InfoQ – March 2023

From a mountpoint for Amazon S3 to the latest features of IaSQL: a recap of my articles for InfoQ this March.

Cloud Provider Sustainability: the Need for a Workload Carbon Footprint Standard

Adrian Cockcroft, tech advisor and former VP for sustainability architecture at Amazon, shared his vision at QCon London on sustainability commitments for cloud providers and the current challenges in determining their supply chain carbon footprint. Cockcroft advocated for a new real-time carbon footprint standard.

Google Cloud Spanner Introduces Configurable Read-Only Replicas and Zero-Downtime Move Service

Google recently announced new regional and multi-regional capabilities for Cloud Spanner. The distributed SQL database now supports configurable read-only replicas and introduced a “zero-downtime” instance move service.

AWS Announces Open Source Mountpoint for Amazon S3

During the latest Pi Day, AWS announced Mountpoint for Amazon S3, an open-source file client to deliver high throughput access on Amazon S3. Currently in alpha, the local mount point provides high single-instance transfer rates and is primarily intended for data lake applications.

AWS Introduces Global Condition Context Keys to Improve EC2 Security

AWS recently introduced global condition context keys to restrict the usage of EC2 instance credentials to the instance itself. The new keys allow the creation of policies that can limit the use of role credentials to only the location from where they originated, reducing the risk of credential exfiltration.

Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL Adds Write-Through Cache to Improve Logical Replication Performance

Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible databases recently introduced a logical replication write-through cache to reduce the amount of storage I/O during logical decoding. The new feature decreases the replication lag, improving read I/O and transaction catch-up time.

AWS Lambda Supports Powertools for .NET to Simplify Observability

AWS recently announced that the open-source library Lambda Powertools now supports .NET. The developer library helps implement observability when running Lambda functions based on .NET 6 or above, reducing the amount of custom code.

Microsoft Claims SQL Server Performs Better on Azure Than AWS

In a recent benchmark, Microsoft claims that SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines can be up to 57% faster and cost up to 54% less than running a similar workload on AWS EC2.

Infrastructure as SQL on AWS: IaSQL Enters Beta Adding Multi-Region and Transactions

The open-source service IaSQL recently announced its beta release. Designed to manage cloud infrastructure using SQL, IaSQL introduced support for AWS multi-region, new AWS services, and infrastructure changes as transactions.

More news? A recap of my articles for InfoQ in February.