AWS Marketplace announces Purchase Order Management for SaaS contracts
Today, AWS Marketplace announced Purchase Order Management for SaaS contracts, which allows customers to add purchase order numbers to their AWS invoices for SaaS contracts purchased in AWS Marketplace. Previously, customers could only add one purchase order number across all their AWS Marketplace transactions. Now, customers can add purchase order numbers specific to public and private offers for SaaS contracts when transacting in AWS Marketplace. Purchase order numbers entered in AWS Marketplace appear on corresponding invoices, easing software spend allocation to internal budgets.

The Babelfish for PostgreSQL open source project is now available. Babelfish for PostgreSQL provides the capability for PostgreSQL to understand queries from applications written for Microsoft SQL Server. With Babelfish, applications currently running on SQL Server can now run directly on PostgreSQL with a fraction of the work required, compared to a traditional migration. Babelfish understands the SQL Server wire-protocol and T-SQL, the Microsoft SQL Server query language, so you don’t have to switch database drivers or re-write all of your application queries.

Following the announcement of updates to the PostgreSQL database  by the open source community, we have updated Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition to support PostgreSQL 13.4, 12.8, 11.13, and 10.18. These releases contain bug fixes and improvements by the PostgreSQL community. As a reminder, Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL 9.6 will reach end of life on January 31, 2022.

Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition now supports PostGIS major version 3.1. This new version of PostGIS is available on PostgreSQL versions 13.4, 12.8, 11.13, 10.18, and higher.

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) now adds native support for Bottlerocket in EKS managed node groups in all commercial AWS regions. Most EKS customers today deploy their applications on worker nodes backed by operating systems that are designed for a variety of use cases. AWS launched Bottlerocket, a minimal, Linux-based open source operating system that is purpose built and optimized to run containers. When combined, EKS managed node groups and Bottlerocket give customers a simple way to provision and manage compute capacity using the latest best practices for running containers in production. Bottlerocket is now included as a built-in AMI choice for managed node groups, enabling customers to provision container optimized worker nodes with a single click.

AWS IoT SiteWise now allows customers to use the same asset model under different asset model hierarchies. With this feature, customers can simplify the asset modeling experience by reducing the number of models required to build a virtual representation of their industrial operations. Previously, for the same type of machine deployed in different production sites, users had to create one asset model for each production site model. Now, users can create one asset model and reuse it in all of your production site models. 

Today, AWS announces the availability of AWS Fargate for Amazon ECS Windows containers. This feature simplifies the adoption of modern container technology for Amazon ECS customers by making it even easier to run their Windows containers on AWS.

The Amazon Chime SDK is a service that makes it easy for developers to add real-time audio, video, screen sharing, and messaging capabilities to their applications. With the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) audio APIs, developers can build customized telephony applications like voice menus, click-to-call, and call routing using the agility and operational simplicity of a serverless AWS Lambda function. Starting today, developers can record PSTN and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) voice calls and store the recordings in the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket of their choice using the call recording feature. 

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces the general availability of compute optimized Amazon EC2 C6i instances. C6i instances are powered by 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code named Ice Lake) with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.5 GHz, offer up to 15% better compute price performance over C5 instances for a wide variety of workloads, and always-on memory encryption using Intel Total Memory Encryption (TME). Designed for compute-intensive workloads, C6i instances are built on the AWS Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and lightweight hypervisor, which delivers practically all of the compute and memory resources of the host hardware to your instances. These instances are an ideal fit for compute-intensive workloads such as batch processing, distributed analytics, high performance computing (HPC), ad serving, highly scalable multiplayer gaming, and video encoding.

The extraordinary assault by the China government on its tech companies has devastated share prices with Alibaba 43% down from its peak. After founder Jack Ma criticised the China financial system last October, Xi has apparently ben trying to show who’s boss. It’s  been done at a huge cost to Chinese tech share prices. Alibaba …

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