Welcome to above the clouds

GCP – You asked, we listened—more productivity features to close out Spanner’s year
Cloud Spanner has had a busy year. We’ve rolled out more enterprise features, including managed backup and restore, local emulator, and numerous multi-region configurations. It’s easier than ever to test and deploy applications across multiple regions without manual sharding, downtime, or patching, and with an industry-leading SLA of 99.999%. In addition to enterprise features, we […]

GCP – Rethinking business resilience with Google Cloud
During my last 20 years of IT projects and consultancy across enterprise businesses, I have seen recurring patterns being implemented to deliver a resilient IT strategy. Challenges across security, operation, innovation, data strategy, and insights are very common for enterprises looking to modernize. 2020 has so far proven to be a very challenging year for […]

AWS – AWS Config launches ability to save advanced queries
AWS Config advanced queries feature adds ability to save your queries in your AWS Config account. Now, when you customize a sample query or write your query, you can save it with a name, description, and tags. This eliminates the need to save a query in a separate repository or rewrite it every time you […]

AWS – Use AWS Secrets Manager to rotate your AWS Data Migration Service source and target database credentials
Starting today, you can use AWS Secrets Manager to rotate AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) source and target database credentials. Rotating credentials is an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) best practice that helps you meet your security and compliance requirements. Read More for the details.

AWS – Now compare different versions of your runbooks with AWS Systems Manager
AWS Systems Manager now lets you perform a side-by-side comparison between different versions of your runbooks and other Systems Manager documents such as Run Command documents. Using this feature, you can quickly troubleshoot issues by visually comparing what changed in your runbook across versions. Read More for the details.

AWS – Announcing the General Availability of Amazon Corretto 11 for Linux on ARM32 and for Windows on x86 (32-bit)
Amazon Corretto11 on ARM32 for Linux Platforms and x86 (32-bit) on Windows are now Generally Available. With our ARM32 build, you can run Corretto 11 on Linux distributions on 32bit ARMv7 hardware. Our x86 on Windows build will run on the same supported versions of Windows and will allow usage of 32-bit libraries. These are […]

AWS – Amazon Connect now supports sharing attachments in chat
You can now send attachments directly through Amazon Connect Chat, making it easier than ever to resolve your customers’ support needs. For example, an agent can send a copy of a recent hotel invoice or a customer can share a photo of a damaged product. Attachments are included in the chat transcript, to help ensure […]

AWS – Amazon Connect CTI Adapter for Salesforce now supports Contact Lens
The Amazon Connect Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) Adapter for Salesforce v5.9 now supports automatically adding transcripts and insights from Contact Lens for Amazon Connect to customer records and cases in Salesforce Service Cloud. Amazon Connect customers have enjoyed being able to gain valuable insights from their call recordings such as customer sentiment, agent sentiment, sentiment […]

AWS – AWS Snow Family now supports the Amazon Linux 2 operating system
AWS Snow Family now supports the Amazon Linux 2 operating system, enabling you to run your Windows-based workloads at the edge on AWS Snowcone, AWS Snowball Edge Compute Optimized, and AWS Snowball Edge Storage Optimized devices. Amazon Linux 2 provides a secure, stable, and high performance execution environment to develop and run cloud and enterprise […]
AWS – AWS Pricing Calculator now supports Windows Server and SQL Server workload cost estimates
AWS Pricing Calculator now supports Windows Server and SQL Server workload compute cost estimates. The workload estimate now accounts for Microsoft licensing. The Windows Server and SQL Server on Amazon EC2 calculator provides a selection of licensing options such as AWS-provided licenses with License Included (LI) offerings and customers’ existing licenses with bring your own […]