October’s monthly recap is here and the list of AWS & DevOps-related announcements include services like Kendra, Lambda and CloudFormation.
Let’s get started.
AWS S3 Object Ownership – New Feature?
This new setting lets you automatically assume ownership of objects uploaded to your S3 bucket by other AWS accounts.
I was a bit surprised about this announcement for two reasons.
First, I didn’t realize that adding a simple setting that changes a default behaviour (which shouldn’t be the default in the first place) passes as a “feature”.
At first glance, everyone would’ve thought that getting ownership of things stored in your own bucket is the default option. Apparently not.
AWS and Grafana Labs – New AWS X-Ray Data Source Plugin
Grafana is a tech company that lets businesses build observability dashboards with all sorts of data.
Put simply, it’s a visualization and analytics software.
Grafana has also gotten really popular lately. That’s why it makes sense for AWS to get in on the party.
The idea of this new plugin is to help devs find problems and debug easily in distributed applications.
Here’s what AWS X-Ray does:
- It goes through applications and collects request data like HTTP statuses, latencies, etc.
- It combines this data into units called traces
- It visualizes this trace data for each service in a unified map
It’s a cool service and I’m excited to see what this AWS-Grafana partnership creates going forward.
Further reading: Analyze and debug applications with AWS X-Ray trace data with Grafana
Employee Onboarding App Template For Honeycomb
Amazon Honeycode is AWS’s attempt to join the no-code movement.
It’s a service that lets you build team management apps without coding. Right now, it’s still in beta, but AWS is constantly adding new features to it.
There are already other templates like inventory management, applicant and budget tracking, but I suspect this employee onboarding app template is especially important.
Tons of people started working remotely this year. Most companies weren’t ready, so everyone is scrambling to find a way to organize their mess.
Employee onboarding is one of the toughest areas to get right. But if you have an onboarding app tailored to your business, you’re on the right track.
In short, I believe more templates for workplace organization apps will follow.
Further watching: Comprehensive, beginner-friendly Honecode tutorial
AWS Lambda Extensions
This is a massive announcement.
In a previous article about the 8 must-learn AWS services, I mentioned that Lambda is often used to bridge together multiple AWS services.
It’s always necessary to integrate Lambda with monitoring, security, or governance tools. But there’s a problem – sometimes integrating Lambda with them is really difficult.
That’s what Extensions promises to fix. According to AWS, this feature will simplify the integration experience greatly.
I’m super excited about this and I hope AWS keeps working in this exact direction.
Further reading: Introducing AWS Lambda Extensions
AWS CloudFormation Increased Limits
CloudFormation simplifies the process of creating and managing your AWS resources (infra).
Here’s how it works:
You give it a template (JSON or YAML file) that describes the resources you want and it does the rest.
But there are some annoying limits when working with these templates.
For example, the maximum size of a template that can be passed in a S3 Object was 450KB. The maximum number of resources was capped at 200 per template.
Here’s how these limits are expanded after this release:
- Maximum size of template passed in a S3 object – from 450KB to 1MB
Per template:
- Max number of resources – from 200 to 500
- Max parameters – from 60 to 200
- Max mappings – from 100 to 200
- Max outputs – 60 to 200
This is a pretty awesome expansion.
There are tons of guides on how to work around these limits. Obviously, a lot of people were asking for this and AWS listened.
Further reading: The Complete CloudFormation Guide
Amazon Kendra Gets Some Nice Upgrades
Kendra is Amazon’s AI-powered search service.
It’s made for enterprises with vast amounts of data in different repositories and locations.
The first big announcement about Kendra this past month was that it now supports custom data sources. Put simply, you can now create custom connectors using Kendra’s API and push content directly into the service from any repository.
The second announcement was that Kendra is now compatible with the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPPA). This allows the service to manage healthcare and life science data.
Both announcements are massive.
Healthcare is the battleground for the next few years between big tech companies. Expect more AWS services to become compliant or, in some way, eligible to work with healthcare data.
Further reading: Building a question and answer chatbot with Amazon Kendra and AWS Fargate
2020 Open Source Jobs Report
This report, created by The Linux Foundation and edX, presents the findings from interviews with hiring managers and IT experts.
There are some non-surprising points like:
- “DevOps and Cloud experts are the most sought after”
- “93% of hiring managers report difficulty finding sufficient talent with open source skills“
But there are also suprising positive trends. For example, more employers say they’re providing comprehensive online training courses on open source tech.
If you don’t want to read the whole thing, here’s the gist:
Finding experienced DevOps/Cloud experts is getting harder every year. Companies must put more resources into training their current employees rather than looking to the job market for rescue.
Further reading: LinkedIn’s 2020 Emerging Jobs Report
AWS Makes Boatloads of Money…Again
AWS posted secure revenues of $11.6 billion for the quarter, up 29% YoY.
Apparently, the pandemic hasn’t slowed down the cloud giant. AWS’s CFO Brian Olsavsky even said that the pandemic caused an acceleration in most companies’ cloud initiatives, except in a few sectors like travel and hospitality.
In short, it’s all good in the cloud world. Not much more to say here.
And that’s about it for October 2020.
Of course, there were tons of other announcements that you also might find interesting. If you’re interested, check out:
Finally, if you need AWS or DevOps advice, don’t hesitate to drop us a line.
