Cloud Bulletin | Issue 7 - June 2023

New with Argonaut

In May, we focused on performance and Quality of Life changes. Creating an RDS instance from a snapshot is now possible, and much more!

Our team also met in person, and we had an exciting and adventurous week together where we bonded, unwinded, and explored Meghalaya, India. We are also excited to be welcoming two new developers, Abhijit and Ananya, to the team!

Kubernetes News

Safer and efficient pruning with kubectl apply

v1.27 introduces ApplySet, an improved pruning implementation that offers better performance and safety. Users can enable this feature by setting the KUBECTL_APPLYSET environment variable and using the --prune and --applyset flags. This new approach aims to streamline Kubernetes resource management and encourages users to try it and provide valuable feedback.

Preventing Port Conflicts for NodePort Services

The new ServiceNodePortStaticSubrange feature helps avoid NodePort Service port conflicts by dividing the port range into two blocks with different allocation policies. This reduces the risk of collision, allowing you to use a separate port allocation strategy for type: NodePort Services and providing better control over how ports are assigned.

In-place pod vertical scaling

The new alpha feature in v1.27 allows users to resize CPU/memory resources for pods without restarting the containers, which enhances workload management. This update adds new fields related to resource allocation and resize status in the pod's specification and status, providing more visibility and control over container resource management.

v1.27 updates on speeding pod startup

Kubernetes v1.27 offers several improvements, such as enabling parallel container image pulls, increasing default API query-per-second limits for kubelet, and event-based pod lifecycle change detection. Additionally, adjusting pod resource limits and using the MemoryQoS feature can further enhance pod startup performance in large clusters.

Open Source Tool Spotlight

Timoni is a Kubernetes package manager that leverages CUE for improved user experience in authoring configurations. Inspired by Helm, it utilizes cuelang's type safety, code generation, and data validation features for more efficient creation, packaging, and delivery of apps to Kubernetes.

k8sGPT is an AI-powered tool that scans Kubernetes clusters, diagnoses, and triages issues in simple English, providing workload health analysis and security CVE reviews. The platform translates complex signals into easily understandable suggestions and connects with scanners like Trivy for fast, in-depth cluster analysis and triage.

AWS Improvements

Top updates

EKS now supports k8s v1.27

Pull through cache for registry.k8s.io in ECR

Connect GitHub Actions to actions in AWS

AWS User Notifications

It is now the single place in the AWS console to set up and view notifications from over 100 AWS services for multiple AWS accounts and Regions. Users can now configure delivery channels, set up event rules, and monitor notifications, enabling better organization and faster communication.

New EC2 I4g instances

EC2 I4g instances, powered by AWS Graviton2 processors, deliver up to 2x improved real-time storage performance compared to the previous generation. Optimized for transactional databases and real-time analytics workloads, these instances use AWS Nitro SSDs to reduce latency and latency variability.

AWS Management Console Private Access

This security feature restricts console access to trusted accounts and organizations within your VPC or connected networks. It utilizes VPC endpoints and AWS PrivateLink for private connections, ensuring users only sign in to approved AWS accounts within your network.

GCP updates

Launch of BigQuery differential privacy

The public preview of BigQuery differential privacy is in partnership with Tumult Labs and provides anonymization techniques for data scientists and analysts. It anonymizes results while maintaining individual-record privacy, without copying or moving data, and can integrate with Dataform pipelines and Apache Spark stored procedures.

Cloud Workstations are now in GA

Cloud Workstations offer fully managed integrated development environments (IDEs) with enhanced features. It boosts developer productivity, speeds up onboarding, and supports compliance requirements through improved security.

Microservices observability is now generally available

For C++, Go, and Java, offering improved monitoring and troubleshooting for microservices applications. Integrated with Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Logging, and Cloud Trace, the tools provide telemetry data collection, transport-level RPC events logging, distributed tracing support, and customizable labels, among other features, enabling users to debug and optimize gRPC workloads efficiently.

Reduced pricing

The cost of an active delivery pipeline in Google Cloud Deploy pipelines has been lowered, and single-target delivery pipelines are no longer chargeable, although underlying service charges still apply. The Security Command Center SCC Premium has a 25% price cut for customers securing Compute Engine, GKE-Autopilot, App Engine, and Cloud SQL.

Found something interesting? Share it with a friend/colleague. Help us spread the word.

Cheatsheet

Not quite a cheatsheet this time around. But, a very useful guide on GitHub Copilot by Jamon Holmgren. GitHub Copilot is an AI-powered coding assistant that seamlessly integrates with your development environment, providing users with intelligent code suggestions and enabling them to write more efficient, accurate, and faster code.

Tutorial Spotlight

Karpenter - Autoscaling and right-sizing EKS nodes by Jeremy Deppen walks through Karpenter setup on AWS and explores how it can save you money on your AWS bill.

Infrastructure as Code by Benjamen Pyle talks about how IaC practices can shift responsibilities, brings teams closer, and establishes a culture of accountability in an organization.

Got any content pieces or tutorials that you would like to share with the readers of this newsletter? Leave us a DM on Twitter.

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