AWS expands Local Zones, celebrates 10 years of DynamoDB

What's going on with AWS this week? Amazon QuickSight now has a community hub. AWS Backup gets a new buddy. We meet the new local zones. And last, but certainly not least, we wish DynamoDB a happy birthday. Let's go!

Your keys to a better career

Get started with ACG today to transform your career with courses and real hands-on labs in AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and beyond.

QuickSighters, assemble! Amazon QuickSight is a serverless business intelligence service that allows everyone to view and understand data with pretty interactive dashboards, natural language questions and uses machine learning to find patterns and anomalies in that data. T

The big news? Amazon has announced a shiny, brand-new community hub!

This community hub will allow QuickSighters to come together to get started, dive in deeper, and not have to sift through the mounds and mounds different places to find more information about QuickSight.

The community hub has three sections: question and answer, the learning center, and announcements. Access to the community can be gained through the QuickSight UI or from the QuickSight Overview page at the bottom. You do NOT need credentials to browse through the community, but you DO need to login to post there.

AWS Backup is a fully managed service that is used to manage and automate backups on several services across AWS. Create plans with policies to ensure backups are taken regularly and set lifecycles to ensure that old backups are deleted as you need them to be.

But here's the thing about AWS Backup: it is ONLY available for specific services. AND that brings me to the news! S3 is now included in those services!

This is great news for anyone who has ever needed to restore their S3 buckets or objects. You can do just that with a few clicks or a single API call. This new functionality does not include cross-region or cross-account backups or a lifecycle to cold storage as of yet. Regions are limited so make sure you do the needful before you go spreading the good news to your organization.

Local Zones are an infrastructure deployment that extends Regions to the edge of the cloud. These are great for any applications that require ultra-low latency like real-time gaming, live video streaming, virtual reality, etc. The launch of these 16 Local Zones across the US expect to provide single-digit millisecond latency performance.

The new Local Zones will allow customers to use core AWS services locally while maintaining connection to the rest of their workloads. This announcement ALSO means the simplification of hybrid cloud migrations.

Excited about the new zones? Well, they're not done yet. Expect to see 32 other local zones in 26 countries in the future. I'm excited to watch the cloud expand and bring us a future in cloud that is seamless and smooth like butter.

And finally, happy birthday to DynamoDB!

On January 18, 2012, Jeff and Werner announced the general availability of Amazon DynamoDB, a fully managed flexible NoSQL database service.

Fun DyanmoDB fact: it was birthed from merging Dynamo (Amazon's original non-relational database) and Simple DB (Amazon's original NoSQL service).

DynamoDB aimed to be scalable, have low latency to retrieve data, and be simple enough that you could declare a table and the system would take care of the low-level complexity. Over its decade of life, DynamoDB has evolved based off of feedback from AWS-ers leading to hundreds of improvements. What started out as a question of "why are we doing it this way?" turned into a major puzzle piece to thousands of cloud environments around the globe. Celebrate this decade of innovation virtually with AWS on March 1. Happy birthday DynamoDB!

Subscribe to A Cloud Guru on YouTube for weekly AWS news (plus news from those other cloud providers too). You can also like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, or join the conversation on Discord!