203: From vaporware to visual apps – AWS App Composer Generally Available

On this episode of The Cloud Pod, the team talks about the new AWS region in Malaysia, the launch of AWS App Composer, the expansion of spanner database capabilities, the release of a vision AI by Microsoft; Florence Foundation Model, and the three migration techniques to the cloud space.

A big thanks to this week’s sponsor, Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

This week’s highlights

• AWS: AWS announces upcoming region in Malaysia.
• GCP: Google launches new capabilities to Spanners regional and multi-regional capabilities
• Azure: The Florence Foundation Model from Microsoft..

Top Quotes

• “I think that these migration projects end up getting sort of pigeonholed over time into things that they’re not”
• “The reality is like ‘What are you really trying to get out of your migration for the business?”
• “The hybrid migration model lets you realize the benefits of cloud incrementally as you go”

AWS: AWS announces upcoming region in Malaysia.

• AWS Region in Malaysia
• ️️ This region is expected to have 3 AZ’s but there is no timeline for when it will come online

GCP: Google launches new capabilities to Spanner’s regional and multi-regional capabilities.

• 0️⃣ Rapidly expand the reach of Spanner databases with read-only replicas and zero-downtime moves
• These include Configurable read-only replicas, Spanner’s zero-downtime instance, and the more affordable cost of multi-regional configurations. 

Azure: The Florence Foundation Model from Microsoft.

• 0️⃣ Announcing a renaissance in computer vision AI with Microsoft’s Florence foundation model
• This new vision AI helps customers connect their data to natural language interactions to gain insights from their image and video resources.

The Cloud Journey Series; Cloud Migration Techniques

• There are three Migration Techniques; Hybrid, Cloud Native, and VMWare Migrations.
• One common mistake people make is believing they won’t get value from the migration till it is completed.
• Generally, it may be hard to decide which is the most successful because this depends on the definition of success as applied to individual businesses.

Other Headlines Mentioned:

• AWS Application Composer Now Generally Available – Visually Build Serverless Applications Quickly
• Subscribe to AWS Daily Feature Updates via Amazon SNS
• Azure WAF guided investigation Notebook using Microsoft Sentinel for automated false positive tuning
• https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/google_data_center_transformation.pdf
• AWS Comprehend simplifies custom model retraining and management
• Amazon Managed Blockchain (AMB) announces general availability of Ethereum Token-Based Access
• Amazon Kinesis Data Streams increases On-Demand write throughput limit to 1 GB/s
• Amazon DevOps Guru for RDS supports Proactive Insights
• Amazon Detective adds graph visualization for interactive security investigations
• Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) adds support for MongoDB 5.0 wire protocol and client-side field level encryption
• AWS Control Tower announces a progress tracker for landing zone setup and upgrades
• Amazon Timestream now supports batch loading data
• AWS Step Functions Distributed Map is now available in more Regions
• AWS CloudShell now supports the modular variant of AWS Tools for PowerShell
• Introducing maintenance window feature for AWS IoT Device Management Jobs
• Amazon EC2 announces the ability to create Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) that can boot on UEFI and Legacy BIOS
• IAM Roles for Amazon EC2 Now Provide Credential Control Properties
• AWS Migration Hub Refactor Spaces now supports environments without a network bridge
• AWS Application Composer is now generally available
• AWS Glue 4.0 now supports Streaming ETL
• AWS announces new competition structure for the 2023 Season
• Announcing Open Data Maps for Amazon Location Service
• Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose now supports data delivery to Elastic
• AWS Database Migration Service Fleet Advisor now supports target recommendations
• AWS Glue introduces faster and simpler permissions setup
• AWS Glue now provides continuous logs in AWS Glue Job Monitoring
• Amazon RDS for MariaDB now supports RDS Optimized Writes
• Amazon Redshift now supports 200K tables in a single cluster
• Amazon DynamoDB now supports table deletion protection
• Node hosting on Google Cloud: a pillar of Web3 infrastructure
• Monitor Azure Virtual Network Manager changes with event logging
• Azure VMware Solution in Microsoft Azure Government streamlines migration efforts
• Microsoft Cost Management updates—February 2023
• Public Preview: Azure Monitor managed service for Prometheus now supports querying PromQL
• Generally available: App Insights Extension for Azure Virtual Machines and VM Scale Sets
• Generally Available: Model Serving on Azure Databricks
• More transactions at no additional cost for Azure Standard SSD
• Azure SQL—General availability updates for early March 2023
• Disclosure: In-tree disk and file drivers will no longer be supported starting in Kubernetes v1.26
• Azure Virtual Network Manager Event Logging now in public preview
• New Azure for Operators products and partner programs released
• General availability: Power BI with Azure Database for MySQL – Flexible Server
• Generally available: Burstable compute for single node configurations for Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL
• Now Available: Azure Monitor Ingestion client libraries
• General availability: Azure Private Link support for Azure Databricks
• General Availability: Customer Initiated Storage Account Conversion
• Public preview: AKS NodeOSUpgrade channel
• Public Preview: Auto vacuum metrics for Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Flexible Server
• Public preview: Caching in ACR
• Public preview: Pod sandboxing in AKS
• GA: Online live resize of persistent volumes
• Public preview: Confidential containers on ACI
• Generally available: 4 TiB, 8 TiB, and 16 TiB storage per node for Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL
• Public preview: Login and TDE-enabled database migrations with Azure Database Migration Service
• General availability: New enhanced connection troubleshoot
• General availability: Azure Archive Storage now available in West US 3
• Discover what’s new in OpenSearch 2.3 and upgrade today!
• Oracle sovereign cloud solutions: Choose where your data is located
• OpenVPN DNS settings with OCI
• Free MySQL HeatWave foundations course
• Introducing Enterprise Scale Baseline Landing Zone Version 2.0
• Self-patching Autonomous Linux 8 can help increase security, availability, and performance

After show

• 0️⃣ I’m a Stanford professor who’s studied organizational behavior for decades. The widespread layoffs in tech are more because of copycat behavior than necessary cost-cutting.
• Sadly, many of these lay-offs are due to under-utilization of these workers rather than underperformance.