Last Month at AWS: September Edition

Regular readers of this monthly round-up of all that’s new and exciting in the AWS ecosystem will know that the platform never seems to stop launching new tools, enhancing others and continuously making tweaks to its numerous service offerings. September was (once again) another busy month where the constant flow of breaking news was eye-spinning for those of us that engage with AWS daily.

As an advanced consulting partner, our technical expertise with AWS products and tools is a key part of what we can bring to the table in terms of digital engineering solutions. This is more than a partnership to Apexon, and we are constantly learning more about the lengths that AWS will go to ensure that cloud operations are not only simplified but also give customers a competitive edge.

With that in mind, the AWS Partner Team has kept its finger on the pulse, noting that AWS has made some significant announcements in the Security, Monitoring, Backup and Kubernetes spaces. The general availability of Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) was a particular highlight, but we were also pleased to see updates related to AWS CloudTrail, AWS QuickSight, AWS IoT Device Defender and AWS Backup.

All of these are covered in more detail below, but we hope that our curated picks will show you, importantly, where Apexon can help you on your digital and cloud journey.

AWS Releases Amazon EKS Anywhere into General Availability

Posted On: September 8, 2021

We are excited to announce the general availability of Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) Anywhere, a new deployment option for Amazon EKS that allows customers to create and operate Kubernetes clusters on customer-managed infrastructure, supported by AWS. Customers can now run Amazon EKS Anywhere on their own on-premises infrastructure using VMware vSphere starting today, with support for other deployment targets in the near future, including support for bare metal coming in 2022.

You can read the full announcement here.

Why It Matters

Security remains the main concern of every company that is considering or in the process of a cloud migration. Unsurprisingly, organizations want to store and process their and, by association, the customer’s data in a highly secure manner.

As cloud platforms are under the watchful eye of Managed Service Providers such as Apexon, security is (and always will be) a key area. Amazon EKS Anywhere allows companies to host and operate their Kubernetes clusters on-premises infrastructure using VMware, while still being supported by AWS in terms of cluster management automation and maintenance.

Additions to Amazon CloudWatch Application Insights

Posted On: September 16, 2021

Setting up monitoring and managing the health of your business applications is now even easier with the ability to discover the applications and resources in your account even without a Resource Group, automatically set up monitoring for them and see their health at a glance in a summary health dashboard presented when you complete setup or open CloudWatch Application Insights.

CloudWatch Application Insights is a service that helps customers easily setup monitoring and troubleshoot their enterprise applications running on AWS resources. The new feature makes setting up monitoring for all the resources in your account a truly one step process.

Full details of these additions can be found here.

Why It Matters

Organizations are always keen to evaluate the health of their applications and infrastructure in real time, allowing them to not only react to any problems but also resolve them as soon as possible, preferably without any impact on customer satisfaction or experience.

With these newly introduced CloudWatch Application Insights, organizations can now monitor all their application workloads on AWS. This allows them to set up the required metrics, logs and alerts, while continuously analysing the generated data for issues or potential problems (including the root cause) via advanced AI/ML techniques.

By accessing this feature, Apexon can now help its customers by setting up a robust and real-time monitoring solution, providing a single view of all the customer applications and AWS resources being used, their health and performance, and any potential concerns.

Amazon QuickSight Launches Dataset-as-a-Source

Posted On: September 17, 2021

Amazon QuickSight announced Dataset-as-a-Source, a new feature that saves customers time and improves data governance. Dataset-as-a-Source allows users to create a new dataset using one or more existing datasets as input, and combine it with brand new data sources, such as other databases, CSV (Computer Systems Validation) files, and apps like Twitter.

Full details of this launch are here.

Why It Matters

As data becomes a valuable commodity, accurately analyzing the generated information is critical to any business optimization strategy.

With that in mind, AWS QuickSight helps customers make smarter data-driven decisions. The tool enables organizations to create and analyze data visualizations and extract easy-to-understand insights. The dashboards can be seamlessly embedded into many applications, portals, and websites.

Apexon’s digital engineers are very conscious that this is a data-driven world, so any solution or resource that can make the process of analyzing datasets more time effective and improves governance is always on our radar. The introduction of Dataset-as-a-Source is one more tool that makes the process of getting the right actionable insights at the right time easier to manage.

Amazon DynamoDB; Audit Logging

Posted on September 22, 2021

You now can use AWS CloudTrail to filter and retrieve Amazon DynamoDB Streams data-plane API activity, giving you more granular control over which DynamoDB API calls you want to selectively log and pay for in CloudTrail and to help address compliance and auditing requirements.

You can read the full announcement here.

Why It Matters

To comply with different audit and compliance requirements, organizations need to log and store certain critical activities in their AWS infrastructure. AWS CloudTrail helps in the auditing and compliance needs of companies and logs almost everything in AWS.

With this latest enhancement to the tool, AWS CloudTrail can now filter and log the Amazon DynamoDB Streams data-plane activity. This provides the customer with control over which API calls they want to log and, crucially, pay for just those API Calls.

Apexon is always looking to prioritize cost optimization, so this announcement will help our AWS customers log, store, and process the critical and relevant events and logs for achieving auditing and compliance needs.

AWS IoT Device Defender: Alarm Verification States

Posted On: September 24, 2021

With AWS IoT Device Defender, customers can now verify an alarm based on their investigation of detected behavior anomalies. They can verify an alarm as True positive, Benign positive, False positive, or Unknown and provide a description of their verification. Users, such as a security or operational team, can use this to manage alarms and improve response time.

Learn more about this verification upgrade here.

Why It Matters

Securing a fleet of IoT devices is particularly important and AWS IoT Device Defender continuously makes an effort to audit IoT configurations to make sure that they aren’t deviating from security best practices.

With this new feature of supporting detect alarm verification states, Apexon customers can verify the alarms that are triggered and drastically improve the response time.

AWS Backup Simplifies Recovery Point Deletions

Posted On: September 27, 2021

AWS Backup now makes it easier to delete recovery points that customers no longer need. Customers can use the new asynchronous delete operation from the console, CLI (Command Line Interface) or APIs, to clean up existing recovery points in bulk and manage their backups more cost-effectively.

This capability is available in all the AWS Regions where AWS Backup is supported. See the AWS Region Table for more information. AWS Backup centralizes and automates data protection across AWS services with compliance auditing and reporting capabilities for your business and regulatory needs.

Why It Matters

Backup always plays a significant role for any organization, especially in the event of any unforeseen failures like outages or disasters. AWS Backup helps companies centrally manage backups, both for on-premise and cloud-based resources.

By providing customers with the ability to remove the recovery points that have become obsolete, AWS is ensuring that cost optimization remains a focal point.

To learn more about AWS Backup, you can visit the product page and take a deeper dive into the documentation. Alternatively, you can talk to one of Apexon’s dedicated cloud professionals to get started with AWS Backup.

To find out how Apexon can ensure that your digital transformation and cloud migration are done right, first time and every time, please fill out the form below.