2017-06-07 - Managed AWS News

nine Team Jun 6, 2017

In our Managed AWS News I will show you what AWS offers for me and how our nine.ch customers can benefit from it.

AWS Batch now available for EU (Ireland)

AWS Batch is available to customers in the EU region (Ireland) since last week and will be interesting for customers with a repetitive and serial workload.

With AWS Batch, a number of batch computing jobs can be automated in the cloud and regardless of which EC2 instance is required for which task, apps and container images can be run.

Additionally, AWS Batch dynamically displays the optimal amount and type of calculation resources (for example, CPU or memory-optimized instances). These are based on the volume and resource requirements of jobs that are passed to the job queues.

This dynamic approach makes the many duplicated processors unnecessary which are required in the physical world for batch computing. By accessing a variety of different instances in the cloud, massive computing efficiency is created, which can be flexibly adapted as required.

AWS Batch is available at no extra cost. You can find the original message from AWS here.

Data export from Amazon Aurora to Amazon S3

Due to the latest update, data from an Amazon Aurora database can now be easily and directly exported to an Amazon S3 bucket.

This is done by an SQL statement, in which data can be queried directly from Amazon Aurora and then stored in an Amazon S3 bucket. Until now, this was only possible with a two-stage process. This novelty applies to all existing and new Aurora customers.

For us, the data export is an interesting extension of Amazon Aurora because we can advise you in the data extraction from the database and design the so-called data pruning with you. Data will be exported from the productive database and then deleted, which makes the current data state faster. The deleted data is available as a compressed version on the S3 instance and can easily be restored from there.

You can find the original message from AWS [here] (https://aws.amazon.com/de/about-aws/whats-new/2017/06/amazon-aurora-can-export-data-into-amazon-s3/).

Start & Stop database instances in Amazon RDS

Amazon RDS now supports starting and stopping database instances for MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and SQL Server. This means a simple and cost-effective use of databases for development and test purposes for the period for which they are needed.

This is especially suitable for our customers who are running a test or development environment at AWS which is managed by us. Therefore, we set up a timed, automated process to minimize costs and ensure that the integration or staging environment is equivalent to the productive environment.

While a database instance is stopped, your backups or transaction logs will persist. This allows a trouble-free re-commissioning of the instance at the same point at which it was stopped and enables flexible allocation “according to consumption”.

The original message from AWS can be found 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.