AWS Week In Review: March 13 2018
Here’s your weekly breakdown of all things AWS…
Amazon Systems Manager Supports Chef InSpec
Amazon further commits to its Configuration Management service, “Amazon Systems Manager”, by extending its capabilities to include Chef’s InSpec tool. InSpec uses a declarative syntax like another tool in this family, ServerSpec, but comes packaged with features geared towards compliance and governance reporting. I like the commitment that Amazon has shown with their Systems Manager service and the direction they’ve heading. At some point soon, I’ll write a post doing a deeper dive into Amazon Systems Manager and all the things it can do like Zero-Day Patching, Secret Credential Management, and more.
Expanded Health Checks for ECS Tasks and Containers
ECS tasks, services, and their sidecar containers could only be checked for healthiness by either (1) ELB health check which requires an exposed port or (2) self-monitoring and then “self-terminating” the running task.
Now, ECS expanded their feature set to support Docker container health checks. Groups of containers acting as a single task can now be better monitored for healthiness and allows operators greater control over setting parameters on internal state to describe healthiness.
Amazon Drops Prices for Educational Institutions
Imagine a world where students enter the workforce already familiar with AWS and the services it provides. I think Amazon may already be imagining that which is why they are dropping Amazon Workspace pricing by 14% for qualified Educational Institutions.
Serverless VOD
Do you want to transcode up to 4k quality video and distribute it to customers with a few button clicks in the AWS console? Of course, you do.
Off-Load Your Post-Production and Editing Workflows to AWS
What I must imagine is how Amazon Studios edits their content, 100% cloud-based video editing was promoted this week. Is this the future of video editing? I hope so because the compute and storage demands of video editing are getting greater and greater. I think it will all come down to what the experience to the person editing the content will be. Editing video is such an intimate, audio-visual experience that the response-time has to be like butter to be effective. Amazon promotes “Teradici’s PC-over-IP” technology as the answer to that concern. Workstations-on-the-cloud seem to to have already arrived. Game development is probably not too far behind…
Other Notables
- MySQL Compatible Aurora is now available in the Singapore Region
- Get Your PI System Data Streaming to S3 With a New Quick Start Deployment
- Users of AWS Service Catalog Can Now Set Auto-Tags
- Gluon Support Available for Amazon’s Developer-Focused Smart Camera
- Amazon’s Conferencing Service, Chime, Gets a Pricing Overhaul
