
NPW Insights (Free): Week 4/4 for Software Engineer
AlloyDB goes global. Amazon Neptune, Kinesis and Timestream updates. SageMaker new feature. Azure VMWare Solution for government. Google Cloud Threat Detection and Response Team
App Building
Google Cloud AlloyDB global
The PostgreSQL-compatible database service is now available in 16 new regions, and coming to more soon. Google Cloud claims the service is 4 times faster for transactional workloads and up to 100 times faster for analytical queries than standard PostgreSQL. UPDATE
Amazon Neptune serverless scales down
Minimum scaling requirements reduced from 2.5 Neptune Capacity units to 1; will use 2.5X lesser resources when the graph database isn’t responding to queries. UPDATE
Why use message brokers
Developer advocate at AWS, David Boyne, offers four reasons: To ensure downstream services don’t get overloaded, and can process messages in any batch size. Prevent loss of messages, as brokers can retry in case of delivery and processing failure. Enable parallel processing downstream using pub/sub patterns or message queues. Achieve better isolation and decoupling as producers don’t need to know about downstream consumers. LINK
SQL tricks you might like
Semi joins with EXISTS and IN, a more performant alternative to joins. Performant pattern matching on strings with SQL built-in matching options. LAG and LEAD for sequential data comparison. + 7 MORE
Career
New job roles in the coming years
Next generation of cloud will be defined by modern compute, polyglot DBs, AI/ML, and hybrid multicloud. Consequently, DevOps will branch out into Cloud-native Ops, Edge-native Ops, AI/MLOps, and multi-cloud architects. Here are links to Google Cloud learning pathways and free courses for skill sets that will be needed for these roles. GOOGLE BLOG
Data Management
Amazon EMR Managed Scaling enhancements
The 2022 update in the Managed Scaling algorithm saves up to 19% costs with better utilization and targeted scale-down, according to this AWS blog. It presents data from two customers but what’s more useful: it tells you how to figure your EMR cluster cost savings through the CloudWatch console. Check it out. AWS BLOG
Batch Load in Amazon Timestream
Batch Load is a serverless way to move batched, time-series data in CSV files from S3 directly to the time series database. UPDATE
Higher write throughput on Amazon Kinesis
Amazon Kinesis Data Streams increases On-demand write throughput from 200MB/s to 1GB/s. UPDATE
AI/ML
Choose SageMaker Autopilot algorithms
When creating an Autopilot experiment, Amazon SageMaker will now let you select from the available algorithms for the training mode. UPDATE
Security
Threat Detection and Response Report
A key theme from a Google Cloud survey of 400 SecOps practitioners included comparisons between on-prem and cloud security. 25% more respondents said cloud offers more “opportunities to learn” because of richer telemetry and more automation. 84% believed they need to automate more to manage evolving threats better, and that the biggest threats on cloud, compared to on-prem, were crypto mining and data leakage. And that skills and knowledge of SecOps teams, who the majority thought were well-staffed, are inadequate. REPORT
Open source security report
Synopsis report looked at findings of 1,703 commercial codebase audits. 96% contained open source code, and 89% had an open source codebase that was more than 4 years out of date - an increase of 5 percent over 2022. 91% didn’t apply updates because they weren’t aware an update was available. RECOMMENDATIONS
Code scan Lambda functions
The Amazon Inspector feature, in preview, will enable vulnerability and best practice scans for custom proprietary code within a Lambda function. UPDATE
Applications
Telecom Data Fabric from Google Cloud
An end-to-end data management and analytics platform introduced at the Mobile World Congress 2023. It enables centralized data governance and analytics for telcos. It comes with adapters to ingest data from multiple sources, and supports open data models and APIs. Key use cases include multi-domain unified data modeling, data normalization, and correlation. UPDATE
Provisioning + Runtime
Azure VMware Solution for government
Azure VMware Solution is now available in Microsoft Azure Government in public preview. UPDATE
AWS Lambda and its dated Python runtime
Cloud consultant Corey Quinn says that despite numerous requests, the AWS Lambda team has failed to bring v3.10 support to its Python-managed runtime while v3.12 is in development. Calls it a sign of irresponsibility as it adds overheads for users and dilutes the value proposition of serverless. BLOG
NPW Weekly Trends
What CSP products got the highest attention. Topics that generated keen interest. Based on what was read by 12,000+ software engineers, DevOps engineers and solution architects the previous week.
Top reads last week for Software Engineers
- The big news of interest was AWS Glue Crawler’s integration with Lake Formation
- Role-based access policies to Quicksight data sources that connect to S3 and Amazon Athena also trended.
- So did the Google-IDC data and AI trends report, and Azure’s publishing of the web app pattern for .NET
