What's New On Alibaba Cloud - Friday Blog Week 47

By: Jeremy Pedersen

Folks, you know what time it is! That's right, it's Blog Time (puts on sunglasses).

This week we're looking at what's new on Alibaba Cloud. This will be a short one, don't worry: you've got time to finish reading before your boss comes up behind you!

What's New - Database Services

RDS

RDS has picked up a couple of new features recently. Let's list 'em out:

You can now move an RDS instance from one vSwitch to another, as documented here.
I covered this in a previous post, but you can also enable multi-region backups for RDS which is a very handy DR feature.
ApsaraDB RDS for PostgreSQL now supports read-only instances.
RDS for PostgreSQL adds support for the well-known index_adviser plugin.

RDS SQL Server Edition now supports 2016EE, 2016SE, 2017SE, 2019SE, 2017 Web, and 2019 Web. I have mentioned this in previous posts, but it's worth mentioning again.

Wondering where you can keep up-to-date on changes? All RDS updates are listed here. This list is kept up to date by the RDS product team, so it should stay current!

PolarDB

No new new updates this week (I have reported on most of these a few weeks back), but I'll summarize here again:

Subscription PolarDB clusters now support automatic upgrade and downgrade.

You can see a full list of new updates here.

What's New - Computing

ECS

You can now create Snapshot Consistent Groups that allow you to take snapshots of multiple disks at once.
New GPU-equipped Bare Metal instances have been released: the ebmgn6ia type is now available.

SAS (Simple Application Server)

SAS has added support for these new application images:

LNMP 7.4
ASP.NET 4.8
Tomcat 8
NextCloud 23.0.0

See the release notes for a full list of updates!

Security

Bastion Host

Bastion Host now allows you to import and export Bastion Host configurations.
Bastion Host proxy servers now support HA configuration (you can designate a secondary or failover proxy server using the network domain feature).

A full list of recent updates is available here.

Resource Access Management (RAM)

RAM has added a couple of new features to help improve security for sensitive operations and make it easier to link external identities to the RAM service:

OpenID Connect single sign-on (OIDC SSO) is now supported.
You can now force MFA for sensitive operations, specifically:
- Creating an Access Key pair.
- Deleting an Access Key pair.
- Disabling an Access Key pair.

A full list of updates is available here.

SSL Certificate Service

There will be a price increase for DigiCert certificates issued through Alibaba Cloud's SSL Certificate Service.

One way to avoid paying a high price for SSL certificates is to generate them using a free service like Let's Encrypt. You can then upload these certificates to services like Alibaba Cloud's CDN or SLB. Instructions are here:

Not as convenient as Alibaba Cloud SSL Certificate Service's one-click deployment, but much cheaper!

Anti-DDoS

Operation logs are now stored for 180 days instead of just 30. See the documentation for more info.

Big Data

Hologres

By default, the public endpoint on new Hologres instances is disabled. This is a security enhancement. If you need public access, you can manually re-enable the public endpoint.
Hologres nodes can now use more than 20 GB of memory for computing tasks: memory is now dynamically allocated to each node.

See a full list of updates here.

Container Services

ACR (Alibaba Cloud Container Registry)

Enterprise Edition (EE) ACR instances can now be accessed using the same endpoints used for Personal Edition instances, which makes migration easier.
We now support acceleration for cross-border Docker image transfers.

See more updates here.

Event Bridge

Event Bridge is a new service that was just released late last year (2021), so there aren't a lot of new updates just yet.

On relatively new feature worth mentioning is EventStreamings, which was added to allow processing of streaming data, which is pretty neat! More details here.

Full release notes here.

ASM (Alibaba Cloud Service Mesh)

ASM now allows you to declare external authorization services within a mesh. See here for details.

Full release notes and future updates will be listed here.

Mobile Services

mPaaS (Mobile Platform as a Service)

A new version of the mPaaS baseline for iOS and Android has been released. See the release notes for more details.

Networking

VPN Gateway

VPN Gateway now supports dynamic BGP routing.

This is a helpful feature for enterprise users that need their VPN Gateway to automatically learn new routes.

GA (Global Acceleration)

GA now offers a one month free trial. If you're not sure GA will work to accelerate your application, no problem: try it out for free first!

ALB (Application Load Balancer)

Server Load Balancer ALBs now support a higher uptime SLA when deployed across two zones.

This is a BIG enhancement over the Classic Load Balancer, which only offered an SLA of 99.95%, lower than ECS.

ALB is now able to offer a multi-zone ALB of 99.995%, bringing it on-par with ECS instance availability guarantees.

See the release notes here or the updated SLA (Chinese).

PrivateLink Is A Thing Now

I'm not sure if I have covered this in other blog posts, so I'll mention it here: there is now a good alternative to peering VPCs with CEN. You can now perform direct, simple peering with PrivateLink.

The service has been available throughout most of 2021, but I thought it was still worth a mention!

This is really nice because it enables easier cross-VPC networking, which I can use to do things like forward traffic from one VPC to a load balancer in a different VPC group.

Alibaba Cloud CDN

Support has been added for QUIC protocol. See the release notes here.
"Domain name management" has added a search feature that allows you to search for CDN-associated domain names by partial-match or fuzzy-match, as well as by origin server.

CEN (Cloud Enterprise Network)

When using the CEN Enterprise Edition transit routing feature, you can specify a different Alibaba Cloud account as the "payer account", meaning traffic charges will be billed to that account, rather than the account hosting CEN. See details here.

A full list of CEN feature releases and upgrades is here.

That's all for this week! See you next time. ^_^

I've Got A Question!

Great! Reach out to me at jierui.pjr@alibabacloud.com and I'll do my best to answer in a future Friday Q&A blog.

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