AWS This Week: 35 new Step Functions integrations, Glue Crawlers & Systems Manager by default

Hello Cloud Gurus and welcome to AWS This Week. we have some very exciting AWS updates to share with you this week, including Step Functions steps it up with 35 new service integrations, AWS Glue Crawlers now integrate with AWS Lake Formation. You can now enable Systems Manager by default on your EC2 instances, and make sure you stick around for the end of the episode. We have some exciting announcements about the future of this channel. I'm David Blocher, and this is AWS This Week. Let's start off with some exciting news in serverless. This week AWS announced 35 new service integrations for Step Functions. Step Functions were already an extremely powerful way to orchestrate and scale serverless AWS services. And with this most recent batch of service integrations, you can now orchestrate over 250 different services using Step Functions. Most notably, you can now include EMR Serverless, Clean Rooms, and IoT Fleetwise in your Step Functions. With Step Functions, you write less integration code and spend less time on finicky permissions, which gives you more time for your value adding business logic and data analysis. Speaking of data analysis, AWS just announced that AWS Glue Crawlers now integrate with AWS Lake Formation. Glue Crawlers are used to discover data sets and their schema, and now crawling data sets in S3 data lakes is easier than ever. By centralizing access to Lake Formation, users can now configure Glue Crawlers to access same account or cross account data lakes upon setup without having to configure custom bucket policies for each S3 data source across all relevant accounts. With this simpler integration, creating more complex data mesh architectures with Glue Crawlers and Data Lakes across many accounts will be much more approachable, and I'm excited to see the ways in which AWS continues to improve the experience of extracting value from your data. Also, this week AWS announced an update to AWS Systems Manager, enabling users to set an account level configuration that enables Systems Manager tools on EC2 instances by default. This is achieved by using the Default Host Management Configuration and it ensures that features such as Patch Manager, Session Manager, and Inventory are available for all new and existing EC2 instances in an account. Because permissions are applied at the account level, you don't even need to worry about changing existing instance profile roles. This feature can be enabled in your account in just a few clicks from the Fleet Manager console. And finally, in some bittersweet news after over five years of runtime, this will be the final episode of AWS This Week in its current form. The good news is that we'll be stepping it up and making room for exciting new cloud content coming your way in 2023, so make sure you're subscribed to stay up to date. Thanks for watching and keep being awesome. As a special sendoff for our last episode, here's a thank you message directly from our very own Faye Ellis. Hello Cloud Gurus. Thank you so much for watching over the last few years. Keep being awesome. Take care of yourselves, and I will look forward to seeing you soon.