AWS & DevOps Recap:
September 2020

AWS And DevOps Recap

In this article, I’ll go over some of the AWS & DevOps-related announcements that caught my eye last month.

These include new AWS features and an exciting acquisition that can shake up the DevOps tooling market.

Let’s get started.

Amazon WorkSpaces enables AWS Resource Groups Tag Editor

This is an awesome addition, although a bit late. 

WorkSpaces is a service that allows customers to provision Windows or Linux desktops quickly. It’s commonly used to give remote workers or contractors access to company apps on a device of their choice.

As you can imagine, it’s quite popular right now.

And as tagging is an essential part of running any AWS account, it was important to add more tagging capabilities to WorkSpaces. 

In short, this new addition allows people to manage and automate tasks on lots of resources at the same time.

Further reading: AWS Tags Best Practices and AWS Tagging Strategies – Part 1 Introduction

Amazon Chime SDK React UI Library

This announcement caught my eye for a few reasons.

First, it’s always great to see AWS contributing to GitHub. AWS has had trouble with the way it treats smaller competitors that open-source their products. But, to their credit, they have made an effort to give back more to the community. This React Library is another step in the right direction.

If you’re interested, check out the source code and examples on GitHub.

I’m also curious to see which direction AWS decides to go with Chime. 

As a communications service, Chime is in one of the most competitive markets right now. 

The COVID pandemic turned remote work into the norm, rather than an exception. Zoom went from 10 million daily users to over 200 million in four months, Google Hangouts’ daily usage increased 25x in less than two months and Amazon… well, they partnered with Slack

Don’t get me wrong, the deal will probably pay dividends down the line. But it’s nowhere near growing over 20x in a few months. 

Regardless of the outcome, the battle for this market is fascinating. And if AWS manages to make Chime less terrible, they’ll probably carve a big piece of the pie along with Google (Hangouts and Meet) and Microsoft (Teams). 

Further reading: How Cerner uses the Amazon Chime SDK to enhance its virtual health strategy

AWS CodePipeline now Supports GitHub Enterprise Server

Speaking of GitHub, this is another major announcement from last month.

CodePipeline is AWS’s CD service. It’s fully managed, allowing customers to automate the build, test and deploy phases of the release process.

Until now, customers could get their source code for CodePipeline from AWS CodeCommit, S3, Bitbucket Cloud, or GitHub.com. The addition of GitHub Enterprise Server to these source code providers is truly massive.

People were asking for this to happen for years. There are even tons of articles and tutorials on how to work around this gap.

But that’s water under the bridge now and this is another step in the right direction.

Further reading: Complete CI/CD with AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodeBuild, AWS CodeDeploy, and AWS CodePipeline

Amazon S3 on Outposts Now Available

Outposts is AWS’s hybrid cloud solution. 

In short, this service allows customers to use the same cloud services, tools and APIs to develop on-premises. This happens by ordering the hardware (Outpost) from AWS. They deliver it and install it in a local data center. 

After that, the Outposts are managed, monitored and updated by AWS.  

The Outposts are also connected to an AWS Region and can access S3 buckets in AWS Regions. With this new addition, customers can use S3 APIs to store and retrieve data in their Outposts just like they would in a regular region.

Companies that need to store and process data locally can reduce their spending with this new feature. A ton of pre-procession can be performed on the data locally, without having to send it to an AWS Region. 

This might seem insignificant at first, but data transfer prices in AWS can be a killer.

I’m not 100% sold on the idea of hybrid yet. However, it’s interesting to see how much time and resources the major cloud providers are spending to upgrade their hybrid cloud offerings. 

Further reading: AWS Outposts Powering The Healthcare Industry

JEDI Contract Controversy Continues

If you’re familiar with the JEDI contract saga, you’re probably sick of it at this point.

If not, here’s a quick TL;DR:

JEDI (in this case) stands for Joint Enterprise Defence Infrastructure. Put simply, it’s a big fat cloud computing contract with the US Department of Defence. Reportedly, it’s worth around $10 billion.

AWS, Microsoft, Google, Oracle and IBM all tried to snag the contract. Considering that it’s not the 1980s (sorry IBM) and Oracle’s cloud offering is horrendous, the big three were the only viable candidates.

In the end, it all came down to AWS and Microsoft. The latter won and AWS was less than thrilled. 

Last month, AWS came out with another PR statement regarding the issue and they pulled no punches. This time, after months of bashing Microsoft, they aimed primarily at the administration and President Trump.

Apparently, Amazon isn’t willing to give up a $10 billion contract that easy. Who would’ve guessed?

Now the courts and media are also involved, which is never a good thing.

Unfortunately, the saga isn’t coming to an end anytime soon. And no one wins because of that. 

Further reading: The JEDI contract saga in detail

Progress Acquires Chef For $220 Million

This is definitely the biggest DevOps news from last month.

Chef is a pioneer of the DevOps movement. They were one of the first companies to popularize the Infrastructure-as-Code approach by offering automated IT configuration management. 

To this day, they continue to contribute heavily to the improvement of the DevOps community. In fact, their security and compliance push has been crucial to the addition of the “Sec” part in the new DevSecOps approach.

On the flipside, we have Progress. They’ve been in the software development market for over 40 years (yes, you read that right). They’re probably the biggest software company most people haven’t heard of.

However, until now, they didn’t have a lot going in the operations side of things. Chef’s portfolio of tools is a perfect fit that expands Progress’ app development tools. On paper, this looks like a superb acquisition.

Further reading: Chef going 100% open source under the Apache 2 license last year

And that’s about it for September 2020.

Of course, there were tons of other announcements that you also might find interesting. If you’re interested, check out: 

Finally, if you’re in need of AWS or DevOps advice, don’t hesitate to drop us a line.

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