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Issue # 22: January 27th, 2023 to February 3rd, 2023

Hey Reader

Welcome to Issue # 22 of AWS Graviton Weekly, which will be focused on sharing everything that happened in the past week related to AWS Silicon: from January 27th, 2023 to February 3rd, 2023.

In the last issue, I mentioned the incredible Porting Advisor for Graviton, a CLI tool that could help your company to accelerate dramatically the move to AWS Graviton-based infrastructure.

I wanted to talk again about it because this tool could seriously help your team to understand the incompatible libraries and dependencies with Graviton processors that are present in your code.

Test it, use it and let me know what do you think.

BTW, don't miss the workshop conducted by Seth Fox and Chad Schmutzer below, and the very interesting discussion between Tom Deakin and Simon McIntosh-Smith from the University of Bristol about Graviton 3 and High Performance Computing.

Highly recommended !!!

Enjoy the content.

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News

Riken Plans ‘Virtual Fugaku’ on AWS

The partnership with AWS announced by Riken represents Riken’s second cloud strategy: AWS has a highly compatible instance of Fugaku, the c7g series, which is powered by an Arm-based AWS Graviton3 processor. Riken has taken advantage of this, and is looking to create a so-called “Virtual Fugaku” by deploying Fugaku’s software solutions on these instances.

Learn more here: https://www.hpcwire.com/2023/01/26/riken-deploys-virtual-fugaku-on-aws/

EC2 Hibernate now supports Amazon EC2 C6i, C6id, M6i, M6id, and I3en instances

You can now hibernate Elastic Block Storage-backed Amazon EC2 I3en, M6i, M6id, C6i, and C6id instances. Hibernation provides you with the convenience of pausing your instances and resuming them later from a saved state. Hibernation is just like closing and opening your laptop lid — your application will start right from where it left off. By using hibernation, you can maintain a fleet of pre-warmed instances that can get to a productive state faster without modifying your existing applications.

Hibernation is available for On-Demand Instances and Reserved Instances running on C3, C4, C5, C6i, C6id, I3, I3en, M3, M4, M5, M5a, M5ad, M6i, M6id, R3, R4, R5, R5a, R5ad, and T2 instances running Amazon Linux, Amazon Linux 2, Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04 LTS, and Windows Server 2012, 2012R2, 2016, and 2019. For Windows, hibernation is supported for instances with up to 16 GB of RAM. For other operating systems, hibernation is supported for instances with less than 150 GB of RAM. These instances can be hibernated in any region where EC2 Hibernate is supported.

Learn more: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/Hibernate.html

AWS announces Credential Guard support for Windows instances on Amazon EC2

Amazon Web Services(AWS) today announced support for Credential Guard, a Windows Virtualization Based Security (VBS) feature.

Credential guard uses VBS isolation to prevent the extraction of Windows login credentials from OS memory. When Credential Guard is turned on, login credentials cannot be used from another host or after a user has logged out. With the availability of this capability, enterprises running Windows Server, especially those that operate in regulated industries, no longer have to choose between meeting compliance requirements and being able to move to the cloud to innovate faster; they can get both on EC2.

Learn more here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/WindowsGuide/windows-virtualization-based-security-features.html

Amazon increases NAT Gateway’s capacity to support concurrent connections to a unique destination

Starting today, you can configure your NAT Gateway to support up to 440,000 concurrent connections to a unique destination by adding multiple IP addresses to same NAT Gateway.

Learn more here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/vpc-nat-gateway.html

Amazon MemoryDB for Redis Announces 99.99% Availability Service Level Agreement

Amazon MemoryDB for Redis now offers an availability Service Level Agreement (SLA) of 99.99% when using a Multi-Availability Zone (Multi-AZ) configuration. Previously, MemoryDB offered an SLA of 99.9% for Multi-AZ configurations. With this launch, MemoryDB has updated its Multi-AZ SLA to provide 10x higher levels of availability.

Learn more here:

https://console.aws.amazon.com/memorydb/

https://aws.amazon.com/memorydb/sla/

Amazon Athena releases data source connector for Google Cloud Storage

Starting today, you can use Amazon Athena to query data in Google Cloud Storage. With Athena’s data source connectors, you can run SQL queries on data stored in relational, non-relational, object, and custom data sources without the need to move data to S3 or learn a new query dialect. Google Cloud Storage is a managed service designed to store data in buckets, similar to Amazon S3.

Learn more here:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/athena/latest/ug/connectors-gcs.html

Articles and Tutorials

Introducing Garden Linux, by Jan Shaffner (SVP, Head of BTP Foundational Plane at SAP)

Garden Linux includes necessary packages only and a Linux Kernel optimized to run Kubernetes nodes in a secure fashion.

