AWS Weekly Roundup: Amazon EC2 M2 Pro Mac, Amazon Coretto 21, Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics, and more (Sept. 25, 2023)

This week, I’m in Jakarta to support AWS User Group Indonesia and AWS Cloud Day Indonesia. Yesterday, I attended a community event – a collaboration between AWS User Group Indonesia and Hacktiv8 with “Innovating Yourself as Early-Stage Developers” as the main theme. We had a blast and I had a wonderful time connecting with speakers and developers.

Next up, AWS Cloud Day Indonesia. I’ll be at the Developer Lounge, come and say hi!

Last Week’s Launches
Here are some of the launches that caught my attention last week:

Add Your Swift Packages to AWS CodeArtifact – In this article, Seb describes how Swift developers who write code for Apple platforms (iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, watchOS, visionOS or Swift) applications running on the server side can use AWS CodeArtifact to securely store and retrieve their package dependencies. What I really like is how developers can still use standard developer tools, such as Xcode, xcodebuild, and the Swift Package Manager (the swift package command) to interact with AWS CodeArtifact and facilitate integration into the development workflow.

Amazon EC2 M2 Pro Mac Instances Built on Apple Silicon M2 Pro Mac Mini Computers – Channy wrote how developers can use Amazon EC2 M2 Pro Mac to run memory intensive builds and test workloads, modernize their CI/CD and accelerate their product time to market. With 2x RAM, 1.5x CPU cores, and more than 2x GPU cores compared to EC2 M1 Mac instances, Apple developers can now run more tests in parallel using multiple Xcode simulators.

Synthetics Python runtime version 2.0 for Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics – With Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics, you can continually verify your customer experience and discover issues before your customers do by creating canaries. Canaries are configurable scripts that run on a schedule, to monitor your endpoints and APIs. In this announcement, you can use Synthetics Python runtime version syn-python-selenium-2.0 to create canaries.

Amazon QuickSight adds new layout and sparkline to KPI visual – Effortlessly design visually appealing KPIs on Amazon Quicksight with these new updates. Quicksight introduces a range of enhancements with user-friendly experience, including templated KPI layouts, support for sparklines, improvements in conditional formatting, and a revamped format pane.

Amazon Location Services announces a price reduction of up to 75 percent for tracking and geofencing – Amazon Location Service just announced a four-tiered pricing model for tracking and geofencing to help you scale and cost-effectively run your operations and business. If you use geofencing, you might see your bill decrease by 20 percent to 70 percent, and tracking by up to 75 percent.

Amazon Corretto 21 is now generally available – Happy news for Java developers. Amazon Coretto 21 with long term support (LTS) is generally available for Linux, Windows and macOS.

AWS App Runner launches improvements for Auto-Scaling configuration management – Now you can use new APIs and parameters for AWS App Runner service to manage your App Runner services and define your auto-scaling configuration (ASC). For example, setting default ASC, update existing ASC and list all App Runner services that are using an ASC resource.

Amazon SNS message data protection with redaction or masking – With Amazon SNS, now you can discover and protect certain types of personally identifiable information (PII) and protected health information (PHI). You can define your data protection policies and SNS will scan messages in real-time for sensitive data.

Upcoming AWS and Community Events
Check your calendars and sign up for these AWS events:

• AWS On Tour – September 18 – October 6,
• AWS Cloud Day Indonesia – September 26,
• AWS Summit Johannesburg – September 26,
• CDK Day – September 29.

And let’s learn from our fellow builders and join AWS Community Days:

• AWS Community Day Zimbabwe (Sept. 30),
• AWS Community Day Chile (Sept. 30),
• AWS Community Day Bulgaria Bulgaria (Oct. 7).

Visit the landing page to check out all the upcoming AWS Community Days.

Happy building!
— Donnie

This post is part of our Weekly Roundup series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!