AWS Week in Review – April 4, 2022

This post is part of our Week in Review series. Check back each week for a quick round up of interesting news and announcements from AWS!

Welcome to the April 4 edition of the AWS Week in Review. This week, alongside the main launches, I also captured a couple of new capabilities, such as a new API to manage your AWS accounts within AWS Organizations, an easier process to update your AWS Lambda layers, and a new behavior of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

Last Week’s Launches
Here are some launches that caught my attention last week:

Sustainability Pillar is now available in the Well Architect Tool – The Well Architected Tool is a central place for cloud architecture best practices and guidance. The Sustainability Pillar was announced at the re:Invent 2021 conference. It helps you to learn, measure, and improve your workloads using environmental best practices for cloud computing.

Close an AWS Member Account with an API Call – This feature was launched with little fanfare, but it is a big deal for those of you managing large numbers of AWS accounts through Organizations.  The Twitter community first spotted the change, noticing a commit in the AWS SDK for Go. See the official blog post announcement for more information!

The Lambda Console Now Allows Updates a Lambda Layer in All or a Subset of Functions – Lambda layers provide a convenient way to package libraries and other dependencies that you can use with your Lambda functions. Using layers reduces the size of uploaded deployment archives and makes it faster to deploy your code. Previously, it was challenging to identify and update all the functions that used a specific layer version. With this release, the Lambda console displays a list of all the functions using a given layer and allows you to select multiple functions to be updated with a newer layer version. It eliminates the need to update one function at a time or utilize an external script to perform the update on multiple functions.

Amazon EC2 Launched Automatic Recovery on Hardware Failure by Default – This new feature makes it easier to recover your instance when it becomes unreachable. Automatic recovery improves instance availability by recovering the instance if it becomes impaired due to an underlying hardware issue. Automatic recovery migrates the instance to another hardware during an instance reboot while retaining its instance ID, private IP addresses, Elastic IP addresses, and all instance metadata. You can choose to disable automatic recovery for your instance if you wish.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New at AWS page.

Other AWS News
Beside launches, here are other news worthy items and a blog that caught my attention:

New AWS podcast for Sub-Saharan AWS communities – There are AWS podcasts in many different languages: English, French, Italian, German, three in Spanish, and Russian just to name a few. This week, my colleague Veliswa launched an English podcast aimed at highlighting the Sub-Saharian AWS communities and customers. You can listen to it using any good podcast application (including but not only Spotify and Apple).

100th episode of Le Podcast AWS en Français – This week also marked the publication of the 100th episode of the AWS French Podcast. Since its start in 2019, the podcast has seen 250k downloads. Thank you for listening.

AWS Open Source News and Updates – My colleague Ricardo writes this weekly open-source newsletter. In the 106th edition, I noticed two pieces of information important for the Java community:

First, we released Amazon Corretto 18. This version supports the latest Java feature release OpenJDK 18, and is available on Linux, Windows, and macOS. OpenJDK 18 offers a new internet-address resolution capability, a Simple Web Server, an updated Vector API, a new @snippet Tag for JavaDoc, a new implementation of Core Reflection, a change to UTF-8 as the default character set (charset) of the standard Java APIs, a second iteration of the foreign memory API, advancements in pattern matching for switch statements, and the deprecation of finalization.

Second, we published a blog post showing how to reduce Lambda cold start time by deploying your Java-based Lambda function on Quarkus. Quarkus was created by Java Champion Emmanuel Bernard. It is an open-source native Java stack tailored for GraalVM and OpenJDK HotSpot, crafted from the best of breed Java libraries and standards. It is designed to have an extremely low memory footprint and fast startup time. And yes, Quarkus runs on Corretto too.

A Cloud Guru Answers a Common Question – Nearly every week, people ask me what AWS certification they should take. A Cloud Guru walks through the decision in Which AWS certification is right for me?

Upcoming AWS Events
Check your calendars and sign up for these AWS events:

The AWS Summit season has started – The Brussels Summit was last week, and the next ones are Paris, San Francisco, and London, in that order. I will be delivering the closing keynote at the Paris Summit and will be around the Formula1 GameDay area in London. Be sure to stop by and say “Hi!” if you’re around. You can sign up to receive a notification when registration opens for a Summit in your area. If you can’t attend a Summit in person this year, we will have an online Summit for EMEA in June (at European time, but all sessions will stay available on-demand until September).

.NET Enterprise Developer Day EMEA registrations are open – .NET Enterprise Developer Day EMEA 2022 is a free, one-day virtual conference providing enterprise developers with the most relevant information to swiftly and efficiently migrate and modernize their .NET applications and workloads on AWS. It will happen online on April 26, 2022.

re:Mars conference registrations are open – Mars stands for Machine learning, Automation, Robotics, and Space. You will learn from recognized thought leaders and technical experts who are building the future of AI/ML. It will happen in Las Vegas, Nevada, between June 21 and 24, 2022.

re:Inforce conference registrations are open – Security is our first priority at AWS, and it deserves its own two-day conference to reinforce your AWS security posture. You’ll hear the latest from industry-leading speakers in security, compliance, identity, and privacy. It will happen in Boston, Massachusetts, on July 26 and 27, 2022.

That’s all for this week. Come back next Monday for another Week in Review!

— seb