This week in DevOps – Another AWS region was opened in Milan, Private AKS clusters are now generally available on Azure and Digital Ocean announced a VPC offering. Google Cloud also announced a new region in Las Vegas while Hashicorp Consul Service on Azure has moved from private to public beta.
AWS
AWS is on a roll lately with the announcement of the Cape Town region last week and now Milan. This is especially interesting given the current situation with COVID-19 in Milan, one could have reasonably expected that the region launch would have been put on hold.
The fact that the region launched while Milan is still under lockdown suggests that the physical buildout was done before COVID-19 hit and AWS was waiting on the launch for other reasons. This brings the total number of AWS regions in Europe to 6, the others are Frankfurt, Ireland, London, Paris and Stockholm.
The Milan region appears to support the core set of AWS services at launch with more planned soon.
AWS::SES – Connect directly to SES from VPC endpoints
SES customers can now connect directly to SES from their VPC via a VPC Endpoint powered by PrivateLink. That quite a mouthful and lots of services involved for a network connection, but it boils down to a more secure way to connect to SES which is always a good thing.
Using this new connection method means your traffic bound for SES will never leave Amazons network for the public internet.
Azure
Azure::AKS – Windows Server containers and Private Clusters
Windows server containers have been used in preview mode for a while, but are now classed as general availability and open for anyone. AKS private clusters are now generally available as well, enhancing AKS security and regulatory compliance for many companies.
Private AKS clusters can be combined with Azure managed identities for AKS which allows AKS applications to access other Azure services securely.
Azure::Backup – File Share Snapshot Management now generally available
Azure Backups File Share Snapshot Management is now generally available and out of the preview phase. Snapshots can be scheduled or on demand and support delete protection for files.
Google Cloud
GCP::Region – Las Vegas is open for business
GCP’s Las Vegas region is now open for business. Standard GCP services such as Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, Google Kubernetes Engine, Bigtable, Spanner and BigQuery are all available at launch.
This announcement is the third region launch by a major cloud provider in the last 2 weeks following AWS’s announcement of their Cape Town and Milan regions and highlights the growing need for cloud services even during a global pandemic.
Digital Ocean
DigitalOcean::VPC – Announcing Digital Ocean VPC
While Digital Ocean has supported private networking for a while now, you could only have on network per account and the configuration options were limited. This announcement brings their networking capabilities more in line with the big 3 cloud providers and allows multiple networks per account and further customization of network settings and parameters.
Network transfer between VPCs is free and the outbound network quotas will continue to be pooled on an account level. Bandwidth overage rates remain the same at $0.01/GB.
HashiCorp
HashiCorp::Consul – Consul for Azure now in public beta
HashiCorps Consul for Azure service has moved from private invite only beta to public beta, meaning anyone with an Azure account can now try it out. During beta the pricing for Consul is free, but you pay for any Azure imfrastructure costs associated with running it.
The public Azure Service page listing can be found here and contains more information. HashiCorp has also released a deployment guide here.
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