nine.ch reports on the latest from AWS and shows how this is important for Swiss customers.
AWS Summit Berlin 2017 -
The visit to the AWS Summit 2017 in Berlin this year was again a good opportunity to hear news from AWS directly, find out more about the products and keep up to date with market developments. Discussions with colleagues are an important part of this.
nine.ch was represented at the AWS Summit in Berlin last week by Cyrill Troxler, Philipp Koch and Roman Plessl as a three-person delegation.
Over 3,000 visitors attended the keynote by AWS Chief Architect Glenn Gore, who had a great deal of very much anticipated news on the AWS site in Frankfurt to report.
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Frankfurt is receiving its third Availability Zone (AZ)
So far we - the nine.ch cloud architects - had designed and implemented AWS setups for Europe in and for Ireland. In this respect, this region was the only one in Europe where high availability with Quorum was possible over three Availability Zones. An Availability Zone consists of one or more data centres, each of which is housed separately, with redundant power and networking.
What’s more, new AWS services are available as the first of their kind in Europe, or even exclusively just in this Ireland Region.
With the opening of the AWS Region Frankfurt in autumn 2014 - from a Swiss perspective the nearest AWS location with the best network connectivity – so far Frankfurt lagged behind Ireland and therefore became second choice for us architects from nine.ch.
At the AWS Summit, Chief Architect Glenn Gore announced that the Frankfurt location would be expanded in terms of capacity and that a third Availability Zone (AZ) would be provided in Frankfurt from the middle of 2017. nine.ch will include this new 3-AZ-Region in the evaluation of new system architectures and take it into account in the recommendation.
You can find the original announcement from AWS here.
AWS Aurora (MySQL) also available in Frankfurt
AWS Aurora is - as I mentioned in my Managed AWS News - the high-availability, MySQL-compatible database from AWS. From the middle of 2017, Aurora will also be available and usable in the Region Frankfurt (eu-central-1).
At the Summit in Berlin, we saw more clearly that Aurora offers advantages over the “pure” MySQL in terms of continuous backup, failover (considerably faster than in a classic Multi-AZ MySQL setup) and even patching (nearly zero downtime).
You can find further technical details on Aurora in the following video, as well as in the announcement of the latest version of Aurora with (nearly) zero-downtime patching, taking into account some framework conditions.
AWS Elastic File System (EFS) also available in Frankfurt
In Frankfurt, the Amazon Elastic File System launched last year by AWS will also be available from the middle of 2017. EFS is a file system accessible from EC2 instances which offers a third type of data storage in addition to block storages (EBS) or in objects (S3).
High availability over several AZs, simultaneous use across multiple virtual EC2 servers, and automatic growing and shrinking are core components in EFS. The use of an NFS v4.1 client on the user’s side offers major advantages in terms of performance.
Detailed information on EFS can be found here.
New S3 Console - User experience
The new and improved Amazon S3 Console offers a user interface with significantly enhanced user experience and provides user interface support for two new S3 functions - object-level tagging and storage analytics.
The new Amazon S3 Console informs the S3 user of the buckets and objects used. The AWS Regions used, information on individual objects, and the summarisation in one overview field are now much more clearly displayed and easier to understand.
You can find the original announcement from AWS here.
Roman Plessl is one of the AWS Certified Solution Architects at nine.ch and writes about the most important AWS news for Swiss customers every week. Follow Roman on LinkedIn, to keep up to date.
