Amazon MQ is a managed message broker service for Apache ActiveMQ that makes it easy to set up and operate message brokers in the cloud. Message brokers allow different software systems–often using different programming languages, and on different platforms–to communicate and exchange information. Messaging is the communications backbone that connects and integrates the components of distributed applications, such as order processing, inventory management, and fullfillment for e-commerce. Amazon MQ manages the administration and maintenance of ActiveMQ, a popular open-source message broker. Amazon MQ takes care of time-consuming tasks such as provisioning the infrastructure, setting up the broker, updating the software, and managing security. Amazon MQ is designed to withstand failures so your messages are highly available. With Amazon MQ, you get direct access to the ActiveMQ console and industry standard APIs and protocols for messaging, including JMS, NMS, AMQP, STOMP, MQTT, and WebSocket. You can easily move from any message broker that uses these standards to Amazon MQ because you don’t have to rewrite any messaging code in your applications.
Announcing Amazon EC2 Bare Metal Instances (Preview)
Amazon EC2 Bare Metal instances provide your applications with direct access to the processor and memory of the underlying server. These instances are ideal for workloads that require access to hardware feature sets (such as Intel VT-x), or for applications that need to run in non-virtualized environments for licensing or support requirements.
Introducing Amazon EC2 H1 Instances, the latest generation of Storage Optimized instances for high performance big data workloads
Amazon EC2 H1 instances are the latest generation of Amazon EC2’s Storage Optimized instances, which are powered by 2.3 GHz Intel® Xeon® E5 2686 v4 processors (codenamed Broadwell), offer more vCPUs and more memory per terabyte of local magnetic storage compared to D2 instances. The largest instance size, h1.16xlarge, provides 64vCPUs and 16TB of HDD-based instance storage. H1 instances are designed for applications that need low cost storage, high disk throughput, and high sequential disk I/O access to large data sets. H1 instances are ideal for data-intensive workloads such as MapReduce-based workloads, distributed file systems such as HDFS and MapR-FS, network file systems, log or data processing applications such as Apache Kafka, and big data workload clusters.
Amazon EC2 Spot Lets you Pause and Resume Your Workloads
Amazon EC2 Spot can now hibernate Amazon EBS-backed instances in the event of an interruption. Spot can fulfill your request by resuming instances from a hibernated state when capacity is available. Hibernate is just like closing and opening your laptop lid, with your application starting up right where it left off.
Introducing Amazon EC2 M5 Instances
M5 Instances are the next generation of the Amazon EC2 General Purpose compute instances, powered by 2.5 GHz Intel® Xeon Platinum 8175 processors (formerly codenamed Skylake), and featuring Intel’s newest vector processing instruction set, Advanced Vector Extension 512 (AVX-512). M5 instances are based on the 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. They deliver up to 14% improvement in price/performance compared to M4 instances with the updated processor. The addition of new AVX-512 delivers 2x the performance per core for vector and floating point intensive workloads such as image and video processing, data compression, cryptography, and high-performance web serving.
Amazon EC2 Spot introduces new pricing model and the ability to launch Spot instances via RunInstances API
Amazon EC2 simplified the Amazon EC2 Spot instance pricing by moving to a model that delivers low, predictable prices that adjust gradually based on long-term trends in supply and demand. You will continue to save up to 90% off the On-Demand instance price and you will continue to pay the Spot price that’s in effect at the beginning of each instance-hour for your running instance.
Announcing Amazon GuardDuty – Intelligent Threat Detection
Amazon GuardDuty is a threat detection service that provides you with an accurate and easy way to continuously monitor and protect your AWS accounts and the applications and services running within them. With a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, GuardDuty immediately begins analyzing billions of events from AWS CloudTrail, VPC Flow Logs, and other AWS data sources.
Texas wastewater plant spilled more than 100M gallons of water during Hurricane Harvey
Records show heavy rainfall caused drainage ditches to overflow during the storm.
Wastewater utility passes $91.9 million budget
Revenue and expenses are both projected to increase at the Little Rock Water Reclamation Authority next year. Of that, $27.5 million comprises operation and maintenance expenses, up $600,000 from this year, or 2.2 percent. It has been a goal of Chief Executive Officer Greg Ramon’s to keep each year’s operating budget within 2 percent of the previous year’s since he arrived at the utility, formerly known as Little Rock Wastewater, in 2014.
More Water Utility Management articles
Florida DEP invests more than $90M in water quality improvement projects
CoBank funds NRWA apprenticeship program with $250,000 grant
Smart water begins at the meter
WEF to Congress: Fund key water programs
The agency penned a letter asking for Congress to continue federal investment in water infrastructure, geographic watershed and state grant programs, and others.