CloudWorld 2021

I am taking three months off from public speaking to recharge my batteries and work on new content, but I will back on stage next February at CloudWorld 2021 to talk about cost optimization on AWS with a special focus on storage and data. This is a new topic I never covered before but that I am really passionate about. The title and abstract of my session at DeveloperWeek are below.

Learn how to manage better your costs on AWS, make your bill less scary or your credits last longer

Should you really always run your cluster in multiple availability zones? How can a transition rule to Glacier double your storage costs? I want to monitor and understand my data transfer costs, where should I start? Why are backups eating my database budget? What, one more storage class on S3? Following so-called “best practices” works only when you fully understand the implications, costs included. We will address a few cloud anti-patterns, making your bill smaller and your deployment better.

Looking forward to one more virtual conference in 2021!

AWS Data Hero

Excited, surprised, humbled at being recognised by the AWS Heroes program. I am now a AWS Data Hero, the first one in Germany. Looking forward to this new opportunity and challenge!

InfoQ – December 2020

All the news articles I wrote for InfoQ in December where related to AWS new announcements and the main cloud event of the month, including a final recap of AWS re:Invent 2020.

AWS Introduces Preview of Aurora Serverless v2

During the first keynote of re:Invent 2020, AWS announced the next version of Amazon Aurora Serverless in preview. The new serverless version for the MySQL 5.7-compatible edition of Amazon Aurora scales in fraction of a second and introduces multi-AZ support, global databases, and read replicas.

Amazon S3 Now Delivers Strong Read-After-Write Consistency

To guarantee higher availability and better performances, S3 has for years relied on an eventual consistency model. During the first week of re:invent, AWS announced that S3 now supports strong read-after-write consistency.

AWS Introduces New Instance Types for Amazon EC2

AWS recently announced new instance types for Amazon EC2 on different processors and for different EC2 families. Most of the new instances are already available, even if only in a subset of regions, others are expected by the end of the month.

Recap of AWS re:Invent 2020

This year the annual re:invent conference organized by AWS was virtual, free and three weeks long. During multiple keynotes and sessions, AWS announced new features, improvements and cloud services. Here is a review of the main announcements impacting compute, database, storage, networking, machine learning and development.

Cloud Computing: Come Creare una Applicazione Serverless

In October 2017 I presented for the first time at Codemotion in Berlin. Three years later, I designed and recorded my first course for them: “Cloud Computing: Come Creare una Applicazione Serverless” is a module of fourteen short lessons in Italian, just over two hours of video content plus exercises. The course uses a simple URL shortener as an example of a serverless application on AWS. It is now available on Codemotion and it is free!

InfoQ – November 2020

From shipping containers at Azure to edge technology at Fastly, from new gateway load balancers at AWS to serverless migrations at BBC, a recap of the news articles I wrote for InfoQ in November 2020.

Amazon SNS Supports FIFO for Pub/Sub Messaging

AWS has recently introduced support for First-in-First-out (FIFO) topics in Amazon SNS with strict ordering and deduplication of messages. The new feature enforces ordering in which messages are sent and received, and avoids that a message is processed multiple times.

Cloud Computing in a Shipping Container: Microsoft Introduces the Azure Modular Datacenter

Microsoft recently announced a new Azure in a shipping container service called Azure Modular Datacenter. The new offer provides an option for setting up an Azure datacenter in hybrid or challenging environments where cloud computing previously would not have been possible.

AWS Introduces Nitro Enclaves, Isolated EC2 Environments for Confidential Computing

AWS has recently made available Nitro Enclaves, isolated EC2 environments to process confidential data. Based on a lightweight Linux OS, a Nitro Enclave is a hardened, attested and highly constrained virtual machine.

Fastly Expands Capabilities for Compute@Edge

Fastly, the cloud computing company providing solutions for edge cloud networks and content delivery networks, recently announced new features for their serverless compute environment Compute@Edge. The new release introduces new CLI functionalities, Terraform API support and additional language support.

BBC Online Going Serverless

In a recent article the BBC engineering team describes the work done moving BBC Online to the cloud and to a serverless deployment. Half of the BBC’s website is now rendered serverlessly with AWS Lambda.

AWS Announces Gateway Load Balancer

AWS Gateway Load Balancer is a new fully managed network gateway and load balancer. The service is tailored to deploy, scale and manage third-party virtual appliances such as firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention systems and deep packet inspection systems in the cloud.