NPW Insights (Free): Week 4/4 for Software Engineer

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

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