450 mark

 

Today I reached a milestone worth celebrating!   On checking the blog scorecard, noticed I had hit 450! 

That's ~143k hits, 30+ followers, 320 accolades in last 10+ consistent years effort.

Three key moves to keep it going are

1. Passion for continuous learning and sharing
2. Self challenge to motivate every day experience
3. Consistency to work hard with your support

The next big milestone is 500+ mark.

As Gandhi said "Live as if you were to die tomorrow; Learn as if you were to live forever"

CloudFormation nested stack

This week, got a great tech info on release of the long awaited feature in CloudFormation nested stacks.

AWS CloudFormation is extending change sets to support applications modeled with nested stacks, enhancing the predictability of update operations. With this launch, you can now preview the changes to your application and infrastructure resources across the entire nested stack hierarchy and proceed with the update only when you confirm that all the changes are as intended.  

When you create a change set with this feature enabled, CloudFormation automatically creates a change set for each nested stack contained in the hierarchy. Each of these change sets contains changes to the resources contained in the stack as well as links to change sets of stacks nested within it. 

Using these links for navigation, you can view the changes across the entire hierarchy. After examining all the changes, you can either choose to proceed with the create or update operation or start over.

AWS Hyderabad

 

A notable exception to this policy is geographic expansion of AWS regions list.

Early this month, AWS per-announced a new region in Zurich, with an eye towards it launching in late 2022, and a second new region in Hyderabad coming in mid-2022.

AWS’s global infrastructure page exhibits the latest stack list. It consists of multiple physically separate availability zones, which are one or more data centers.

With few billions dollars, each region is built with massive investments in real estate, computer hardware, networking, and hiring. Their Hyderabad region apparently resembles a $2.8 billion investment.

Whenever AWS announces a region, they aren’t doing because they think it’d be neat to have a region in a given place.  It's purely driven by customer demand.

.NET 5

Microsoft's .NET 5 developer platform, key to the company's work to unify its different .NET flavors, is generally available as of yesterday, November 10.

In 2019, Microsoft announced that .NET 5 would be its first major deliverable on the road toward unifying .NET.  Ref: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/introducing-net-5/

.NET 5 includes C# 9, F# 5, and the corresponding ASP.NET Core release. Microsoft is encouraging developers to use new application programming interfaces (APIs) in .NET 5 to integrate with other tools like its Power Platform low-code/no-code platform. It also provides native (not just emulated) support for Windows Arm64, as well as performance improvements in the .NET libraries and Garbage Collector; smaller container images; and single-file applications.

We knew that Microsoft adopted open source strategy for last 3+ years using .NET Core  .NET 5 is the next step forward with .NET Core. The project aims to improve .NET in a few key ways:

1. Produce a single .NET runtime and framework that can be used everywhere and that has uniform runtime behaviors and developer experiences.
2. Expand the capabilities of .NET by taking the best of .NET Core, .NET Framework, Xamarin and Mono.
3. Build that product out of a single code-base that developers (Microsoft and the community) can work on and expand together and that improves all scenarios.

Feel free to download and enjoy .NET 5 at https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download/dotnet/5.0

More fun to come with the attached product roadmap from Microsoft.  As of now, they're on track. Kudos to their great effort !

Metrics Explorer

 

Amazon CloudWatch launches Metrics Explorer – a tag-based dashboard tool that enables customers to filter, aggregate, and visualize operational health and performance metrics by tags.

On top of effective metric driven monitoring, the performance graphs will be useful to continuously monitor your application health and troubleshoot issues when they occur.

Metrics Explorer enables you to slice and dice metrics using existing AWS Resource Tags or using EC2 and Lambda resource properties as Tags. It aggregates the metrics by resource properties such as instance type and visualize one graph per Availability Zone or organize metrics on one or multiple graphs by splitting them based on tags.

default REST API

Amazon API Gateway now supports disabling the default, auto-generated REST API endpoint. The default REST API endpoint in API Gateway looks like https://{restapi_id}.execute-api.{region}.amazonaws.com. 

This feature is intended for customers who use custom domain names for REST APIs and want to ensure that all traffic to their API only goes through the custom domain name and not the default endpoint. This feature was already available for HTTP APIs. Now, it is available for REST APIs too.

Customers can configure a custom domain name endpoint to require different security than the default endpoint generated by API Gateway. For example, you can choose to configure a custom domain name with mutual TLS authentication, or require that traffic to a custom domain name use TLS 1.2. 

By disabling the default API endpoint, customers can require that clients access an API through only the custom domain name. Using this strategy, customers can ensure that clients are only accessing backend systems through approved security controls configured on the custom domain name.