Weekly Cloud Provider News – AWS Snow Family, Azure Automatic Instance Repairs, Oracle Patch Updates, VMware Cloud Director and Google OS Patch Management
Here’s our weekly update on recent cloud provider news. This week, we cover AWS Snow Family enhancements, Azure Automatic Instance Repairs, Oracle Critical Patch Updates, VMware Cloud Director 10.1 and Google OS Patch Management service.
- AWS has announced multiple product enhancements for AWS Snow Family, a set of physical devices to migrate data into and out of AWS. One is AWS OpsHub, a GUI you can use to manage your AWS Snowball devices, enabling the rapid deployment of edge computing workloads. Previously, customers operated Snowball devices by either entering commands in a CLI or using REST APIs. Read about other enhancements here.
Why it matters: The AWS Snow Family is a key part of migrating large data sets into AWS. The enhancements allow customers to migrate their workloads in a more secure manner. And, the release of OpsHub and the integration with AWS Systems Manager allows customers to reduce operational and administrative overhead so they can manage more migrations in parallel with a consistency and control of process not previously available.
- Azure announced that automatic instance repairs for virtual machine scale sets are now available. This provides the capability to automatically repair virtual machine instances in a scale set that is determined to be unhealthy. You can configure scale set instances to emit application health by using either the application health extension or Azure Load Balancer health probes. Learn more here.
Why it matters: This allows organizations that use application scale sets to automatically shrink and/or grow their application pools to take advantage of new monitoring capabilities. It ensures that a given application pool with appropriate monitoring parameters will always serve the correct working application functionality. It should also reduce time needed for IT to determine which server is behaving incorrectly, giving IT staff time back to do other (more critical) tasks.
- Oracle announced that its Critical Patch Updates (CPUs) for April are now available. The company’s Critical Patch Update is the starting point for reviewing all patch update advisories, security alerts and bulletins. It includes a list of products affected, risk matrices of fixed vulnerabilities and links to other key documents. Read more here.
Why it matters: CPUs resolve bugs and security issues discovered in the previous quarter. Customers should apply these patches to their Oracle products as soon as possible to avoid encountering issues.
- VMware Cloud Director 10.1 is now generally available and packed with new capabilities. Core updates include improvements in UI navigation, appliance improvements, and VM encryption exposed in the UI and App Launchpad. Get more details on the new capabilities here.
Key updates: There is no longer an Adobe flex UI, and NSX-T integration has been enhanced with routed Org VDC networks. The NSX-V side of networking also has a new feature – using Cross VDC networking within the same vCenter Server. On the storage front, vSphere VM Encryption is now supported within Cloud Director.
- Google announced the availability of Google Cloud’s OS Patch Management Service to protect running VMs against defects and vulnerabilities. The service works on Google Compute Engine and across OS environments. You can apply OS patches across a set of VMs, receive patch compliance data across your environments, and automate installation across VMs – all from a centralized location. Learn more here.
Why it matters: With this news, Google has announced the capability to manage deployment of patches to VMs in GCP. With this update, customers will be able to reduce the amount of manual intervention required to support a workload on GCP, allowing smaller teams to run much bigger fleets of servers.
If you have any questions about these product updates and how they can optimize your environment, please contact us at hello@navisite.com.
We’ll be back next week with another update!