In this post that was published in September 2021, Jeff Barr announced general availability of Amazon QuickSight Q. To recap, Amazon QuickSight Q is a natural language query capability that lets business users ask simple questions of their data. QuickSight Q is powered by machine learning (ML), providing self-service analytics by allowing you to query your data using plain language and therefore eliminating the need to fiddle with dashboards, controls, and calculations. With last year’s announcement of QuickSight Q, you can ask simple questions like “who had the highest sales in EMEA in 2021” and get your answers (with relevant visualizations like graphs, maps, or tables) in seconds. Data used for analytics is often stored in a data warehouse like…
Introducing VPC Lattice – Simplify Networking for Service-to-Service Communication (Preview)
Modern applications are built using modular and distributed components. Each component is a service that implements its own subset of functionalities. To make these services communicate with each other, you need a way to let them discover where they are, authorize access, and route traffic. When troubleshooting issues, you need to keep communication configurations under control so that you can quickly understand what is happening at the application, service, and network levels. This can take a lot of your time. Today, we are making available in preview Amazon VPC Lattice, a new capability of Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) that gives you a consistent way to connect, secure, and monitor communication between your services. With VPC Lattice, you can…
Announcing AWS KMS External Key Store (XKS)
I am excited to announce the availability of AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) External Key Store. Customers who have a regulatory need to store and use their encryption keys on premises or outside of the AWS Cloud can now do so. This new capability allows you to store AWS KMS customer managed keys on a hardware security module (HSM) that you operate on premises or at any location of your choice. At a high level, AWS KMS forwards API calls to securely communicate with your HSM. Your key material never leaves your HSM. This solution allows you to encrypt data with external keys for the vast majority of AWS services that support AWS KMS customer managed keys, such as…
New for Amazon Redshift – General Availability of Streaming Ingestion for Kinesis Data Streams and Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka
Ten years ago, just a few months after I joined AWS, Amazon Redshift was launched. Over the years, many features have been added to improve performance and make it easier to use. Amazon Redshift now allows you to analyze structured and semi-structured data across data warehouses, operational databases, and data lakes. More recently, Amazon Redshift Serverless became generally available to make it easier to run and scale analytics without having to manage your data warehouse infrastructure. To process data as quickly as possible from real-time applications, customers are adopting streaming engines like Amazon Kinesis and Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka. Previously, to load streaming data into your Amazon Redshift database, you’d have to configure a process to stage data…