MSK Serverless

 

Amazon MSK Serverless is a cluster type for Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK). Last week, AWS announced the general availability of Amazon MSK Serverless

It makes easy for the users to run Apache Kafka without having to manage and scale cluster capacity.

MSK Serverless automatically provisions and scales compute and storage resources, so the user can use Apache Kafka on demand and pay for the stream/retain data.

It is fully compatible with Apache Kafka to run the existing applications without any code changes or create new applications using familiar tools and APIs.  With pay-as-you-go pricing, there are no upfront commitments or minimum fees. The user pay an hourly rate per cluster and an hourly rate for each partition.

MSK Serverless also provides private connectivity via AWS PrivateLink, secure client access via AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), serverless stream processing and analytics via Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics and AWS Lambda, and schema evolution control via AWS Glue Schema Registry. In addition to these features, MSK Serverless is compliant with GDPR and provides a 99.9% availability SLA.

AWS CF Ready

 

Amazon CloudFront (CF) Ready partners provide solutions-focused offerings to AWS customers in the end-to-end media management, security, monitoring and analytics, and content acceleration space.

These solutions help complement and augment existing AWS services to help customers optimize their use of Amazon CloudFront. Amazon CloudFront Ready software products are vetted by AWS Partner Solutions Architects for their sound architecture, adherence to AWS best practices, and demonstrated customer success.

With the new Amazon CloudFront Ready designation, customers can quickly and confidently identify validated AWS Partner software products that support Amazon CloudFront.

Ref: https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/partners/?partner-solutions-cards.sort-by=item.additionalFields.partnerNameLower&partner-solutions-cards.sort-order=asc&awsf.partner-solutions-filter-partner-type=partner-type%23technology

CloudWatch Metrics Insight

 

Metrics Insights is a new feature from Amazon CloudWatch that is now generally available. 

As a fast, flexible, SQL based query engine, Metrics Insights enables developers, operators, systems engineers, and cloud solutions architects to identify trends and patterns across millions of operational metrics in real time and helps you use these insights to reduce time to resolution. 

With Metrics Insights, you can gain better visibility on your infrastructure and large scale application performance with flexible querying and on-the-fly metric aggregations. Use Metrics Insights and other CloudWatch features to monitor your AWS and hybrid environments, and to respond to operational problems promptly.

While Metrics Insights comes with standard SQL language, you can also get started with Metrics Insights by using the visual query builder. To use the query builder, first, you select your metrics of interest, namespaces and dimensions visually, and the console automatically constructs your SQL queries for you, based on your selections. Metrics Insights is now available in all commercial AWS Regions and you can start using it immediately. 

It is easy to get started with Metrics Insights.  To learn more about Metrics Insights please refer to AWS documentation at https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/query_with_cloudwatch-metrics-insights.html

Amazon GameSparks

Amazon GameSparks is a managed AWS service to provide game developers with features for building, running, and scaling the backend for their games without having to manage servers or low-level cloud primitives.

It comes with out-of-the-box backend features that require minimal setup and is pre-integrated with the Unity game engine.

Amazon GameSparks manages the backend services, infrastructure scaling, and on-going game maintenance for customers, thereby reducing their cost and time to launch a game. This allows developers to focus on creating the best gaming experience, not spending unnecessary time on the backend.

AWS will not charge for the use of Amazon GameSparks during the preview period. Amazon GameSparks is available in the US East (N. Virginia) Region and is pre-integrated with the Unity game engine. 

Amazon GameSparks provides a downloadable AWS Mobile SDK for Unity and other resources that includes a sample game, Cloud Code API Reference material, and a developer guide. Ref: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/gamesparks/

AWS CF compression

 

AWS CloudFront (CF) automatically compresses certain types of objects (files) and serve the compressed objects when viewers (web browsers or other clients) support them. Viewers indicate their support for compressed objects with the Accept-Encoding HTTP header. CloudFront can compress objects using the Gzip and Brotli compression formats. When the viewer supports both formats, CloudFront prefers Brotli.

Chrome and Firefox web browsers support Brotli compression only when the request is sent using HTTPS. These browsers do not support Brotli with HTTP requests.

When requested objects are compressed, downloads can be faster because the objects are smaller—in some cases, less than a quarter the size of the original. Especially for JavaScript and CSS files, faster downloads can result in faster rendering of webpages for your users. In addition, because the cost of CloudFront data transfer is based on the total amount of data served, serving compressed objects can be less expensive than serving them uncompressed.

CloudFront only compresses objects that have one of the following values in the Content-Type response header:

1. application/dash+xml
2. application/eot
3. application/font
4. application/font-sfnt
5. application/javascript
6. application/json
7. application/opentype
8. application/otf
9. application/pkcs7-mime
10. application/protobuf
11. application/rss+xml
12. application/truetype
13. application/ttf
14. application/vnd.apple.mpegurl
15. application/vnd.mapbox-vector-tile
16. application/vnd.ms-fontobject
17. application/xhtml+xml
18. application/xml
19. application/x-font-opentype
20. application/x-font-truetype
21. application/x-font-ttf
22. application/x-httpd-cgi
23. application/x-javascript
24. application/x-mpegurl
25. application/x-opentype
26. application/x-otf
27. application/x-perl
28. application/x-ttf
29. font/eot
30. font/opentype
31. font/otf
32. font/ttf
33. image/svg+xml
34. text/css
35. text/csv
36. text/html
37. text/javascript
38. text/js
39. text/plain
40. text/richtext
41. text/tab-separated-values
42. text/xml
43. text/x-component
44. text/x-java-source
45. text/x-script
46. vnd.apple.mpegurl

Ultimately, I realize a significant performance improvement on leveraging AWS CF compression.

AWS CF vs TF

 

AWS CloudFormation (CF) is an infrastructure templating, or infrastructure as code (IaC) service provided free of charge by AWS. HashiCorp Terraform addresses similar needs, including an IaC declarative approach, but in a cloud agnostic way.

Terraform (TF) is an open source product first released by HashiCorp in 2014. Like all open source, this means limitations are out in the open (security or otherwise), and high priority changes/fixes can be made by the public if needed.

CloudFormation is a free but proprietary SaaS offering.  The implementation is not available for examination or modification except by Amazon staff.  Like all traditional software products, this means that the quality of the underlying implementation is a trade secret of AWS, and change prioritization is set by AWS.

Comparison chart is attached in the blog title image.  It's up to you and your business to choose the appropriate cloud automation framework based on your enterprise needs.

AWS .NET 6

Start of 2022, Microsoft announced .NET 6, which has the advantages of new .NET language features and performance optimizations. Ref: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/whats-new/dotnet-6

Last week, AWS Lambda started to support .NET 6 as both a managed runtime and a container base image. Developers creating serverless applications in Lambda with .NET 6 can take advantage of new features such as improved logging, simplified function definitions using top-level statements, and improved performance using source generators.

To build and deploy Lambda functions using .NET 6, use the .NET Core CLI, AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio, or AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM). Additionally, you can also use the AWS-provided .NET 6 base image to build and deploy .NET 6 functions using a container image. To migrate existing Lambda functions running earlier .NET versions, see the blog post linked above.

.NET 6 is the latest long-term support (LTS) release of .NET and will be supported for security and bug fixes until November 2024. AWS will automatically apply updates to the .NET 6 managed runtime and to the AWS-provided .NET 6 base image, as they become available.