With the endless flood of new products, features and changes from AWS and its surrounding ecosystem, it can be easy to miss an update. Our monthly round up highlights major AWS news, announcements, product updates and behind the scenes changes we think are most relevant.

CloudFormation Updates!

Every so often Amazon releases updates that make the lives of developers everywhere easier. In September, Amazon released some updates to CloudFormation. The following updates are now available in all AWS and GovCloud regions, and developers everywhere can rejoice! Here are a few I found really exciting:

• Suspend and resume automatic scaling in Amazon EC2 Autoscaling.
• Specify server side encryption in Amazon DynamoDB tables.
• Specify CPU options for the instance and an identifier for an AWS KMS Customer Master Key,; under which an Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume is encrypted for Amazon EC2 instances.
• Specify an Amazon ECS task group for the task, the launch type on which your task is running, the VPC subnets and security groups associated with the task and whether a public IP address is to be used, and the platform version for the task for Amazon CloudWatch Events Rules.
• Specify a description for the role and a list of tags that are attached to the specified role in AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles.
• Specify the AWS IAM roles associated with the database instance, the type of restore to be performed, the identifier of the source database cluster from which to restore and whether to restore the database cluster to the latest restorable backup time for Amazon RDS database clusters.
• Specify the AWS IAM roles associated with the database instance in Amazon RDS DB Instance.

This announcement can be found here: AWS CloudFormation updates for Amazon EC2, Amazon ECS, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon ElasticSearch, and more

Amazon EKS Updates!

 Amazon EKS now supports Kubernetes version 1.14. With Kubernetes constantly evolving and moving forward, being able to use a version from this year is exciting. While Kubernetes is rapidly evolving, it can be a monumental task to stay up to date and support the newest version set to release this month, but having a newer version is definitely a welcome sight.

Amazon supports their three most recent releases (Amazon’s, not Kubernetes). Because of this, 1.11 will be deprecated and no longer supported on Nov. 4th, so 1.11 clusters will no longer be able to be created. The supported versions of Kubernetes will then become 1.12, 1.13 and 1.14.

 More information on their announcement here: Amazon EKS now supports Kubernetes version 1.14

 Money! Money! Money!

Everyone loves saving money. We here at Rhythmic are no exception. Another announcement is the Amazon EFS price reduction for Infrequent Access storage. The costs being reduced by 44 percent for EFS IA. This begins Sep. 1, so be prepared to have a little more change in your wallet and rejoice! This cost change will be dependant on region, of course, but this announcement does affect the U.S. East region. The have updated their pricing chart, and more information can be found here: Announcing Amazon EFS price reduction for Infrequent Access storage

Miscellaneous News:

Amazon EKS Now Supports the EBS CSI Driver – The in-tree EBS plugin eventually will be deprecated, so might as well get used to this.

Amazon EKS Supports Cluster Tagging – This is something I feel should have been introduced at initial release because of how important tagging is, but at least we have it now.

Memcached 1.5.16 now available on Amazon ElastiCache – This is mainly a bugfix patch, but the fewer bugs the better, so it is welcome.

Elastic Load Balancing: Network Load Balancers now support multiple TLS certificates using Server Name Indication (SNI) – Being able to host multiple secure applications on a single Load Balance is definitely a welcome sight.

Amazon S3 introduces Same-Region Replication – In this business, having another way to mitigate disasters is always welcome. For those who do not want to use Cross Region Replication, this will be a welcome feature.

AWS DataSync supports all Amazon S3 storage classes, more data controls – More control over data replication or moving data is always a positive. Here you will be able to manage the costs and control overwrites for existing files or objects as well as additional verification checks.