The tale of the Dutch bookstore, the pivot and the Golden Pin

Bookstore Dominicanen can be found in a former Dominican church in the city of Maastricht, a thriving cultural hub and one of the oldest cities in The Netherlands. Before COVID, the bookstore welcomed almost one million visitors a year. They mostly relied on customers visiting in person to shop for a good read or to enjoy a coffee while admiring the store’s vault paintings and the unique 14th century fresco depicting scenes from Thomas Aquinas’ life. And then the pandemic hit.   The Covid-19 pandemic has had a major impact on businesses worldwide but it also sparked creativity and accelerated many businesses’ use of digital tools. In The Netherlands for example, 81% of Dutch SMEs made more use of digital…

Amazon Managed Grafana Is Now Generally Available with Many New Features

In December, we introduced the preview of Amazon Managed Grafana, a fully managed service developed in collaboration with Grafana Labs that makes it easy to use the open-source and the enterprise versions of Grafana to visualize and analyze your data from multiple sources. With Amazon Managed Grafana, you can analyze your metrics, logs, and traces without having to provision servers, or configure and update software. During the preview, Amazon Managed Grafana was updated with new capabilities. Today, I am happy to announce that Amazon Managed Grafana is now generally available with additional new features: Grafana has been upgraded to version 8 and offers new data sources, visualizations, and features, including library panels that you can build once and re-use on…

Inspect Subnet to Subnet traffic with Amazon VPC More Specific Routing

Since December 2019, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) has allowed you to route all ingress traffic (also known as north – south traffic) to a specific network interface. You might use this capability for a number of reasons. For example, to inspect incoming traffic using an intrusion detection system (IDS) appliance or to route ingress traffic to a firewall. Since we launched this feature, many of you asked us to provide a similar capability to analyze traffic flowing from one subnet to another inside your VPC, also known as east – west traffic. Until today, it was not possible because a route in a routing table cannot be more specific than the default local route (check the VPC documentation for more details).…

New for AWS CloudFormation – Quickly Retry Stack Operations from the Point of Failure

One of the great advantages of cloud computing is that you have access to programmable infrastructure. This allows you to manage your infrastructure as code and apply the same practices of application code development to infrastructure provisioning. AWS CloudFormation gives you an easy way to model a collection of related AWS and third-party resources, provision them quickly and consistently, and manage them throughout their lifecycles. A CloudFormation template describes your desired resources and their dependencies so you can launch and configure them together as a stack. You can use a template to create, update, and delete an entire stack as a single unit instead of managing resources individually. When you create or update a stack, your action might fail for…