Monthly Cloudy Updates, January 2025

Table of Contents

Hello World!

Happy new year everyone! Let’s start this year with some interesting news and articles I found interesting.

Want to improve your Git skills? Check out this article Git - Beyond the Basics
Good article about complex systems migrations How to Actually Migrate Complex Systems in Infrastructure.
Of course, we need to talk about AI, AI is Creating a Generation of Illiterate Programmers.
If you think software is just about shinny new technologies, you might need to read this>: Software is mostly made of people.

And now, let’s get to the updates!

AWS

AWS WAF Console adds new Top Insights Visualizations

AWS WAF’s console dashboard now includes richer visualizations that give you insights into the top sources of traffic. With this feature, customers with CloudWatch logging destinations can view a new top insights section within the all traffic dashboard. More details here.

Amazon DynamoDB now supports configurable point-in-time-recovery periods

Amazon DynamoDB now supports a configurable period for point-in-time-recovery (PITR). You can specify the duration for data recoverability using PITR on a per-table basis, ranging from 1 to 35 days.

AWS CodeBuild now supports batch builds with reserved capacity and Lambda compute

Batch builds in CodeBuild enable the simultaneous execution of multiple, coordinated builds within a project. This feature is particularly beneficial for developers working on multi-platform projects or those with interdependent build processes.

I cannot believe it is 2025 and this is being announced. More info here.

AWS Encryption SDK for Go now generally available

Developers can now use the AWS Encryption SDK for Go to help protect their data. This open-source release makes it easier for developers to encrypt and decrypt their data when building applications using the Go programming language. More info here.

Amazon Redshift introduces new SQL features for zero-ETL integrations

QUERY_ALL_STATES allows you to query tables in all states, including during updates, ensuring continuous data availability. TRUNCATECOLUMNS automatically truncates VARCHAR data that exceeds Amazon Redshift’s length limit, preventing replication errors and ensuring smoother data ingestion. ACCEPTINVCHARS enables you to replace invalid UTF-8 characters with a specified character of your choice, which is particularly useful when dealing with data from various sources that may contain non-standard characters. More info here.

With default throughput matching SNS standard topics across all regions. When you enable high-throughput mode, SNS FIFO topics will maintain order within message group, while reducing the de-duplication scope to the message-group level. More info here.

Amazon EventBridge announces direct delivery to cross-account targets

Amazon EventBridge Event Bus now allows you to deliver events directly to AWS services in another account. This feature enables you to use multiple accounts to improve security and streamline business processes while reducing the overall cost and complexity of your architecture. More info here.

AWS Client VPN announces support for concurrent VPN connections

This feature allows you to securely connect to multiple Client VPN connections simultaneously, enabling access to your resources across different work environments. More info here.

Amazon EKS and Amazon EKS Distro now supports Kubernetes version 1.32

More info here.

Amazon S3 Metadata is now generally available

S3 Metadata automatically captures metadata from objects as they are uploaded into a bucket and makes that metadata queryable in a read-only table. As data in your bucket changes, S3 Metadata updates the table within minutes to reflect the latest changes. More info here.

Amazon S3 Tables now support 10,000 tables per table bucket

Amazon S3 Tables now support creating up to 10,000 tables in each S3 table bucket. With this higher quota, you can scale up to 100,000 tables across 10 table buckets within an AWS Region per AWS Account.

Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus collector adds support for cross-account ingestion

You can now agentlessly scrape metrics from Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service clusters in different accounts than your Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus workspace. More info here.

Azure

Collect Azure Container Storage metrics with Azure Monitor Managed Service for Prometheus (Public Preview)

Customers using Azure Container Storage (ACStor) on AKS clusters can now collect storage pool and disk metrics with Azure Monitor Managed Service for Prometheus and view/query metrics in Azure Managed Grafana.

Generally Available: App Service session affinity proxy compatibility

The new session affinity proxy setting allows you to adapt the session affinity cookie to the custom domain used by a reverse proxy when calling the App Service app using the default host name. More info here.

