As we march firmly into the heart of fall and Q4, AWS continues to bring on the treats with more than a few tricks up its sleeves. This month’s list will be a bit shorter, as Amazon gears up for the biggest cloud computing conference in the world, AWS re:Invent, but I think you’ll still find a lot here to consider for your enterprise cloud workloads. And a reminder that Onica will be there, so look for our booth on the vendor floor and come say hi.

VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts Brings VMware SDDC as a Fully Managed on-prem Service
Continuing a history of solid support for VMware integration, AWS is making SDDC a full managed service on AWS Outposts. Realizing that some workloads still need to remain on-premises, AWS and VMware have announced the general availability of VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts. VMware on AWS Outposts eliminates the overhead associated with managing IT infrastructure, giving customers a single pane of glass into vCenter installations, and allowing integration into other AWS services.

AWS Data Exchange for Amazon Redshift
Building on the overwhelming success of AWS Data Exchange, AWS has released AWS Data Exchange for Amazon Redshift. When you subscribe to the service, you can use data from partner providers without any further processing, and no need for an ETL process. The data is always current, and you can use it directly in your Amazon Redshift queries.

General Availability of Amazon RDS Custom for Oracle
While Amazon RDS makes provisioning, managing, and operating a database much simpler than the traditional compute node model, there are some legacy applications that require you to customize the underlying database and operating system. Customers who require these customizations have not been able to realize the benefits of a fully managed database service like RDS, until now. Amazon RDS Custom for Oracle enables database administrators to open the hood and customize database and operating system parameters required for specialized applications. This is a great option if you’re an Oracle customer who needs this kind of flexibility and access to the underlying engines, but could also benefit from a full managed service like RDS. The announcement and some great examples are available here, and the product page can be found here.

These are the announcement we feel will be most interesting to enterprise thought leaders this month, and you can bet that a shorter list this month means some exciting announcements out of re:Invent 2021, happening November 29 – December 3, 2021 in Las Vegas, NV. The keynotes will be streamed live, and most sessions will be made available online shortly after they are presented. Once again, I’d like to invite you to stop by the Onica booth to say hello to us, and feel free to discuss any challenges you’re facing in your cloud journey. We’d be more than happy to see if there’s an opportunity for Onica to assist you, or at least just commiserate and make some recommendations.