Okay. Hello, Cloud Gurus, how y'all doing?
Scott Pletcher here with another batch of AWS news goodness.
Multi-AZ RDS gets a new deployment option.
We get a new carbon footprint tool and the AWS Service Health Dashboard
gets a much needed overhaul. This is AWS this week.
With social responsibility becoming a more prominent factor for investors,
organizations are ramping up their efforts around sustainability. In fact,
migrating to the cloud and shuttering those power hungry data centers is
sometimes cited as an environmental net positive given the cloud providers
economies of scale,
but just because your stuff lives in someone else's data center doesn't mean
that it's not consuming natural resources.
Calculating your carbon footprint in a cloud environment has traditionally been
challenging given the amount of shared resources and ephemeral workloads.
To help bring some better clarity to the sustainability topic,
AWS has launched a customer carbon footprint tool.
This additional view has been added to your billing console and will provide a
carbon footprint estimate by account, geography and AWS service.
How do we know this data isn't just feel-good smoke and mirrors. Well,
AWS says the tool uses data that meets the greenhouse gas protocol,
which is the international standard for greenhouse gas reporting.
Seems legit. Well, the humble, modest,
and much maligned AWS Service Health Dashboard has gotten an upgrade. Recently,
AWS announced a significant facelift and usability upgrade for the AWS Service
Health Dashboard featuring a searchable event log and the ability to see account
level and organization specific service impacts. Additionally,
the new dashboard will support more of a root cause holistic view versus
just a sea of service specific reports. For example,
if there is a problem with a network back plane,
you'll see that reported problem and all the other impacted services tagged in
that report versus an endless litany of individualized outage
announcements.
This probably won't be the last we see of the Health Dashboard improvements for
this year as AWS has termed this the first iteration.
I guess that means we're gonna have to now say goodbye to all those jokes about
the dashboard just being a static HTML page,
hosted on some dusty windows NT server in the back of a supply closet somewhere.
Well we now have a nifty new RDS,
Multi-AZ deployment option for our PostgreSQL and mySQL needs.
In a normal Multi-AZ RDS deployment you'll have one primary database instance
in one AZ and a standby in another AZ.
Now you really can't do anything with that standby,
it just kind of hangs out waiting for a failover event.
With this new deployment option,
you can have two standbys spreading your risk across three AZs,
but here's the really cool part:
those standbys can also function as read replicas.
You can point your write-heavy applications to the primary endpoint and use the
standbys through a managed read only endpoint for queries and reporting.
AWS also claims that transaction commits happen up to twice as fast and
failovers will typically take less than 35 seconds. And finally,
a new season of the DeepRacer League is again upon us.
This year, the DeepRacer League is introducing some new divisions,
new tracks and more ways to win. Additionally,
a special student league has been announced aimed at high schools and college
undergrads. If you're relatively new to this series,
you might not know that I quite miraculously managed to make it into the season
finale of the inaugural DeepRacer League back in 2019,
I've sat out the past couple years, but maybe it's time to once again,
channel my inner Ricky Bobby and give it another go.
That my friends is all the AWS news it's fit to print this week. Stay safe,
take care of one another and keep being awesome cloud gurus.