App Runner

 Last week, AWS announced the general availability of AWS App Runner.

App Runner is a fully managed container application service that makes it easy for customers without any prior containers or infrastructure experience to build, deploy, and run containerized web applications and APIs in just a few clicks. 

As an end user, it is not required to be tech savvy.  You simply provide source code, a container image, or deployment pipeline; rest will be done by App Runner.  It automatically builds and deploys the web application, load balances traffic, scales on demand, and monitors application health.

Out of the box, App Runner is built for web scale, so there’s no need to re-platform or re-architect as the business grows. It makes it simpler to rapidly deliver innovative solutions and business value.

Documentation is available with three sections (1) Developer Guide, (2) API Reference and (3) Release Notes.  Ref: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/apprunner/

Data Prediction

Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur built the Covid prediction data model for India's second wave. 

Our scientists are working on the SUTRA model for charting the trajectory of COVID-19. They have been working on a mathematical model to predict the spread of the virus.

It is important to note that a mathematical model can only predict future with some certainty so long as virus dynamics and its transmissibility don’t change substantially over time. Mathematical models can also provide a mechanism to predicting alternate scenarios corresponding to various policy decisions such as non-pharmaceutical interventions.

 It is quite accurate and in sync with the current date. Ref: https://www.sutra-india.in/

CloudFront functions

 

Amazon CloudFront Functions is ideal for lightweight CloudFront content delivery network customization.  It can run on every request to enable high scale and latency sensitive operations like HTTP header manipulations, URL rewrites/redirects, and cache key normalization. For example, you can use CloudFront Functions to rewrite requests to language specific versions of your site based on the Accept-Language header of the incoming request. You can also use CloudFront Functions to validate custom tokens to authorize incoming requests.

As these functions run at all of CloudFront’s edge locations, they can scale instantly to millions of requests per second with minimal latency overhead.  It is built for lightweight HTTP(S) transformations and manipulations, allowing you to deliver richer, more personalized content with low latency to your customers.

CloudFront Functions is natively built-in to CloudFront, allowing you to easily build, test, and deploy viewer request and viewer response functions entirely within CloudFront.

Few useful sample code repository is available at https://github.com/aws-samples/amazon-cloudfront-functions

Goodbye Python2.7

 

Python is one of the powerful language recently used in the industry.  Why? Because, it is dynamically typed with garbage collected concepts. Also, it supports multiple programming paradigms like structured, procedural, object-oriented and functional programming.

Coming back to AWS Cloud world, Python plays a vital role.  

Few key dates and updates of AWS Lambda Python 2.7 deprecation

• January 1, 2020 - Python Software Foundation (PSF) officially sunset Python 2.7
  
  
• July 15, 2021 - AWS Lambda will end support for Python 2.7
• You will not be able to create new Python 2.7 functions after this date
  
  
• September 30, 2021 - Unable to update existing Python 2.7 functions
• Invokes to existing functions will not be affected
• Existing function runtime can still be changed
  
  
• Resources:
• AWS Blog: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/announcing-end-of-support-for-python-2-7-in-aws-lambda/
• PSF Migration Guide: https://docs.python.org/3/howto/pyporting.html

It is high time to take an immediate action against the existing Python 2.7 Lambda functions in your firm.

AWS CloudShell

 As we know, there are 3 ways to connect AWS infrastructure.  They are:

1. AWS Console (web based interface)
2. AWS CLI (Command Line Interface)
3. AWS API (Application Program Interface)

Non technical users prefer to use AWS Console.  Scripting engineers are used to leverage CLI.  Third option API is used by application engineers.

Recently, start of the year, AWS CloudShell is available to use as attached.

AWS CloudShell is a browser-based, pre-authenticated shell that the user can launch directly from the AWS Management Console. It runs any AWS CLI commands against AWS services using your preferred shell (Bash, PowerShell, or Z shell). Cool thing is no need to download or install command line tools.

Happy Cloud Access in simple way!