Last Month at AWS: October Edition

The “new normal” may be at risk of becoming overused as a way to refer to the post-pandemic world, but there is little doubt that the required shift towards digital transformation that the health crisis sparked has seen increased demand for cloud migration.

Top of the list are (as ever) a requirement for effective security and enhancements to existing cloud solutions or services. With more than 15 years of experience under its belt, AWS is often able to tap into what its customers and partners need, continually improving its offerings and introducing new features.

Although there is a good chance that AWS is keeping some of its visions for the future of the cloud under wraps until AWS re:invent 2021, the company has maintained its regular cadence of enhancements and announcements.

Apexon will be attending this event in person, and it goes without saying that we are looking forward to not only being in Las Vegas, but also finding out what AWS has up its sleeve for 2022 and beyond. You can find out where we will be, how to book a meeting and why we deliver the true value of the AWS Cloud in this dedicated webpage.

Before we get ready for Nevada in November, however, we have a few AWS announcements from last month to share. As ever, the AWS Partner Team has kept a straight bat and its eye on the ball, with the curated picks below all highlighting what we think matters to your cloud and digital journey.

New AWS Solutions Implementation: Automated Account Configuration 

Posted On: Oct 12, 2021

Automated Account Configuration helps you automate operational processes in an efficient, error-free, standardized and consistent way, to ensure that your AWS accounts are set up properly and with the necessary resources to meet your business and production needs. You can use the solutions implementation to configure and deploy the following business critical services:

• AWS Backup to centrally managed the backups of AWS services including Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon RDS, and Amazon EFS.
• AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager to automate the patching of managed instances such as EC2 instances.

You can read the full announcement here.

Why It Matters

Apexon leverages AWS Solutions Implementations to help its customers both target common problems and build solutions quickly. All these available tools are examined by AWS architects and are designed to be reliable, secure, and cost-efficient.

In this case, for example, the key features that come with the Automated Account Configuration include the ability to set up operational processes that can be integrated as templates or frameworks for tasks that are essential for the continued business requirements of the company.

Introducing AWS Migration Hub Strategy Recommendations 

Posted On: Oct 25, 2021

AWS Migration Hub now helps you easily build a migration and modernization strategy for your applications running on-premises or in AWS. The new Strategy Recommendations feature is the ideal starting point to begin your transformation journey delivering prescriptive guidance on the optimal strategy and tools to help you migrate and modernize at scale.

Strategy Recommendations automates the manual process of analyzing each running application, its process dependencies and technical complexity to reduce the time and effort spent on planning application migration and modernization, and accelerate your business transformation on AWS.

You can read the full announcement here.

Why It Matters

This new offering is one that Apexon can use for a variety of clients and solutions. Simply put, the AWS Strategy Recommendations feature evaluates a customer’s applications to determine runtime environment and process dependencies, optionally analyses source code and DB, and more. All of this comes without any additional cost.

The data collected from the analysis is assessed against a set of business objectives that you set – for example, speed of migration, reducing operational overhead from using managed services, or modernizing infrastructure using cloud-native technologies. Once this is completed, the tool provides recommendations of feasible paths to migrate and modernize your application.

You can learn more about how this new offering can make a difference in a recent AWS blog post.

Announcing Amazon RDS Custom for Oracle 

Posted On: Oct 26, 2021

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) Custom is a managed database service for legacy, custom, and packaged applications that require access to the underlying OS and DB environment. Amazon RDS Custom is now available for the Oracle database engine.

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.

You can read the full announcement here.

Why It Matters

Today most digital organizations are opting for Amazon RDS to run their database workloads, mainly because it removes the overhead of not only maintaining and updating the database but also its underlying OS.

However, some industries such as healthcare, banking and hospitality are still running legacy Oracle applications, which require them to make customizations to the database and the OS. As Amazon RDS was not able cater to this requirement, organizations were bound to host their application databases either on-premises or on EC2s.

With this announcement of Amazon RDS Custom for Oracle, database admins can now access and perform the maintenance tasks such as backups, upgrade and  underlying OS patching.

With our expertise in database migration and administration, Apexon can help its customers to migrate the legacy applications to the AWS RDS Custom for Oracle offering. In addition, we can perform database and OS maintenance tasks as well, thanks to the model of shared responsibility that this feature now offers

Amazon Connect Chat adds Real-time Message Streaming APIs 

 Posted On: Oct 29, 2021

Amazon Connect Chat now provides new APIs that allow you to create customized experiences for your customers by enabling you to subscribe to a real-time stream of chat messages.

Using the new APIs, you can integrate Amazon Connect Chat with SMS solutions and third party messaging applications (e.g., Facebook Messenger, Twitter), enable mobile push notifications, and create analytics dashboards to monitor and track chat message activity. Messages are published via Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), and can be set up in a couple of clicks by going to the Amazon SNS console and creating a new SNS topic.

You can read the full announcement here.

Why It Matters

With this new feature, you are now able to build integrations with SMS and third-party services by subscribing to the real-time stream of chat messages.

In addition to the Amazon Connect Chat WebSocket connection, these APIs expose a webhook endpoint to allow the subscription of these messages so you can send communications back and forth between these third-party platforms. This feature also enables organizations to deliver push notifications to their customer devices and do real-time analytics on all these chat messages.

Apexon can help its customers create a robust and customised cloud contact centre for their end users leveraging these new real-time messaging APIs of the Amazon Connect Chat tool.

Apexon’s Advanced Consulting partnership with AWS allows our digital engineers to leverage technical expertise and knowledge to deliver solutions to the toughest cloud challenges. To find out how we can move you into or further along your cloud journey, fill out the form below.