In February this year, Australia welcomed its second AWS region right here in Melbourne. This significant milestone has been a boon for organisations operating on AWS within Australia as it enables them to move workloads closer to their customers for reduced latencies and improved performance.
Join us as we take a look at the latest services and features that have been enabled in the AWS Melbourne region over the past few months.
Networking
AWS Transit Gateway
In June, AWS Transit Gateway, a network service that simplifies and centralises the management of multiple Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) and on-premises network connections became available in the Melbourne region. With AWS Transit Gateway, organisations can streamline network connectivity and reduce operational overhead, enhancing their ability to build and scale multi-VPC and hybrid cloud environments.
In August, we also saw AWS Transit Gateway Flow Logs come online. This feature provides detailed information about network traffic flowing through your Transit Gateway. Captured data includes source and destination IP addresses, ports, protocols, and timestamps, helping you monitor and analyse network activity. These logs are invaluable for troubleshooting, security analysis, and compliance requirements, giving you insights into traffic patterns and potential issues within your AWS network infrastructure.
AWS Network Firewall Manager
AWS Network Firewall Manager simplifies the management and deployment of network firewalls across your organisation’s AWS accounts. It provides centralised control and visibility over your firewall policies, making it easier to ensure consistent security across your VPCs and workloads. Network Firewall Manager streamlines the administration of AWS WAF and AWS Firewall Manager policies, helping organisations protect their applications and resources from threats effectively.
AWS Transfer Family
AWS Transfer Family is a collection of managed file transfer services. It allows users to easily and securely transfer files to and from AWS storage services such as Amazon S3 and Amazon EFS. AWS Transfer Family supports multiple protocols like FTP, SFTP, and FTPS, making it suitable for a wide range of file transfer needs. It simplifies the setup and management of file transfer operations while maintaining security and compliance standards.
Compute
AWS Lambda Functions powered by Graviton2
AWS Lambda is a serverless computing service by Amazon Web Services that enables you to run code in response to events without the need for server management. It’s a versatile platform for building scalable and event-driven applications, making it easier to focus on your code while AWS handles the underlying infrastructure.
Utilising Graviton2 processors with AWS Lambda offers several advantages. These ARM-based processors are optimised for serverless workloads, providing enhanced performance and cost-efficiency. They enable Lambda functions to execute at a lower cost per request, making it an attractive choice for building efficient and cost-effective serverless applications.
VMWare Cloud
VMware Cloud on AWS is a jointly engineered cloud solution that seamlessly integrates VMware’s virtualisation technology with Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure. It allows organisations to run their VMware workloads in the AWS cloud environment, providing flexibility, scalability, and the ability to leverage AWS services. This solution simplifies hybrid cloud operations, enabling businesses to migrate, extend, and protect their existing VMware-based applications and data in a familiar VMware environment, while benefiting from the scale and agility of AWS.
Amazon EC2 Instance Connect
As a relatively new feature, it’s great to see Amazon EC2 Instance Connect available for use today in the Melbourne region. This feature makes it possible to connect to your EC2 instances via a dedicated AWS IAM secured endpoint over SSH. What is particularly impressive about this is you can safely connect to instances running in your private subnets without the need for a jump-box or internet gateway.
Be sure to check out our recent post for an overview of this awesome new feature.
AWS Elemental MediaConvert
AWS Elemental MediaConvert is a service for video transcoding and media processing. It enables content creators and broadcasters to easily convert media files from one format to another, making it suitable for various delivery platforms like web, mobile devices, and broadcast. MediaConvert offers a scalable and efficient solution for video processing, including features like closed captioning, DRM encryption, and adaptive bitrate streaming, helping organisations deliver high-quality video content to their audiences.
Data
Amazon SageMaker
AWS SageMaker is a fully managed machine learning service. It simplifies the end-to-end machine learning workflow, from data preparation and model training to deployment and scaling. With SageMaker, data scientists and developers can build, train, and deploy machine learning models quickly and efficiently. It offers a comprehensive set of tools and resources to accelerate the development of AI-powered applications, making it easier for organisations to harness the power of machine learning in their projects.
AWS Glue
AWS Glue is a managed ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) service, streamlining the process of preparing and moving data for analysis in the AWS. It automates tasks like data discovery, transformation, and job scheduling, making it a powerful tool for senior software engineers like you with expertise in AWS and data management.
Amazon Athena
Amazon Athena is a serverless query service designed for analysing data stored in Amazon S3 using standard SQL queries. It eliminates the need for complex data transformation or loading processes, allowing users to quickly and cost-effectively run ad-hoc queries on large datasets. AWS Athena simplifies data analysis and exploration, making it a valuable tool for extracting insights from your stored data without the need for infrastructure management.
AWS Lake Formation
AWS Lake Formation is a comprehensive data lake management service. It simplifies the process of setting up, securing, and managing a data lake. With AWS Lake Formation, users can easily ingest, catalogue, and transform data from various sources into a structured format for analysis. It streamlines data access control and provides a centralised platform for data lakes, making it a valuable tool for organisations looking to harness the power of big data and analytics.
Migration and backup
AWS Application Migration Service
AWS Application Migration Service is a specialised migration tool designed to simplify and accelerate the migration of on-premises applications to AWS. It automates the process of discovering, replicating, and launching applications in the cloud, reducing the complexities associated with migration projects. This service helps organisations transition their workloads seamlessly, ensuring minimal downtime and a smooth transition to AWS infrastructure.
AWS Backup improvements
While AWS Backup has been available for use in Melbourne for a number of months now we recently saw some additional features of this service come online.
Cross-account backups are now supported to allow copying of data from a backup vault from one account to another. This offers additional data protection in the event of a disruption to the source account such as a service outage or data corruption.
We also got backup support for Amazon S3. This provides a robust backup solution for those storing application data in S3.
Databases
Amazon Aurora Serverless v2
Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 is an enhanced version of Amazon Aurora Serverless, a fully managed relational database service. It offers the benefits of on-demand auto-scaling, automatically adjusting database capacity based on actual usage. Aurora Serverless v2 further improves upon this capability, providing even more granular scalability, faster scaling, and cost savings. It’s an ideal choice for applications with variable workloads, as it ensures efficient database performance and cost-effectiveness without the need for manual capacity management.
Amazon RDS Graviton2 based instances
AWS RDS, or Amazon Relational Database Service, is a managed database service which simplifies the process of setting up, operating, and scaling relational databases in the cloud. With RDS, you can choose from several database engines, such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and SQL Server, and AWS takes care of routine database tasks like patching, backups, and hardware provisioning. This makes it easier for developers to focus on building applications rather than managing databases, ensuring high availability and data durability.
It is now possible to create Graviton2 based instances with T4g, M6g and R6g instance types now available.
DynamoDB Global Tables
AWS DynamoDB Global Tables is a feature of Amazon DynamoDB, a managed NoSQL database service, that enables automatic and seamless replication of data across multiple AWS regions. It ensures high availability and low-latency access to data for applications with a global user base. DynamoDB Global Tables automatically handles data synchronisation and failover, making it a robust solution for building globally distributed and highly resilient applications that require near-instantaneous data access and redundancy.
Conclusion
As evident, the AWS Melbourne region has witnessed several significant additions over the past few months. With more tent-pole services coming online such as AWS Transit Gateway and with improvements to existing services like AWS Backup, it is likely we will see more businesses extend workloads into this region.
At the time of writing, there are a total of 92 services available in the Melbourne region, in contrast to the 210 services offered in the Sydney region.
To stay updated on the latest announcements regarding enhancements and new offerings in the AWS Melbourne region, be sure to keep a close watch on this blog.
