AWS Man

Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) last week announced the first Windows Server 2019 machine images (AMIs) for Windows Server 2019. The latest edition of Microsoft's flagship back-end server OS  debuted  last October, shortly after which users started  asking  about corresponding AMIs with queries such as: "I am wondering if there is an ETA for a Windows Server 2019 AMI by Amazon?" There was no definitive answer to those questions until a Jan. 7  post  announcing the arrival. "Windows Server 2019 comes loaded with a variety of new features including smaller and more efficient Windows containers, support for Linux containers for application modernization and App Compatibility Feature on Demand," the post said. The AMIs run on the platform's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service and available EC2 instances include: Windows Server 2019 Windows Server 2019 with Hyper-V Windows Server 2019 with Containers Windows Server 2019 with Select Language Packs W...

Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched several enhancements to SageMaker, its machine learning platform, at this week's re:Invent conference. The company announced the general availability of  SageMaker Ground Truth , a service that promises to reduce the manual labor and costs associated with labeling data in preparation for machine learning training. SageMaker Ground Truth lets users tap "human annotators" (whether they're from a third-party provider, the  Amazon Mechanical Turk  crowdsource service or their own workforce) to do part of the labeling tasks. The service then uses that human-labeled data as a guide to do the rest of the work, greatly reducing the time it takes to finish the dataset and potentially slashing costs by up to 70 percent, according to AWS'  announcement . "Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth can optionally use active learning to automate the labeling of your input data. Active learning is a machine learning technique that identifies da...

One of the biggest advantages in this Automator’s eyes of using Amazon’s S3 service for file storage is its ability to interface directly with the Lambda service. If you’re not familiar with AWS Lambda, it’s essentially code execution in the cloud. There are no servers to manage nor even a terminal window! Lambda is a window that gives you the ability to run code without concerning yourself with anything else. One of the coolest features of Lambda though is its ability to natively integrate with other AWS services. In Lambda, your code is broken down into function. Each function contains not only the code to execute but also what action will trigger that code as well as other execution options. That  how  concept is powerful. Think about it. Running Python, Node.JS, etc. code without having to worry about the infrastructure, but if you’re forced to kick off that code by logging into the AWS management console all the time, it’s not too useful. Lambda allows you to define ...

IT training company Global Knowledge released a report on top-paying IT certifications for 2019, with two AWS certs making the top five. The firm culled data from its annual IT skills and salary report (coming later this year) to compile this year's cloud-heavy list. "This year's highest-paying certifications reveal a strong emphasis on particular topics, such as cloud computing, cybersecurity, networking and project management," the company said in a Monday (Feb 11) blog  post . "In fact, cloud and project management dominate the top five spots." And in those top five spots are two AWS certs with associated reported salaries both more than $130,000: AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate. This demonstrates "expertise in designing and deploying scalable systems on AWS" and is listed with a $132,840annual salary. AWS Certified Developer – Associate. This validates "technical expertise in developing and maintaining applications ...

It's becoming more of a two-horse race in the cloud computing arena, as a new RightScale State of the Cloud report reinforces other studies that show Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) dwarfing competitors in market share, though No. 2 Microsoft Azure is narrowing the gap. "Azure continues to grow quickly and reduce the AWS lead, especially among enterprises," says the " RightScale 2019 State of the Cloud Report ," this year published by Flexera, which acquired RightScale last year but which is continuing the eight-year tradition of publishing the report. "Overall Azure adoption grew from 45 to 52 percent to narrow the gap with AWS," the report said. "As a result, Azure adoption has now reached 85 percent of AWS adoption, up from 70 percent last year." [Click on image for larger view.] Public Cloud Adoption - Enterprise  (source: Flexera). Furthermore, "Azure continues to catch up with AWS overall especially among enterprises, where...

Lambda@Edge Lambda@Edge  is a new Lambda-based processing model that allows you to run functions in response to various  Amazon CloudFront  events—in AWS locations that are closer to the end user. It can modify CloudFront requests and responses and has many practical use cases, including: Creating new HTTP responses that redirect unauthenticated users to login pages. Inspecting cookies in order to rewrite URLs to different versions of websites for testing purposes. Inspecting headers and authorized tokens for access control before deciding whether to forward a request. Adding, deleting, and modifying headers. Rewriting URL paths to redirect users to different locations, depending on need. To use Lambda@Edge, simply write a piece of code (AWS offers  several examples for Lambda@Edge functions) and set up the trigger to be a specific CloudFront event. After the trigger is set, your function will be replicated to multiple AWS edge locations. These locations ...

Cloud skills are paying off in today's tech sector, a new report from careers site Dice says, with Amazon-related skills among the most profitable. In fact, AWS services are strewn throughout the top-paying skills list, even taking two of the top five salary slots. Placing No. 3 on that list is Amazon DynamoDB, followed by Amazon Redshift, both providing more than $125,000 as an average salary. The top five entries on that list are: Go programming language (Golang): $132,827 Kafka: $127,554 Amazon DynamoDB: $125,554 Amazon Redshift: $125,090 Cassandra: $124,152 Overall, Dice's annual tech salary study shows low unemployment and stagnant salaries, with other considerations beyond salary affecting job choices among developers and other pros who seem increasingly willing to move on. That latter point is highlighted by a section of the newly published  Dice 2019 Salary Report  from the tech careers specialist titled "It's Not  Only  About Money." ...

Amazon EC2 offers multiple compute and storage options catering to the varied requirements of NoSQL workloads. Using Amazon EC2 with other services in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) ecosystem, such as Amazon Cloud Watch and 1-Click Launch from Amazon Marketplace, provides additional advantages. Recommended Best Practices Some of the best practices recommended for hosting NoSQL databases on Amazon EC2 are: Multiple Deployment Options With the help of  AWS regions  and Availability Zones , Amazon EC2 offers multiple deployment options that provide highly available workloads. However, enabling high availability requires network and security level planning and configuration. Also, the various deployment models add latency to write operations (for eventual consistency), which comes at a financial cost. Single Region and Multiple Availability Zones Setting up a MongoDB cluster in a new Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) on AWS requires the following deployment and...

Service-to-Service Comparison Containers and Serverless The development community has widely embraced containerized and serverless app architectures for their portability and maintainability. All three CSPs provide Docker container registries for centrally storing, managing, deploying, and securing Docker container images. They also provide managed services for running and orchestrating containers in general, and Kubernetes containers in particular. Similarly, all three CSPs provide robust serverless support, with Azure also offering a framework for developing serverless applications. AWS Azure GCP Docker container registry Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR) Azure Container Registry Container Registry Docker deployment Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS): Scalable, high-performance container orchestration Azure Container Instances  (ACI): Run workloads in a container on the Azure cloud (containers on demand) Container Engine : GCP’s Compute ...