New – Amazon EBS Snapshots Archive

I am pleased to announce the availability of Amazon EBS Snapshots Archive, a new storage tier for the long-term retention of Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) snapshots of your EBS volumes. In a nutshell, EBS is an easy-to-use high-performance block storage service for your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. An EBS volume mounted to your EC2 instances lets you boot an operating system and store data for your most performance-demanding workloads. You may use EBS snapshots to create point-in-time copies of your volume data. The first snapshot of a volume contains all of the data written into that volume. Subsequent snapshots are incremental. Snapshots are stored on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and they may be shared…

New – Amazon CloudWatch Evidently – Experiments and Feature Management

As a developer, I am excited to announce the availability of Amazon CloudWatch Evidently. This is a new Amazon CloudWatch capability that makes it easy for developers to introduce experiments and feature management in their application code. CloudWatch Evidently may be used for two similar but distinct use-cases: implementing dark launches, also known as feature flags, and A/B testing. Features flags is a software development technique that lets you enable or disable features without needing to deploy your code. It decouples the feature deployment from the release. Features in your code are deployed in advance of the actual release. They stay hidden behind if-then-else statements. At runtime, your application code queries a remote service. The service decides the percentage of…

New – AWS Migration Hub Refactor Spaces Helps to Incrementally Refactor Your Applications

I am excited to announce the preview of AWS Migration Hub Refactor Spaces, a new capability of AWS Migration Hub to let you refactor existing applications into distributed applications, typically based on microservices. There are multiple reasons why you want to refactor existing applications. You might want to make your code more modular, use more modern frameworks, use different data storage, etc. In general, when refactoring, your objective is to make your application easier to maintain and evolve over time. Other benefits might include handling larger workloads, increasing resiliency, or lowering costs. But let’s face it, refactoring is hard. I usually compare refactoring to changing the engines, cabin seats, and entertainment system of a plane while keeping the plane in…

Measure and Improve Your Application Resilience with AWS Resilience Hub

I am excited to announce the immediate availability of AWS Resilience Hub, a new AWS service designed to help you define, track, and manage the resilience of your applications. You are building and managing resilient applications to serve your customers. Building distributed systems is hard; maintaining them in an operational state is even harder. The question is not if a system will fail, but when it will, and you want to be prepared for that. Resilience targets are typically measured by two metrics: Recovery Time Objective (RTO), the time it takes to recover from a failure, and Recovery Point Objective (RPO), the maximum window of time in which data might be lost after an incident. Depending on your business and…