ECS container health

 Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) now provides customers enhanced visibility into the health of their compute infrastructure.  It helps customers improve application resiliency.

Customers running containerized workloads using Amazon ECS on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud  (Amazon EC2) or on-premises with Amazon ECS Anywhere can now query the health status of the container runtime (i.e Docker) for their container instances directly from the Amazon ECS API.

mazon ECS automatically monitors the container runtime for responsiveness on customers’ behalf. Customers can use the ECS Describe-Instances API with the include Health Status option to view the health information for their Amazon ECS Tasks.

Customers can view the instance health status for all their Amazon ECS container instances running version 1.57.0 of the Amazon ECS container Agent or higher.

Athena CPU cost

 Last week, AWS launched a new featured in Amazon Athena.  Now, it displays the computational cost of your queries alongside their execution plans.

With the release of the EXPLAIN ANALYZE statement, Athena can now execute your specified query and return a detailed breakdown of its execution plan along with the CPU usage of each stage and the number of rows processed.

In addition to understanding a query’s execution plan, you can now see the time spent within each operator to better assess the performance profiles of query clauses and their chosen ordering. With row input and output counts, you can also validate the impact of query predicates, especially over large datasets.

Administrators will also find the scanned data counts useful in planning the financial impact of their users’ workloads and identifying queries that could benefit from further optimization or that should be governed to control costs using Athena’s data usage controls.

Babelfish for Aurora

Babelfish for PostgreSQL is an open source project available under the Apache 2.0 and PostgreSQL licenses. It provides the capability for PostgreSQL to understand queries from applications written for Microsoft SQL Server.

Babelfish understands the SQL Server wire-protocol and T-SQL, the Microsoft SQL Server query language, so you don’t have to switch database drivers or re-write all of your application queries. With Babelfish, applications currently running on SQL Server can now run directly on PostgreSQL with fewer code changes.

The source code of open source project Babelfish is available at https://www.babelfishpg.org/getstarted/#source

This allows users to leverage Babelfish on their own PostgreSQL servers. Babelfish includes support for stored procedures, save points, static cursors, nested transactions, the variant data type and much more.

Last week, AWS announced Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL as Generally Available (GA).