This reduces image size and potential attack surface. ARM support allows SAP products to run on AWS Graviton processors.

Garden Linux is ideal for running on cloud providers such as Azure, AWS, GCP, and Alibaba Cloud. It also runs inside our SAP data centers.

Unlike most commercial distributions, Garden Linux uses the latest LTS Linux kernel. Today, Garden Linux is the foundation of thousands of Gardener Kubernetes clusters run by SAP, and we want to share it with you.

Learn more here: https://github.com/gardenlinux/gardenlinux

AWS Open Source newsletter # 143, by Ricardo Sueiras (Principal Advocate in Open Source at AWS)

Welcome to edition #143 of the AWS open source newsletter, and another week of great new open source projects for you to try out.

This week we feature projects including "aws-cdk-in-electron", a project that lets you put AWS CDK in a graphical user interface, "lightsail-k8s-installer" that helps you deploy Kubernetes into Amazon Lightsail, "porting-advisor-for-graviton" a great project to help you migrate to Arm based AWS Graviton instance types, "aws-ebook-downloader" a browser tool to help you easily download pdf's on AWS topics, "lake-formation-permissions-sync" a useful tool to help you keep on top of your Lake Formation setups, and many more.

Achieving Sustainability Goals in AWS, by Chathra Serasinghe ( Senior Engineer at Versent)

First up, with compute services, we want to optimize the compute size, the instant size, the number of containers, and ultimately the number of instances that you're actually using to serve your end users. But the number of instances/containers should change over time based on usage, this means that when you don't need a certain amount of compute power, containers, or instances, it should automatically reduced in size. In other words, the main objective is to lowering the amount of compute required per transaction.

Some of the Design Principals for Compute:

- Right sizing

- Eliminate the idle resourcesUsing ARM processors instead of Intel(eg:-AWS Graviton processors)

- Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

- Containerize the workloads to achieve maximize server utilization

- Use Serverless services(eg:- Fargate, Lambda)

Salt on Graviton, by Jakub Wołynko (Global Platform Architect at ISS A/S)

Let’s assume that we’re running 5 machines in AWS. To make it fancier, let’s use Graviton 2 - AWS Arm64-based instances. Also, two of our machines will be placed Data Center, ah and one small server in the office.

AWS Graviton: a powerful processor for cost savings in cloud computing, by Lorenzo Campo (Cloud Architect at Keeple)

The AWS Graviton processor is an innovative technology that has the potential to greatly improve the performance and efficiency of cloud computing.

With its scalable architecture, wide range of use cases and savings potential, the Graviton processor is an important addition to the AWS ecosystem and a valuable tool for organisations looking to optimise their cloud computing costs, always bearing in mind that a change of processor architecture may entail the revision and adaptation of application development.

Ascend Money Improves Application Performance by 40% Using AWS Graviton–Based EC2 Instances

Using AWS Graviton2 processors and the versatile x86 processors it was using for Spot Instances, Ascend Money built an innovative multi-arch approach that involves running services designed for one computer architecture on another. Ascend Money developed its compute strategy alongside AWS compute specialists, an AWS account team, and AWS Enterprise Support, which provides concierge-like service where the main focus is helping companies achieve their outcomes and find success in the cloud. The strategy involved expanding the use of Spot Instances using x86 processors for fault-tolerant and scalable workloads while using On-Demand Instances on AWS Graviton2 processors. This combination offered desirable cost and price performance across the landscape of compute on AWS.

The year 2022 was good for the cloud. And 2023 will be a great(er) year for the people using it.

Surprised at how much AWS has leaned into processors in the last few years? So is Amazon.com SVP and Distinguished Engineer James Hamilton—whom a Slalom team member

Full disclosure: We’re pretty excited about Graviton ourselves, and were named an AWS Service Delivery Partner for AWS Graviton (and AWS Glue) during re:Invent. Check out Slalom’s Rob Flesher displaying our shiny—erm, beautifully wood-carved—new Graviton launch partner trophy on

Slides, Videos and Audio

[VIDEO] Optimizing Cost with AWS Graviton Based Services, by Seth Fox (WorldWide SA Leader EC2 Core at AWS) and Chad Schmutzer (Principal Solution Architect Sustainability, EC2 Graviton at AWS)

AWS Graviton processors are designed to deliver the best price performance for a wide variety of workloads in Amazon EC2. In this workshop, we will walk through migrating a workload to AWS Graviton based instances, including containerized applications. This workshop is ideal for developers or IT practitioners who are running Linux-based workloads in Amazon EC2 and looking for better price performance.

