AWS Cloud News Round-up: September 2020

September 2020 updates on Amazon Comprehend, AWS Perspective, AWS Glue Studio, Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, Microsoft Azure Orbital and more.

AWS Cloud Updates

Protect Personal Information with Amazon Comprehend

A new update to Amazon Comprehend uses machine learning to detect and mask Personally Identifiable Information. This includes social security numbers, credit card numbers, and email addresses.

Amazon Comprehend is a natural language processing service that uses machine learning to find insights and relationships in text. It provides pre-trained models for recognising key phrases, sentiments, or other common elements in a document. You can also create custom models with Amazon Comprehend to recognise specific insights.

AWS Perspective Now Available

As of this month, AWS Perspective is now available. AWS Perspective helps users build detailed architecture diagrams of workloads. These diagrams are created from live data and can be customised or shared.

AWS Perspective keeps an inventory of AWS resources from your imported accounts and AWS Regions. It then determines relationships between discovered resources and presents them through a web application.

AWS Glue Studio Now Available

AWS Glue Studio is a simple visual interface to compose jobs that move and transform data. This new tool makes it easy for developers to author, run, and monitor AWS Glue jobs.

Without writing code, users of all experience levels can take advantage of big data processing on AWS Glue’s serverless platform. Users can also monitor global execution and resource usage through the AWS Glue Studio job monitoring dashboard.

AWS Cloud and IT News

Gartner Names AWS as Cloud Leader for 10th Consecutive Year

AWS has been named as a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services. AWS also placed highest in Ability to Execute and furthest in Completeness of Vision. This is the 10th year AWS has taken the top spot.

This year Gartner has expanded the scope of their magic quadrant to include additional Platform as a Service capabilities. Gartner also extended coverage for areas such as Managed Database Services, Serverless Computing, and Developer Tools.

Microsoft Launches Azure Orbital

Microsoft has launched Azure Orbital, a cloud-based satellite data processing platform. This launches as a direct competitor to AWS’s Ground Station offering.

Like AWS Ground Station, Azure Orbital makes it possible for satellite operators to control their spacecraft via the cloud, or integrate satellite data with cloud-based storage and processing.

Companies Receive Investments from Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund

Amazon has announced the first 5 companies selected to receive investments from its Climate Pledge Fund. The companies are CarbonCure Technologies, Pachama, Redwood Materials, Rivian and Turntide Technologies.

The Climate Pledge Fund is a $2 billion program that supports innovations that assist Amazon reduce its carbon emissions. The investment amounts range from hundreds of thousands in seed and early-stage investments, to multi-million dollar investments.

Useful Cloud Resources

Case Study: AWS Keeps Aged Care Services Running During COVID

Aged care provider Juniper has used AWS to roll out remote work and learning solutions during Covid. Juniper uses Amazon Chime to facilitate communication between its communities, Amazon Connect for distributing recorded information, and Amazon WorkSpaces to enable employees to work from home.

Best Practices for Security in the AWS Cloud

Cloud changes the way organisations need to approach security. Although AWS is responsible for security of their cloud and infrastructure, it’s up to organisations to ensure security in the cloud.

AWS helps organisations build secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure for their applications. Read our Introduction to AWS Security blog to get started with AWS Security best practices.