WebSocket support in Application Gateway for Containers is now generally available

More info here.

Public Preview: Seamless Amazon API Gateway Integration for API Center

One of the standout capabilities of this integration is its ability to handle changes on the AWS side. Once the APIs are registered, any updates or modifications made on AWS will be continuously synchronized with API Center. More info here.

Retirement: Resources interacting with Azure Automation using TLS 1.0/1.1 protocol will be blocked from March 1, 2025

Ensure your resources interact with Azure Automation using TLS 1.2 or higher. Follow these steps to disable TLS 1.0/1.1 protocols and enable TLS 1.2 or higher for Windows and Linux machines.

Azure Resource Manager will be retiring support for TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1

To avoid any service disruptions, update to TLS 1.2 and remove any dependencies on TLS 1.0/1.1 by  March 1, 2024.

Support for new custom error pages in Application Gateway

In addition to the response codes 403 and 502, the Azure Application Gateway now lets you configure company-branded error pages for more response codes - 400, 405, 408, 500, 503, and 504. More info here.

Public Preview: Azure Monitor Integrates Performance Diagnostics for Enhanced VM Troubleshooting

This integration is now available in the VM Overview Monitoring Tab and VM Insights blade of Azure Monitor, providing a seamless experience that combines monitoring and diagnostics in one place. More info here.

Google Cloud

Media CDN

Now supports dynamic compression for compressible content by using Brotli and gzip algorithms. Enabling dynamic compression can help you achieve faster page load times, speed up playback speed for video content, and optimize egress costs. More info here.

Batch

You can use the Google Cloud console to create jobs that use GPUs.

Spanner

You can now monitor and troubleshoot queries that are running in your Spanner instance. More info here.

Google Cloud Deploy

You can now connect to your GKE cluster’s DNS-based endpoint, simplifying networking configuration when talking to private clusters from Cloud Deploy. More info here.

Cloud Logging

You can now create analytics views, which let you transform your log data into a custom format. You can then use SQL to query your analytics views. More info here.

Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

VPC Flow Logs can sample traffic that is sent through VLAN attachments for Cloud Interconnect and Cloud VPN tunnels. More info here.
You can create a VPC network with the RDMA network profile, which lets you run AI workloads on VM instances that have RDMA network interfaces (NICs), more info here.
Private Service Connect endpoints for regional Google APIs can be configured with IPv6 addresses to support access from IPv6 clients. More info here.

Cloud Run

You can now deploy multiple containers (sidecars) to a Cloud Run job.

Compute Engine

Compute Engine is enabled for use with Cloud KMS Autokey. Using keys generated by Autokey can help you consistently align with industry standards and recommended practices for data security. More info here.
Managed instance groups (MIGs) let you create pools of suspended and stopped virtual machine (VM) instances. More info here.
To prevent data loss or corruption when a compute instance is stopped, you can enable graceful shutdown in the instance. This setting gives the guest OS up to one hour to finish running tasks. Gracefully shutting down an instance is helpful when, for example, your database needs time to complete active transactions, your multiplayer session needs time to end properly, or you want to cleanly shutdown a high performance computing (HPC) job. More info here.
You can now modify which machine types are recommended, so that the generated recommendations only include your preferred machine series. You can also change the metrics used to generate memory recommendations to improve the accuracy of the recommendations. More info here.

Dataflow

Managed I/O now supports automatic upgrades for supported I/O connectors. Using this feature, Dataflow pipelines automatically use the latest reliable version of the connector. More info here.

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)

User-managed firewall rules for GKE LoadBalancer Services is now generally available on GKE clusters running version 1.31.3-gke.1056000 or later. By allowing user-managed firewall rules for GKE LoadBalancer Services, advanced firewall policies can now be configured to control ingress traffic to your GKE Services exposed with passthrough network load balancers. More info here.

Cloud Storage

You can now enable client-side traces with OpenTelemetry when you use Cloud Storage client libraries. More info here.