Okay. Hello, Cloud Gurus, how y'all doing?
Scott Pletcher here with another instalment of AWS news,
you can now plan ahead on savings plans. Step Functions,
get X-ray vision and the ARM processor instance train just keeps on
rolling. Plus we announced the guru of the week,
stick around for AWS this week.
Let me start off the show, right by saying, everyone's getting a free instance.
If I had a mic, I'd drop it.
That's right from now until December 31st,
you can get 750 hours per month of T4g micro
instance free of charge. The T4g family runs. AWS's Graviton2
processor and claims to have up to 40% better performance at
20% lower cost than comparable T3 instances,
T4g joins the A1, M6g, C6g and
the R6g instance families, further expanding the Graviton offering.
And seems to demonstrate AWS's strategy of controlling more of its own
destiny in-house and challenging the dominance of AMD and
Intel. When AWS announced savings plans at re:Invent 2019,
some people were a little confused between compute savings plans,
EC2 savings plans, standard reserved instances,
convertible reserved instances,
and - oh yeah - regional reserved instances and zonal reserved instances. Well,
why not add more confusion to the mix by introducing something new?
And that's exactly what AWS did by announcing scheduled savings
plans. Not to be confused with scheduled reserved instances.
Now we can schedule a savings plan to go into effect sometime in the future.
And this might be useful for those who like to plan ahead or don't want to see
their savings plan accidentally expire.
Savings plans differ from reserved instances in that you're making a commitment
to spend a certain amount of dollars per hour for a term of one or
three years, with the discount baked into how those dollars are consumed.
Now with reserved instances,
you're making a commitment to run an instance for one or three years
at a discounted rate.
Also note that savings plans do not reserve capacity like zonal
reserved instances.
Instead you'd use an on- demand capacity reservation. See?
Clear as mud.
AWS step functions are a great way to organize some really complex serverless
workflows. But as anyone will tell you,
who has tried to build such applications,
they can be pretty tricky to debug and optimize. Recently.
AWS announced that X-ray.
The analysis and debugging tool tailor-made for distributed applications,
is now integrated into Step Functions.
So now you can get a bird's eye view of your step flow with the ability to
drill down into components and examine errors rather than having to sift through
all those CloudWatch logs.
X-ray offers a service map that'll show you all the services involved in that
workflow.
A trace map where you can observe a single trace through the process,
and also a trace timeline which can help identify long-running steps and
potential bottlenecks. And now onto our guru of the week, this week,
we tested your knowledge of the benefits of AWS global accelerator.
Now, while we had some good answers,
there can be only one guru of the week and that person is Rob Harding,
a cloud solutions architect at wire hive in the UK. Congratulations, Rob,
a sensational swag pack is on its way to you now.
If you would like to have a crack at this week's question,
we've linked it down below that my friends is all the AWS news that's fit to
print this week, stay safe, take care of one another and keep being awesome,
Cloud Gurus!