Long time no see, life have been life lately and I really didn’t had much mindspace available to work on this website. I wasn’t totally inactive, still pushed some code in some projects, but I was more busy on other things, like returning to archery and drawing.

But with not longer introduction, let’s see what took my eyes on last AWS Releases.

Database:

Redshift:

This one have been quite busy.

Audit logging

Super important for managing your DWH, as well as troubleshooting, having an easy to access logging mechanism is really important, and Redshift just improved greatly there: it’s now possible to store log in real time in Cloudwatch. This will allow to find the root cause of any slowdown really faster than ever before without the need to connect to the cluster, taking resources, not waiting for audits to be exported in S3.

Machine Learning

I’m not really big in machine learning topics, but being able to feed your ML models from SQL queries directly from Redshift sounds like a great feature, saving a lot of overhead. I have some concern about the compute cost of running the ML models with Redshift compute capacities. I think this really deserve some investigation.

Snapshot isolation level

This one is more technical, this new transaction isolation level will allow different transaction to write in the same table without failing. This can be super useful when you have different jobs filling the same table (example metric tables, that are feed from independent sources).

Athena:

There is 10 new data source that you can query from Athena, not much to add here, still interesting to be able to mix more data sources in your queries.

Cloud Formation

Really quick, 25 new resources can be deployed using Cloud formation.