Weekly Cloud Provider News – Amazon RDS Proxy, Azure Backup, VMware NSX-T 3.0, Cloud BigTable
Here’s our weekly update on recent cloud provider news. This week we cover Amazon RDS Proxy previews PostgreSQL compatibility, Azure Backup support for VMs with custom images, general availability of VMware’s NSX-T 3.0 and Google NoSQL Database enhancements.
- Amazon RDS Proxy, a fully-managed, highly available database proxy for Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), is now available in preview for Aurora PostgreSQL and RDS PostgreSQL. RDS Proxy makes applications more scalable, more resilient to database failures, and more secure. Get more details here.
Why it matters: The release of this product for any of the Amazon RDS instances allows customers to mimic legacy application behavior by providing a highly available database entry point such as a VIP or load balancer. This will enable customers to migrate database and enterprise application workloads into AWS and take advantage of managed database as a service. Managed database offerings allow enterprises to offload many thankless operational tasks to the service provider, allowing their engineers to focus on more value-added tasks.
- Microsoft Azure Backup support is now available for virtual machines with custom images to replace existing disks during the restore flow. Previously, Azure Backup supported a number of ways to restore a VM, but support was only available for VMs with marketplace images. Read more here.
Why it matters: Previously, when restoring entire virtual machine disks from Azure Backups, it was not possible to restore and replace the entire disk if the virtual machine was NOT created from the Azure Marketplace. Now organizations now have the ability to restore an entire disk rather than restoring portions of files/directories within the disks. This makes restoring virtual machines created from custom images much easier and reduces the Recovery Time Objective for a given virtual machine. This will help reduce the concern of organizations that require custom images to move to the cloud, as they now have the ability to recover data quickly from virtual machines running on custom images.
- VMware announced general availability of NSX-T 3.0, a major release of its full stack Layer 2-7 networking platform that offers virtual networking, security, load balancing, visibility and analytics in a single platform. It includes key innovations across cloud-scale networking, security, containers and operations. It will help enterprises achieve a one-click public cloud experience. Read more here.
Why it matters: NSX-T Data Center is focused on providing networking, security, automation, and operational simplicity for emerging application frameworks and architectures that have heterogeneous endpoint environments and technology stacks. It supports cloud-native applications, bare metal workloads, multi-hypervisor environments, public clouds and multiple clouds. With NSX-T 3.0, administrators can now deploy NSX-T directly on VMware vSphere distributed switch 7.0, which simplifies NSX-T deployment. In addition to enhanced networking and security capabilities, NSX Federation in 3.0 helps deliver a cloud-like operating model by simplifying the consumption of networking and security constructs.
- Cloud BigTable, which is Google’s NoSQL Database, has two enhancements this week. First, the KeyViewer tool has been added to the BigTable console, facilitating index optimization and querying of data. Second, support was announced for smaller BigTable clusters and datasets. Learn more here.
Why it matters: GCP is making it simpler to construct indexes and access paths to retrieve data from the tables, making it easier for BigTable developers to accelerate queries. And, support of smaller clusters encourages developers to start with BigTable to design new apps that do not have to store large amounts of data. All this lowers the cost of entry to using BigTable as a repository for application data.
If you have any questions about these product updates and how they can optimize your environment, please contact us at hello@navisite.com.