time.  Consider letting us manage your Oracle/AWS systems in the cloud.

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