This Week in DevOps – AWS reduced prices on some reserved instances and inter-region data transfer for some regions. They also rolled out a new Enterprise Search service called Kendra and a new class of instances called M6g which are based on Graviton2. Spot Virtual Machines came to Azure this week, Digital Ocean opened a new data center in San Francisco and HashiCorp released consul 1.8 for public beta.
AWS
AWS::EC2 – Price reduction on reserved instances and savings plans
Amazon has rolled out up to 18% price reductions on standard reserved instances and EC2 savings plans. The steepest discounts are on M5 instances in the European regions. The exact discount amount depends on the region plus the length of reservation. See the linked announcement for a table with percentages.
AWS::DTIR – Inter region data transfer price reductions
AWS has reduced inter-region data transfer rates for 4 regions. The reductions differ per region but seem to generally be around 20% less than previous prices. Affected regions include Sydney, Bahrain, Cape Town and São Paulo.
AWS::Kendra – Now generally available
Kendra is an enterprise search tool which was released late last year in beta. Kendra is now generally available in production ready high availability and developer oriented single AZ formats.
Kendra can index unstructured data from file systems like S3 and return results for natural language queries. Pricing for the production ready version starts at $7 an hour plus connector and document scanning fees, so this definitely seems to be aimed at larger enterprises.
AWS::EC2 – M6g instances powered by AWS Graviton2 now available
This appears to be a limited release instead of general availability as M6g instances are currently only available in 6 regions (N. Virginia, Ohio, Oregon, Ireland, Frankfurt and Tokyo). These new instances run on Amazon’s Graviton2 processor which is ARM based and developed by Amazon owned Annapurna labs.
M6g instances can be configured with 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 48, and 64 vCPUs or as bare metal. Amazon claims these instances deliver up to 40% greater efficiency compared to M5 instances for popular open source applications such as Redis. Amazon has also confirmed that they are working on R6g and C6g class instances based on the same architecture.
AWS::Macie – New enhanced version with reduced pricing
Macie is a data monitoring and classification engine. This announcement covers a new enhanced version of Macie based on customer feedback.
The main changes seem to be enhanced machine learning based matching models, multi account support and a better API. Macie also has a new tiered pricing model which reduces costs by 80% or more. The new model also includes a free tier for development purposes.
Azure
Azure::SpotVirtualMachines – General availability
Azure Spot Virtual Machines are now in general availability. These seem to work very similarly to AWS spot instances with deep discounts in exchange for the ability to evict your machine at any time.
Pricing is dynamic and differs for Windows and Linux. Evictions provide a 30 second notice if desired allowing for shutdown of jobs or caching of data prior to termination.
Azure::FrontDoor – Rules Engine in preview
Rules Engine is a routing layer for Azure Front Door which allows you to redirect requests based on configured conditions. Rules Engine can be used for simple cases like enforcing https or more complex configurations like routing url paths to different backend services.
A list of potential actions for rules engine can be found here. Pricing appears to be the same for Front Door with or without Rule Engine enabled.
Google Cloud
GCP::VMWare – Announcing VMWare Engine
Google previously announced support for VMWare workloads on Google Cloud and this announcement appears to take things a step further. It’s not entirely clear however why Google is announcing this now as VmWare engine does not appear to actually be available for use yet.
The announcement mentions that 2 regions will be available this quarter (North Virginia and Los Angeles) with more global regions planned in the second half of the year. The actual product page can be viewed here.
Digital Ocean
DigitalOcean::DataDenter – New San Francisco data center (SFO3)
Digital Ocean runs data centers in 8 regions globally. This latest addition provides further capacity to the San Francisco region and supports Droplets, Kubernetes Engine and VPCs.
HashiCorp
HashiCorp::Consul – Version 1.8 Public Beta now available
Consul 1.8 is now available as a public beta. This release adds Ingress and Terminating gateways to the open source version and SSO plus Audit logging to Consul Enterprise.
WAN Federation over Mesh Gateways were also added to the open source and enterprise version of consul with this release. The Hashicorp learning portal was updated with a tutorial outlining this new feature.
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