Learning Objectives:

Objective 1: Explore running container workloads using native multi-architecture support in Amazon EKS, Amazon ECR, and AWS developer tools such as AWS CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, and CodePipeline
Objective 2: Explore running Amazon EMR cluster on Graviton instance types.
Objective 3: Focus on simple Spark job execution and more.

[VIDEO] AWS Made Easy: January 2023 Review - Ask Us Anything Ep # 35, with Stephen Barr (Chief Technical Evangelist at CloudFix) and Rahul Subramaniam (Founder and Chief Evangelist at CloudFix)

A great discussion with the last news related to AWS in general, but they put a big focus on the Porting Advisor for Graviton tool. Obvious, right?

[VIDEO] Tom Deakin talks about performance portability in HPC and AWS Graviton, with Tom Deakin (High Performance Computing Researcher at the University of Bristol) and Simon McIntosh Smith (Professor in High Performance Computing at University of Bristol)

Tom Deakin (and his colleague Simon McIntosh Smith) work on the hard problem of performance portability - the task of getting great performance out of software running on a range of computer architectures. This means they're often digging deep into workloads that find specific challenges with not just hardware, but compilers and libraries - virtually everything in the stack is fair game. Tom and I caught up in Bristol before Christmas and he filled me in on a number of things they've found already, and also gave us an early report card on the AWS Graviton3, which is our Arm-architecture CPU - but he covers a lot of other ground, too.

It's a great discussion.

[PODCAST] Swift Package Index 19: The SPI project is growing up, DocC uploading with AWS Lambda, and Are we server yet? hosted by Dave Verwer and Sven A. Schmitd

It's a very interesting discussion between Dave and Sven, especially the part where they discussed how Dave used AWS Lambda on ARM64 architecture, using Graviton processors, but ultimately, they chose to stay on the X86 version of the Lambda deployment, even after knowing that the ARM64 based Lambda on Graviton was faster than the x86 version.

The main reason? Github Actions

I toyed with the idea of making that process ARM-based, but the problem is GitHub Actions, so the GitHub runners aren't any ARM64 runners.

So the only option really would have been to set up our own hosted runner, which isn't a huge deal, but at that point, given how often we actually plan to change that Lambda, if you set up a GitHub dedicated runner, you probably might as well just have it on one of our or both of our machines to do it ad hoc whenever needed, because one environment would would have to maintain anyway, so it might as well be one.

And the weird thing is the part that is, you'd expect to be compute bound, which is the unzipping was as fast or maybe even slightly faster than the ARM64 version, but all the networking stuff happening after that, like the transfer of the unzipped files, the 70,000 files of one gigabyte in total into S3 actually took way, way longer with the x86 variant.

Now, I guess that's not architecture related. Perhaps it's where these things run. So I'm guessing, I have no idea, but it looks to me like in this case, at least in this case, well, A, in this case, it's very obvious that the x86 Lambda, you know, takes probably around 40% longer than the ARM64 variant to the degree that it wasn't actually usable for us.

You can find the episode on Transistor.FM, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube if you prefer video.

[VIDEO] AWS This Week: OpenSearch Serverless, Porting Advisor for Graviton & contiguous IPv6 CIDR blocks, with Faye Ellis (Principal AWS Training Architect at A Cloud Guru)

Faye is back with your AWS news! In AWS announcements this week, OpenSearch Serverless is now GA, and also allows an enhanced dry run of config changes to your cluster. Porting Advisor for AWS Graviton is also GA, and AWS announces Amazon-provided contiguous IPv6 CIDRs blocks!

[VIDEO] AWS for Beginners Build modern applications with purpose-built databases Part I, with Orlando Andico (Solutions Architect at AWS)

Seldom can one database fit the needs of multiple distinct use cases. The days of the one-size-fits-all monolithic database are behind us, and we are building highly distributed applications using many purpose-built databases. The world is evolving and the categories of databases continue to grow. We are increasingly seeing customers wanting to build internet-scale applications that require diverse data models. In response to these needs, we offer the choice of key-value, wide column, document, in-memory, graph, time-series, and ledger databases. Each solves a specific problem or group of problems. In this session, learn more about AWS purpose-built databases that meet the scale, performance, and manageability requirements of modern applications.

[VIDEO] Beginner's Guide to Amazon and AWS Services Nitro, Silicon, Fargate, Aurora, Monitron, and MORE!, with Kristine Howard (Head of Developer Relations APJ at AWS), Wendy Wong (a fellow AWS Community Builder and Business Performance Analyst at Service NSW) and Harinder Seera (another AWS Community Builder and Head of Observability at PEXA)

Beginner's Guide to the Different Amazon and AWS Services Nitro, Silicon, Fargate, Aurora, Redshift, Monitron, Panorama, CodeCommit, MANY MORE FOR THE IMPATIENT PERSON, COMPLETE SUMMARY!!!!!!!

