Okay. Hello, Cloud Gurus, how y'all doing? My name's Scott Pletcher,
here with another batch of AWS news that you just might be able to use.
EKS expands its reach, livestreamers,
have some powerful new EC2 instances to work with.
And the service formerly known as ElasticSearch gets a new name.
Plus we have a couple of live events coming up that you won't want to miss.
All right here, on AWS This Week.
Announced back at reInvent 2020,
Elastic Kubernetes Service Anywhere aims to let organizations run EKS
from the comfort and security of their own data center.
Architecturally speaking,
containerization is a pretty good way to hedge your bets on cloud providers.
As all the major providers have pretty good support for containers.
The value proposition of EKS Anywhere is that it provides a consistent way to
manage both on-prem and AWS-based EKS clusters.
And if you live in the K8s ecosystem of tooling and utilities,
you know that sometimes consistency is few and far between.
Not quite ready to dive deep with EKS Anywhere?
You can try out a new public preview of the EKS Connector,
which can connect any Kubernetes cluster to the EKS console.
Hear ye hear ye!
Amazon ElasticSearch Service shall now henceforth be known as
Amazon OpenSearch Service.
To understand the why's and the how's of this rename,
one has to go back to earlier in the year when Elastic,
the company behind the ElasticSearch and Kibana,
announced that it would be moving away from the Apache License version two to a
more restrictive license,
a move that encouraged the ire of the open source community and left Elastic and
AWS finger pointing at each other as the culprits. In response,
AWS announced OpenSearch in April, 2021,
which was an open source fork of ElasticSearch in Kibana,
which AWS still keeps under the Apache version two license.
Additionally, the fork allowed AWS to continue adding features and enhancements,
which they have recently released as OpenSearch 1.0,
and they decided the time was right for a name change as well. Now,
AWS hasn't completely quit ElastiSearch though,
as customers can still run the product up to version 7.10.
Past that, customers are going to have to make a decision.
The past couple of years have ushered in a whole new world of online streaming,
as individuals and corporations have tried to figure out how to carry on when
in-person events just weren't permitted or practical. Once a novelty,
live streaming has now become big business.
And what once required a satellite uplink and a production crew can now be done
with a pretty good laptop, OBS, and an internet connection.
While the barriers to live streaming may be low, viewers,
especially those paying for a stream, expect very high quality.
Recently,
AWS has introduced a new EC2 family purpose built for this live streaming
mission called VT1.
They're unique in that they contain specialized transcoding chips from Xilinx,
which are much more efficient at media streaming than GPU based instances.
And as compared to GPU instances,
the VT1 family offers more streaming power at up to
60% lower cost.
AWS even plans to make these VT1 instances available on AWS
Outposts, allowing broadcasters to transcode locally.
Speaking of live streaming, we're gearing up for another live exam walkthrough.
This time covering the AWS Certified SysOps administrator
associate exam.
Faye Ellis and I will dish out the intel for the new exam and walk through some
sample exam questions. Additionally,
we'll show you how those new exam labs work and how to prepare.
That's happening on Tuesday, September 28th at 11:00 AM eastern,
8:00 AM Pacific, and 4:00 PM British summer time.
And we'll simulcast on Twitch and YouTube. Closer in,
join Mattias Andersson, Lars Klint,
and me again on our Discord server for something we're calling a
certification office hours.
It's your time to drop in and say hi and ask whatever question you might have on
cloud certifications, or just tell us a good joke. We'd like that too.
That's happening on September 22nd, 6:00 PM Eastern, 3:00 PM Pacific.
Links to all this stuff down below.
And finally just a quick heads up for all those Kotlin developers out there.
AWS quietly released an alpha version of the AWS SDK for
Kotlin. It's not production ready yet, but it might be worth a look.
And that is all the AWS news that I have for you this week. Stay safe,
take care of one another, and keep being awesome Cloud Gurus.