AWS This Week: Melbourne AWS region, Amazon DeepLens EOL & CloudTrail Lake supports non-AWS events

Hello Cloud Gurus. Welcome to AWS This Week, your premium supplier of the latest news about AWS. This week we'll be talking about CloudTrail Lake, now supporting events from outside AWS, the retirement of Amazon DeepLens, some updates to the AWS Snow Family, and the new AWS region right here in Melbourne, Australia. I'm Stephen Sennett here to bring you another episode of AWS This Week. CloudTrail Lake now supports events from non-AWS sources. CloudTrail Lake was really designed to help us aggregate our CloudTrail logs from across multiple accounts into one location so that we can store and query them in a more unified way. This solves a lot of headaches for organizations with lots of CloudTrail audit logs who wanna be able to analyze them effectively and run queries with tools like SQL. Now, you can ingest non-AWS events into your CloudTrail Lake as well. Solutions from various AWS partners like Okta, GitHub, CrowdStrike, and Snyk can easily be integrated into your lake using AWS console. You can also write your own custom integrations using the available event schema and the newly available API calls. Again, this is really focused on those auditing and security events rather than the general application logs. If your security team are looking for a solution to consolidate storage and analysis of these type of events, this could be worth checking out and it's now available in all regions where CloudTrail Lake is supported. AWS DeepLens has been given an end of life notice with access for the service due to terminate at the end of January, 2024. If you're not familiar with it, DeepLenss is basically a video camera attached to a small NUC-type computer with a GPU that can host machine learning models powered by frameworks like TensorFlow or MXNet. It was designed for developers to be able to quickly deploy and run Computer Vision solutions, and people did some really interesting things with it. DeepLens is a rare case for an AWS service actually being deprecated. I mean, just look at Simple Workflow Service. The newest model from 2019 is also coming up to being about five years old, so it makes sense they're ready to call it quits, especially with the proliferation of more powerful edge computing solutions in recent years. This was always intended as a platform for experimentation rather than as a production system. So chances are this isn't going to ruin your day. Your hardware will continue to work beyond end of life, but you'll no longer be able to deploy any new models to it. But if you still have a DeepLens sitting unopened in a box in your wardrobe, you've got about a year left to see what you can do with it, or we can send it to the local museum. The AWS Snow Family has had a couple of updates in the last week, which we'll cover quickly. Ubuntu 20. 04 in 22. 04, the two latest LTS versions are now supported on Snowcone and Snowball Edge devices, giving you a wider range of possibilities for edge deployments with these platforms. AWS Snowcone now supports system software updates, which can be important if you're leasing your Snowcone for an extended period of time. Both Snowcone and Snowball Edge devices now support version 2 of the Instance Metadata Service. Needless to say, if we're using these platforms for compute, we probably value our security quite a lot, so it's great to be able to start leveraging IMDSv2. Unfortunately, no updates for Snow Mobile, but when you're a truck that can hold a hundred petabytes of data and require as much power as a small neighborhood, you're impressive enough as it is. For regional availability for each of these announcements, see the links and description below the video. The latest AWS region has gone live right here in beautiful, sunny Melbourne, Australia. This takes AWS up to a total of 31 regions worldwide. The two biggest advantages of the new region are to deliver either single digit millisecond latency within the Melbourne area, or to provide significantly higher resilience across multiple regions while still making data sovereignty requirements. If you're hosting solutions on AWS in Australia, this can be really valuable. The region is still very new, and there's still a lot of services and instances that are yet become available. That said, if you're looking to start leveraging a second region, now is the perfect time to get things rolling by preparing your architectures and infrastructure to support a multi-region design. More functionality will become available over the coming months. So be sure to check out the AWS newsfeed for the latest information. You could start using this new region right now by enabling in the AWS console. That's it for the news this week. We hope you've enjoyed it. Also, if you're interested in our content, be sure to check out the free trial available on the A Cloud Guru website, which includes access to all of our courses and our awesome range of hands-on labs. Until next time, go forth and learn all the things, and as always, keep being awesome Cloud Gurus.