MSK Serverless & new EC2 I4i instance types

Wow, do we have a lot to get into from AWS this week! Now in GA, we have Managed Streaming for Kafka Serverless. We look at the streaming video events feature of Amazon Rekognition and new I4i instance types. We get an updated EKS console to help with Kubernetes cluster management. And in addition, my neighbor’s cat will even get in on this week’s announcements. Let’s get to it!

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Back at re:Invent 2021, AWS announced a suite of four preview service offerings around data and analytics that would be available in serverless or on-demand configurations. This included Redshift Serverless, EMR Serverless, and Kinesis Data Streams On-Demand. In addition to those three, they also announced Managed Streaming for Kafka Serverless (or MSK Serverless for less of a mouthful) and this offering has now graduated to being generally available.

This offering works just like the normal Managed Streaming Offering for Kafka in that it enables you to securely ingest and stream large amounts of data within a fully managed service. The primary difference is that you no longer have to manage the scaling of your cluster. This makes it even easier to integrate MSK Serverless into your cloud applications. 

So, at about 3AM every morning I get a notification on my phone that motion has been detected on my basement security camera. Do I get worried? No. It’s simply my neighbor’s cat out for an evening stroll. Wait, what does this have to do with AWS news?

Well, this is just one kind of real time video alerting that you can build for yourself with a new feature for AWS’s computer vision service, Rekognition, and it is called Streaming Video Events. The great news is that it too just transitioned to being generally available.

This capability is built on top of the existing Rekognition service and Kinesis Video Streams. Out of the box it comes with machine learning models that can detect people, packages, and pets.

I’m sure you can think of better things to do with this than tracking your neighbor’s cat, but if you are into cat tracking, it just got a lot easier with the power of the cloud.

We have a new instance type for EC2! The new I4i instances are designed for workloads that need to maximize storage I/O. These are based on Ice Lake Xeon processors, and according to AWS they offer “up to 30% better compute price performance over I3 instances,” while also offering always-on memory encryption. 

At launch only three regions were supported, so make sure you read up on the AWS news blog for all the specifics and to know how you can test these out today.

Start building your cloud skills with these 10 fun hands-on projects to learn AWS.

Finally in AWS news, I have a great announcement for those of you leveraging EKS for your Kubernetes workloads. AWS has crafted a console update that now includes the ability to view all Kubernetes API resources types on your cluster. For some of you this may mean that you don’t have to leverage as many third-party tools to manage your EKS cluster. 

You will now be able to have insights into service resources, configuration and storage resources, policy resources, and even authorization resources. If you don’t need all of this information, you can filter the list to show only the resource types you are interested in.

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