Welcome to above the clouds

GCP – Introducing the new Google Cloud Trace Explorer
Distributed tracing is a critical part of an observability stack, letting you troubleshoot latency and errors in your applications. Cloud Trace, part of Google Cloud Observability, is Google Cloud’s native tracing product, and we’ve made numerous improvements to the Trace explorer UI on top of a new analytics backend. The new Trace explorer page contains: […]

GCP – Phishing Campaigns Targeting Higher Education Institutions
Written by: Ashley Pearson, Ryan Rath, Gabriel Simches, Brian Timberlake, Ryan Magaw, Jessica Wilbur Overview Beginning in August 2024, Mandiant observed a notable increase in phishing attacks targeting the education industry, specifically U.S.-based universities. A separate investigation conducted by the Google’s Workspace Trust and Safety team identified a long-term campaign spanning from at least October 2022, […]

AWS – Certificate-Based Authentication is now available on Amazon AppStream 2.0 multi-session fleets
Amazon AppStream 2.0 improves the end-user experience by adding support for certificate-based authentication (CBA) on multi-session fleets running the Microsoft Windows operating system and joined to an Active Directory. This functionality helps administrators to leverage the cost benefits of the multi-session model while providing an enhanced end-user experience. By combining these enhancements with the existing […]

AWS – Announcing fine-grained access control via AWS Lake Formation with EMR on EKS
We are excited to announce the general availability of fine-grained data access control (FGAC) via AWS Lake Formation for Apache Spark with Amazon EMR on EKS. This enables you to enforce full FGAC policies (database, table, column, row, and cell-level) defined in Lake Formation for your data lake tables from EMR on EKS Spark jobs. […]

AWS – You can now use your China UnionPay credit card to create an AWS account
Amazon Web Services, Inc. now supports China UnionPay credit cards for creating new AWS accounts, eliminating the need for international credit cards for customers in China. To use China UnionPay for creating your AWS account, enter your address and billing country in China, then provide your local China UnionPay credit card details and verify your […]

AWS – Amazon MSK adds support for Apache Kafka version 3.8
Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) now supports Apache Kafka version 3.8. You can now create new clusters using version 3.8 with either KRAFT or ZooKeeper mode for metadata management or upgrade your existing ZooKeeper based clusters to use version 3.8. Apache Kafka version 3.8 includes several bug fixes and new features that […]

AWS – AWS CodePipeline adds native Amazon EC2 deployment support
AWS CodePipeline introduces a new action to deploy to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). This action enables you to easily deploy your application to a group of EC2 instances behind load balancers. Previously, if you wanted to deploy to EC2 instances, you had to use CodeDeploy with an AppSpec file to configure the deployment. Now, […]

AWS – Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL supports minor versions 17.4, 16.8, 15.12, 14.17, 13.20
Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for PostgreSQL now supports the latest minor versions 17.4, 16.8, 15.12, 14.17, and 13.20. Please note, this release supports the versions released by the PostgreSQL community on February, 20,2025 to address the regression that was part of the February 13, 2025 release. We recommend that you upgrade to the latest […]

AWS – AWS Database Migration Service now supports Multi-ENI networking for homogeneous migrations.
Amazon Database Migration Service (DMS) now supports the Multi-ENI networking model and Credentials Vending System for DMS Homogenous Migrations. Customers can now choose the Multi-ENI connection type and use the Credentials Vending System, providing a simplified networking configuration experience for secure connectivity to their on-premises database instances. For information see documentation for AWS DMS Homogeneous […]
GCP – Introducing Cloud DNS public IP health checks, for more resilient multicloud deployments
Organizations use multiple clouds to gain agility, use resources more efficiently, and leverage the strengths of different cloud providers. However, managing application traffic across these environments is challenging. To support predictable services, organizations need a system that intelligently selects the optimal backend for each request. The selection takes into account both the real-time health of […]