[VIDEO] Arm DevSummit 2022: Magma Project for Low-Cost, Scalable Networks Outside the Datacenter, with Govindarajan Mohandoss (Software Engineer at Arm), Shubham Tatvamasi (DevOps Engineer, Magma Core Foundation) and Marc Meunier (Director of Ecosystem Development at Arm)

The Magma project for modern software-defined networks leverages cloud-native constructs to deliver a flexible, low-cost, and scalable network outside the data center. It has a distributed core and federation gateway, and developers can use Kubernetes to manage workloads.

Capable of running on small devices, including the Raspberry Pi, this solution is ideal for small-scale, low-cost community networks. It also scales to deliver additional bandwidth when needed and supports different radios, including LTE and 5G. Join us here as we walk through the project and describe the various features available today and in the future.

With the flexibility to run the core in the cloud on AWS Graviton, CI-led development accelerates time to market and ensures an always stable solution. We also provide a demonstration to help you get started and present solutions from our partners.

Learn more: https://www.arm.com/campaigns/5g-solutions-lab

[VIDEO] Seven Steps to Lower Costs While Improving Application Performance, by Boyd McGeachie (Global Head of Flexible Compute GTM at AWS)

AWS pioneered cloud computing in 2006, years before any other cloud provider. Since the beginning, we have helped customers migrate their workloads to the cloud that offers more performance at lower costs than any other cloud. In fact, helping you maximize savings is at the core of what we do: AWS relentlessly innovates and optimizes the efficiency of AWS services so you can continuously lower your cost of experimentation and accelerate your innovation. In this webinar, we will guide you through seven steps to reducing costs and improving performance and highlight how AWS can help you optimize your infrastructure investment.

Jobs

And if you are a company looking for new members for your time, you can get access to our Talent Collective here.

There are 22 active candidates ready for interviews:

The Interesting Data Gigs Talent Collectivee

Events

[MEETUP] Windsor AWS User Group Meetup, Feb, 21st, 2023, Invited Speaker: Rohini Gaonkar (Sr. Developer Advocate at AWS)

[WEBINAR] Data Science on AWS - Monthly Webinar: Hands-on Learning with Ray.io, PyTorch, TensorFlow, Kubernetes, GPU, Spark, SageMaker, Kubeflow, with Chris Fregly (Principal Developer Advocate for AI and Machine Learning at AWS) and Antje Barth (Principal Developer Advocate for AI and Machine Learning at AWS). Date: Monday, February 20, 2023 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM EST

[ONLINE EVENT] Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity with AWS, with Abhishek Srivastav (Sr. Solutions Architect at AWS) and Qualen Bradley (Enterprise Account Executive at AWS)

Join us to learn about building a disaster recovery solution using AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (AWS DRS). Learn how AWS DRS helps customers minimize downtime and data loss with fast, reliable recovery of on-premises and cloud-based applications using affordable storage, minimal compute, and point-in-time recovery. The discussion will offer 100–200 level solution and the value of building a disaster recovery solution. At the end, we will play the Kahoot game, and the winners will be awarded an Uber Eats gift card.

Quote of the week

Graviton 3 and Graviton 2 both a really interesting Arm processors but only available in the cloud. So it kind of opened up these questions of well what other opportunities are therein the cloud and with the kind ofperformance portability slant on it we're interested in trying to get good performance across all processes we care about and the cloud is really exciting and interesting because I can get whatever architecture I like at the click of a button almost immediately right and so I'm interested in exploring

Tom Deakin (High Performance Computing Researcher at the University of Bristol) Source: YouTube

Marcos Ortiz

AWS Graviton Weekly # 22: Week from January 27th, 2023 to February 3rd, 2023

Issue # 22: January 27th, 2023 to February 3rd, 2023

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News

Articles and Tutorials

Slides, Videos and Audio

Jobs

Events

Quote of the week

Marcos Ortiz

AWS Graviton Weekly # 84

AWS Graviton Weekly # 83: It's LAUNCH DAY: The Cloud Silicon Content Library is READY

AWS Graviton Weekly # 82

Marcos Ortiz

AWS Graviton Weekly # 22: Week from January 27th, 2023 to February 3rd, 2023

Issue # 22: January 27th, 2023 to February 3rd, 2023

​Try beehiiv absolutely free with no credit card required.​

News

Articles and Tutorials

Slides, Videos and Audio

Jobs

Events

Quote of the week

Marcos Ortiz

AWS Graviton Weekly # 84

AWS Graviton Weekly # 83: It's LAUNCH DAY: The Cloud Silicon Content Library is READY

AWS Graviton Weekly # 82

Try beehiiv absolutely free with no credit card required.