Let’s ring in the New Year with a brief look at last month’s cloud news.
AWS Personal Health Dashboard
Launched on Dec. 1, 2016, the Dashboard provides an in-depth and personalized look at the performance and availability of each AWS service you use. You don’t have to look anywhere else to find out about the health of your resources and any issues they may experience.
AWS Launches IPv6 Support for VPN EC2 Instances
AWS is announcing that it will now support IPv6 for both its Virtual Private Cloud and EC2 instances in VPNs–completely free. This service will begin for US East (Ohio) and will continue to roll out for other regions.
To enable IPv6, simply select it from the CDR block option at the Console screen when creating a new VPC. You may also select it for existing VPCs.
Another noteworthy feature is that the Direct Connect Console allows you to create VIFs (Virtual interfaces) with support for both IPv4 or IPv6. You simply select which one in the creation screen.
Lastly, AWS also announced an Egress-only Internet Gateway where you can generate private subnets within your VPN. The EIG allows you to block incoming traffic to your VPC while allowing outgoing traffic. You can even use it to restrict IPv6 inbound traffic. This service is free.
AWS Launches Amazon QuickSight Enterprise Edition
Amazon QuickSight Standard Edition was launched in November 2016 to provide an easy means of big data analytics. Now, AWS is launching its Enterprise Edition, which adds two features: Active Directory Integration and Encryption at Rest.
User Authentication
Enterprise edition uses AWS Managed Microsoft Active Directory (AD) to authenticate users. Users may sign on to QuickSight with credentials that are already logged into the MS Active Direotry hosted in AWS or on-premise. Also available is the SSO (single sign-on) feature, which lets users start working sooner with less administrative work involved.
All in all, the system allows you to enter thousands of user accounts and manage them with minimal effort.
SPICE for Amazon QuickSight
QuickSight also uses SPICE (Super-fast, Parallel, In-memory Calculation Engine) for highly-scalable big data analytics. To further protect your data, the Enterprise Edition encrypts data at rest within SPICE with keys provided by Amazon.
Amazon Quicksight Enterprise Edition is now available US East (Northern Virginia) Region. SPICE capacity is available to the US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland) Regions only for now. Pricing can be found here.
AWS Launches Application Discovery Service Console
Planning on migrating to the AWS cloud? Need a way to discover and collect all information on your system? The AWS Application Discovery Service can do that for you automatically.
By using a light data collection agent, or connecting through AWS’s Agentless Discovery Connector through your VMWare, you may start gathering information on your devices, applications, events, and other pertinent materials.
Amazon EFS Now Supports Direct Connect
Launched last year, Amazon Elastic File System or Amazon EFS allowed users to configure and manage shared file storage in AWS. Since then, AWS has updated EFS to connect on-premise through AWS Direct Connect.
This can be useful in a number of ways:
For file migration and data backup, you may link your servers to an Amazon EFS file system, copy your files to it, then process it in the AWS cloud when you wish. Of course, you may choose to retrieve this data when you wish.
For cloudbursting, you may copy your files to your on-site server, analyze the data using EC2 instance fleets, then copy it back to your server so you visualize it with tools.
You may also access your files through EC2 or your onsite servers simultaneously. You will also experience the same strong consistency and file locking as regular Amazon EFS.
Amazon ECS supports Windows Containers (Beta)
Launched in 2014, Amazon ECS is a highly-scalable and reliable container management service. It supports Docker containers and lets you run a cluster of EC2 instances. This eliminates the need for you to manage, run, or install your own container service.
Now, Amazon ECS is providing support for Windows containers as well. While this support will be at beta-level for now, you may test your applications in Windows containers by selecting the Windows Server 2016 Base with Containers AMI when creating clusters.
Looking forward to another great year with our partner AWS. See you in the cloud!
