This is the first entry in a series of three posts about accessing your EC2 instances. EC2 Instance Connect, which I’ll call Instance Connect from here, allows you to connect to an instance that doesn’t have a key installed.

Working closely with our clients, we occasionally have the opportunity to do something a little bit outside of the norm. In this post, we (Declan and Arjen) were lucky enough to help out Belong with a fun learning event.

Last month my colleague and I got to run a DeepRacer event at the client we’re working at. This post shows what that was like, how we did it, and what lessons we learned.

This week AWS released several useful features for existing services. Step Functions now support Dynamic Parallelism, and you can now replicate your S3 buckets within the same region.

Amazon Quantum Ledger Database was released, and Flow Logs allow the addition of meta-data.

Today is focused once again on a couple of very welcome improvements. This time that concerns Lambda's shared ENIs and IAM Roles for EKS services.

Amazon Forecast is released, and a couple of new features show how Session Manager works and suddenly make it look like a completely different service.

Both App Mesh and Step Functions gained some long-awaited functionalities, and I take a brief look at some improvements to the out of the box runtimes for CodeBuild.

Last month I was lucky enough to be asked back to give a workshop at the Melbourne AWS Programming and Tools Meetup. This meetup is always a lot of fun as it's all about going hands on. My subject this time around was CloudFormation Macros.

AWS released Lake Formation and support for multiple masters in Aurora, while GitHub announced updates about GitHub Actions.

An introductory talk to DeepRacer

Since my last weekly note, AWS has released a couple of highly anticipated features for both ECS and CloudWatch Logs Insights. In addition they open sourced a new query language and have given us a public roadmap for CloudFormation.

Between EventBridge, new ways of connecting to your EC2 instances, and CDK going GA there's a lot to cover this week.

Last week gave us the first re:Inforce, AWS' new security focused conference. And naturally this meant a number of security focused releases, including Security Hub, Control Tower, and VPC Traffic Mirroring.

AWS integrates App Mesh and Cloud Map and releases a way to review your Service Control Policies for an account. In the meantime Azure released a managed Bastion service.

Apple held their WWDC conference with announcements to make everyone happy, including me. In the meantime AWS released a new capability for ECS that allows you to assign far more ENIs for your awsvpc networking tasks. I'm also introducing a new segment to these notes.