Okay, hello Cloud Gurus, how y'all doing?
I'm Scott Pletcher here with another round of AWS news goodness.
This week we get something resembling a proper firewall for our VPCs,
Amazon Personalize gets more personable,
and Amazon DocumentDB with MongoDB compatibility gets more compatible. Plus,
we'll reveal the guru of the week. Right here on AWS This Week.
[Inaudible].
Recently AWS announced the availability of the AWS Network Firewall,
a fully managed network firewall designed to help protect those important subnet
resources. Now, of course, we've had security groups, network ACL's,
web application firewalls, and AWS Shield, and we still have those things,
but AWS Network Firewall aims to be an easier and more functional way to
control traffic going in and out of our VPCs. You know,
like a real firewall.
You'll need to create a network firewall in each AZ that you want to protect,
and they can be configured to do firewall things like allow, deny,
and drop certain traffic based on IP and protocol,
but they can also do more advanced things like inspect packets for pattern
matching or restrict certain domains for outbound traffic.
They can also support Suricata IPS rules syntax,
which allows for some quite complex threat detection rules.
Do know that this nifty service will cost you though based on runtime and the
amount of network traffic processed.
The curiously named Amazon DocumentDB with MongoDB compatibility has gotten some
new capabilities as part of its adoption of MongoDB 4.0
compatibility.
One such feature that Amazon DocumentDB with MongoDB compatibility is
particularly proud of is the ability to perform transactions across
documents. Now, many of you may be saying, so what? Well,
Amazon DocumentDB with MongoDB compatibility is considered a no
SQL database and generally no SQL databases adhere to what's called a
base consistency model.
That just means that it's okay for the updates to lag behind a tiny bit across
the database in exchange for much better performance and scalability.
In comparison,
relational databases usually adhere to what's called an acid consistency model.
Now without getting too much into the weeds,
this just means that the database handles updates in a very complete and
deliberate way, a transactional way with consistency,
taking priority over performance and record availability.
Now different scenarios call for different consistency models.
A common use case for acid consistency models are order
processing inventory systems or financial transactions where you'd want to
be sure only the most recent updated values can be retrieved.
Now that Amazon DocumentDB with MongoDB compatibility supports transactions,
we can leverage both consistency models where appropriate.
Amazon Personalize users can now use dynamic filters to generate
recommendations. Now, if you use Personalize,
this is certainly a very welcome improvement as you can now define filters
that accept a parameter.
You can just pass it versus having to create a bunch of hard-coded filters to
cover all the possible options. Now,
there is a caveat in that only in and equal operators support
dynamically passing in values into the filters,
you still need to use static filters.
If you're trying to use a range query such as greater than or less than.
And now on to the coveted Guru of the Week.
This week's deserving winner is Elliot Jennings,
intrepid software engineer and devoted Fulham FC fan from
London in the UK.
A fancy swag pack is on its way to you as I speak.
If you'd like to test your cloud expertise,
head on over to this week's question, linked down below,
and remember winners are selected not just based on correctness of the answer,
but also in your reasoning and depth of thought reflected in your response.
Now go impress those judges.
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.