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.

The AWS Web Console. Widget Edition.

The AWS Web Console changed this month to a widget-based experience, allowing users to further customize their homepages. There are currently only eight widgets offered but given AWS’ current trajectory of allowing customers to customize everything, it’s only a matter of time!

As a user, I love that costs get their own widget that’s on the front page by default. This should help console the cadre of voices complaining about AWS billing. In particular, that bills can sneak up on you. It’s a lot harder to ignore a bill when it’s right in front of your face every time you log on. Resource link here.

IPv6 Networking is Real

For years now I’ve heard about IPv6 networking and the switch from IPv4. To this date, I don’t know that I’ve touched a system that makes use of IPv6. The mystery of IPv6 is compounded by overhearing otherworldly proclamations like “there are more IPv6 addresses than there are atoms on the surface of the earth!” To be forthright if you told me IPv6 was a joke cooked up to scare new network engineers, I would believe you.

In the last part of 2021 AWS introduced IPv6 support to several services including Lambda and their Load Balancers. Before running IPv6-compliant networks on AWS wasn’t practical, but it is now a possibility. For anyone growing impatient with the slow speed of the transition to IPv6, this is a reason to look up!

Links:

• Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service Adds IPv6 Networking.

• Amazon EKS now supports Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6).

• AWS Lambda now supports Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) endpoints. for inbound connections

Sell Your Own Data

Companies like Google and Facebook have been making a fortune selling my data for years but I’ve yet to receive a cut of the profits. With the advent of AWS Data Exchange, I can cut out the middle man and start selling my own data! Buyers can peruse data sets on the AWS marketplace, purchase with a subscription fee, and start consuming data immediately (and thus incur AWS data transfer fees)! There are free datasets posted like the COVID dataset from Tableau, pictured below.

True to the marketing I was able to click my way to data through the AWS Marketplace. After purchasing a Subscription I set up an AWS Data Exchange Job to run a one-time export on the data to an S3 bucket. This particular resource is S3 based, AWS Data Exchange also offers data from AWS Redshift and API Gateway. Resource link here.

One Advisor to Rule Them All

AWS Advisor & AWS Health recently got a whole lot more visibility by getting dedicated widgets in the new AWS console. These, along with a few a half dozen related AWS services, can help cloud engineers troubleshoot and secure AWS environments. How these services overlap is not clear, nor is the ontology one should refer to when creating alerts coming from this system of hubs. With AWS Health now sending alerts to AWS Security Hub, which sends alerts to AWS Trusted Advisor, it’s starting to look like AWS Trusted Advisor is being positioned as the end-all for automated advice from AWS. Resource link here.

With AWS SSM the World Is Only a Slack Shortcut Away

Now, you can call webhooks (basically tiny APIs) in AWS SSM Automations and you can trigger those automations from Slack. I’m not advocating Slack become the single interface from which you control your digital universe but you can!

• Now remediate operational issues faster by executing AWS Systems Manager Automation runbooks from Slack.

• AWS Systems Manager Automation now enables you to take action in third-party applications through webhooks.

AWS Glue Is Sticking Around

AWS Glue is an Apache-Spark-based data transformation tool. The last month has seen four new features, including interactive notebooks and autoscaling, which make it more comparable to the service provided by the people behind Spark – Databricks.

• Introducing AWS Glue Interactive Sessions and Job Notebooks (Preview).

• Introducing Autoscaling in AWS Glue jobs (Preview).

• Amazon EMR now supports Apache Spark SQL to insert data into and update Glue Data Catalog tables when Lake Formation integration is enabled.

• Announcing Personal Identifiable Information (PII) detection and remediation in AWS Glue (Preview).

Miscellaneous News

• ACM Private CA Kubernetes cert-manager plugin is production ready. The popular helm chart cert-manager gets an AWS plugin. Read more.
• Amazon ECR adds the ability to monitor repository pull statistics. Previously there was no way to get repository-based statistics. Finally, ECR users can brag about how many times your image has been pulled. Read more.
• Amazon CloudWatch Logs announces AWS Organizations support for cross account Subscriptions. Get allthelogs by specifying your AWS Organization ID instead of every account in your org! Read more.
• GitOps model for provisioning and bootstrapping Amazon EKS clusters using Crossplane and Flux. I want to try this. Read more.