What's New At Alibaba Cloud? - Week 44 - Alibaba Cloud Community

By: Jeremy Pedersen

This week we take a quick look at what's new in the world of Alibaba Cloud.

What's New: Databases

PolarDB

The PolarProxy database proxy feature will become a paid feature, included in the Enterprise edition of PolarDB.
PolarDB's Archive Database Cluster now supports MySQL 8.0.

RDS

RDS (MySQL) now supports one-click Availability Zone change (within a single region, of course). The whole migration process is handled automatically! Learn more in the documentation.
RDS (PostgreSQL) now supports PostgreSQL 14.1.
RDS (SQL Server) has added support for some additional SQL Server versions: Basic Editions for 2016EE, 2016SE, 2017SE, 2019SE, 2017 Web, and 2019 Web.

Other Database Updates

AnalyticDB for PostgreSQL has released a Serverless Edition. As this is an early release, you need to submit a support ticket to enable this feature.
The DTS data migration tool now supports Microsoft SQL Server 2019.

What's New: Computing

ECS

Two new 7th-generation AMD-equipped ECS instance types have been added, in particular ebmg7a and ebmr7a which are 7th generation Bare Metal instances with AMD processors. These AMD-based instances offer great price/performance and support for very large amounts of memory...in the case of ebmr7a, up to 256 vCPU cores and 2,048 GB of memory!
A new GPU-equipped Bare Metal instance type is now available, the ebmgn7e, which uses NVIDIA A100 SXM4 80GB GPUs with NVSwitch support, delivering up to 312 TFLOPS on TensorFloat-32.

Function Compute

An entirely new tool, Serverless Devs, now replaces the fun command line tool as the recommended way to deploy and manage serverless applications.

The tool is too big to cover in detail in this week's blog post, but take a look at the Serverless Devs documentation (link in the previous paragraph), or check out this blog post where I use Serverless Devs to deploy a custom container runtime.

Compute Nest

An entirely new service, Compute Nest, is now live.

Compute Nest is a PaaS service that provides a centralized management platform for service providers.

Essentially, it's a tool to help you build and deploy your own cloud services on top of Alibaba Cloud! If you are an Independent Software Vendor (ISV), IT service provider, delivery (deployment) service provider, or O&M provider, you can use Compute Nest to create and deploy services on Alibaba Cloud, which you can then make available to your end users.

See the documentation for more details.

Server Migration Center

Server Migration Center's go2aliyun migration tool now supports ARM64 server migrations.

What's New: Containers

Container Service for Kubernetes (ACK)

A cluster cost analysis feature has been added, which allows you to build dashboards to better understand your ACK expenses. It looks quite nice!

cost_dashboard

Alibaba Cloud Container Registry (ACR)

You can now manually synchronize container images, as well as manually retry failed sync tasks. This works both for synchronization within a single region and synchronization across regions

What's New: Security

ActionTrail

ActionTrail has added an Insight Events feature to help users automatically identify unusual operations. This is a great help in discovering misconfigurations and mistakes early.

Bastion Host

The Bastion Host service now allows you to create time-limited authorization rules for users, allowing them temporary access to one or more ECS instances behind the Bastion Host instance.
You can now import and export Bastion Host configurations, allowing you to transfer all your existing configuration data from one Bastion Host to another.

Big Data & AI

QuickBI

QuickBI has now added support for a wide range of self-built databases. The following are now supported as data sources in QuickBI 3.12.2:
Snowflake
Impala
Kylin
You can now export charts and graphs as images and PDF files, in addition to Excel format.
You can also export reports directly to OSS.

PAI (Platform for AI)

Upgraded ASR models for Chinese and English language speech have been added to Model Hub. This allows you to more easily train highly accurate automatic speech recognition systems.

Networking

Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

Technically, these features are not that new (most were released mid-year 2021) but they are still important. These are four major additions to the VPC service that everybody should know about:

DHCP options sets allow you to customize DHCP within your VPC. This allows you to automatically pass DNS server information to new ECS instances as soon as they come online, or set custom domain names for your ECS instances.
Traffic mirroring allows you to forward traffic bound for one ENI (Elastic Network Interface) to a load balancer or secondary ENI, which is great for threat detection, logging and monitoring, or just regular old troubleshooting.
VPCs now support Network ACLs (NACLs), allowing you more fine-grained control over how ENIs and VSwitches can communicate. This allows you to do things like create a "private subnet" (VSwitch) which is unable to communicate with the Internet.
VPC sharing allows you to do something really cool: with VPC sharing, you can allow multiple Alibaba Cloud accounts to create resources within a single VPC. This means more than one account can create RDS databases, ECS instances, or load balancers within a single, shared VPC. This helps to avoid the need to set up VPC peering using CEN.

VPN Gateway

VPN Gateway has now added support for BGP Dynamic Routing. Learn more here.

Unusual Stuff

Did you know that Alibaba Cloud has a service to pull data from futures and securities exchanges? Yes. Really.

It's called CloudQuotation. You can find it in the console here.

It's expensive, but if you're building a financial application and need access to up-to-the-second market data, CloudQuotation is a good place to start.

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.

You can also follow the Alibaba Cloud Academy LinkedIn Page. We'll re-post these blogs there each Friday.

Not a LinkedIn person? We're also on Twitter and YouTube.

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What's New At Alibaba Cloud? - Week 44