Okay. Hello Cloud Gurus, how y'all doing?
I'm Scott Pletcher back with another set of news that you just cannot refuse
this week. The Well-Architected framework gets some new expansion packs,
I give some love to a humble but important AWS service.
And learn how you can start building video games for free.
That's right. All right here on AWS This Week.
[inaudible]
Ever since I watched Matthew Broderick plug up his acoustic coupler and hook
into Whopper in the 1983 movie War Games,
I have been fascinated with online gaming,
and for those of you who have been around for a while,
you might recall the original bulletin board systems of the eighties and early
nineties and some of those associated BBS games like Trade Wars
or Motive. Well,
how far we have come or maybe we've just come full circle.
There are gaming services today like NVIDIA's G-Force now and Google Stadia
which are fully cloud based,
allowing us to run graphics intensive games with minimal local hardware
just as long as we have a decent internet connection,
much more than the 1200 baud I enjoyed back in my BBS days.
And I may or may not have tried to load steam on app stream.
Stick around and I'll let you know how you can get a new free-to -play MMO
game recently released by Amazon Game Studios.
The Well-Architected Framework is a super useful tool for anyone trying to
architect a cloud-based workload.
It provides a structured and consistent way to walk through many important
aspects of good design.
As flexible as the framework is,
some workloads require more domain specific designs and best practices.
AWS accommodates these specialized areas through something known as
lenses.
You can think of them as kind of like an expansion pack that plug into the base
framework. Lenses exist for serverless workloads,
high performance computing, IOT and financial services.
This month AWS added two new lenses to the collection,
machine learning and analytics.
These new additions aim to provide specific best practices
in and around those respective domains and hopefully create
better architectures. Exciting news this week. Wait for it.
Wait for it.
AWS announced that the latest SOC one SOC two and SOC three reports are now
available online. Well okay,
maybe that's not so exciting,
but it does give me an excuse to segue into another bit of news and talk about a
little known service that really should get more respect and that's AWS
Artifact, which got a new UI this week. What is Artifact?
Well,
Artifact is one of those services that you probably would never know about
unless you had a reason to know about it, and now you do.
It is a repository of all sorts of security and compliance documents like AWS's
ISO certification,
PCI or payment card industry compliance audits,
and service organization control or SOC reports.
Why Artifact? Well,
AWS recognizes that an important part of cloud adoption is to make sure that
all those internal and external auditors of customers are kept happy
and satisfied and these certifications and reports are usually compiled by third
parties and ensure that AWS is taking the proper measures to protect
data and maintain reliability in line with industry
regulatory and international standards.
Why doesn't AWS just post all these reports publicly?
Are they trying to hide something? Well, no.
Many of these audit reports are considered confidential and often need to be
protected by a nondisclosure agreement between your company and
AWS. As a result,
each document is generated specifically for you and associated with your
account.
This generated document contains a unique watermark providing
traceability directly back to AWS and this,
from an audit perspective, is a very good thing.
Have you ever wanted to try your hand at video game development?
Maybe you can use your quarantine quiet time to become the next Tencent or
Electronic Arts.
Amazon Lumberyard is a free high performance,
real time 3d design suite that you can use to create immersive
virtual worlds, games and simulations.
It has ready-made integrations with Twitch and many AWS services to
power your games. This month,
AWS released Lumberyard Beta 1.24 which brings
support for Visual Studio 2019 as well as a slew of bug
fixes and some new improved gems,
which are plugins that provide additional features if you need some
inspiration or maybe just a distraction.
Amazon Game Studios recently released a free-to-play game called
Crucible that was built using Lumberyard and makes use of Amazon
GameLift, Kinesis, S3,
Lambda and even uses Amazon Polly which provides the
voices for some characters.
You can grab it at the link down below or over on the Steam platform.
It's only available for Windows,
but I did get it to work using Steam Play on Ubuntu
20.04.
And now onto the Guru of the Week.
Well done this week gurus,
as you came up with 40 responses to our question with many,
many creative answers. It was a hard decision but alas,
there can be only one Guru of the Week and that person is Ankit
Patel, a systems engineer from Baltimore, Maryland in the US.
A glorious swag pack is on its way to you and presuming that re:Invent will
still be held this year,
you've also been entered into a draw for a ticket to said
event.
If you think you're Guru of the Week material have a look at our question this
week in the links down below.
That my friends is all the AWS news that is fit to print this week.
Until next time, go play some games and keep being awesome Gloud Gurus.
[inaudible].