Christmas came early this year at AWS re: Invent 2022

AWS re:Invent 2022 just wrapped up, and for me, I have finally made it back to Australian shores for our non-snowy, hopefully, hot Christmas Day.

On the long flight(s) home I was able to reflect on the 119 new services and features that were announced as part of AWS re: Invent 2022 from Nov 28 – Dec 2^nd, and the myriad of new capabilities we announced in our latest innovation release, Commvault Platform Release 2023 (released Dec 15^th, 2022).

I know I felt like a kid in a candy store trying to decide what I’m going to try first when I return to the office in 2023.

I saw four major themes emerge across re: Invent that underpin the responsible building of secure and sustainable cloud native applications. Builders need to consider security of data in-transit and at-rest, responsible scaling, and cloud operations that respond to planned and unplanned events:

Securing the cloud, which continues to be Job Zero for both AWS and builders alike as we strive to build more data-driven applications, that are more accessible than ever before. Some notable releases that will positively impact AWS and Commvault customers looking to protect their AWS resources were:

• Announcing delegated administrator for AWS Organizations which allows businesses to delegate the management of Organizational policies. This will allow streamlined management of the IAM policies, Service Control Policies, and tagging policies that enable scalable protection of your compute, container, database, and storage resources in your multi-account landing zones.
  
  Commvault agrees with delegated security controls and can enforce multi-person authorization for sensitive data actions like deletions or restoration of data. See Authorization by Tenant Administrators for Business Logic Workflows to ensure you are delegating the protection of your data to more than one individual.
• Advanced Notice: Amazon S3 will automatically enable S3 Block Public Access and disable access control lists for all new buckets starting in April 2023 which, just makes sense. Accidental publishing of sensitive content in public-access enabled S3 buckets has long been at the top of the list of ‘things to not do in AWS’. Tip: Don’t forget to check your backups and backup copies to ensure you have enabled encryption as well.
  
  Commvault hopes your business stays malware-free, but hope is never a plan. Commvault now scans your backup content for malware to allow recovery from known clean backup data. Ensure recovery is always part of your threat analysis and response plan.
• AWS Resource Access Manager is now available in the AWS Europe (Zurich) Region, AsiaPacific (Hyderabad), and Europe (Spain) making it easier to securely share resources across AWS accounts, within and across organizational units (OUs).
  
  Stay tuned to Commvault What’s New announcements for updates on new regional supportability. Commvault supports most AWS Regions and all AWS Local Zones today. Commvault announced Amazon VPC Protection in Commvault Platform Release 2023 to ensure your network configurations are protected and recoverable as you expand into and across the 30 Regions available today.

Scaling Cloud Operations was a recurring theme for almost all service and feature releases. As businesses expand in AWS service adoption and consumption, they need to be able to scale or automate their cloud operations. Some notable enhancements to help achieve cost-optimized operations were:

• AWS announces Systems Manager Quick Setup for Resource Scheduler which simplifies the setup of scheduled resource power-up, power-down, and optimization of capacity to save costs.
  
  Commvault automates the power management of MediaAgents by powering Amazon EC2 data management resources on and off as backup and recovery activities occur. This approach saves runtime costs but migrates resource optimization to an event-driven scalable approach. You can automate resource power management. backup, and recovery operations with Commvault too, just grab an access token to access the Commvault service endpoint and start automating today.
• Amazon CloudWatch launches cross-account observability across multiple AWS accounts and helps you monitor and troubleshoot applications that span multiple accounts. This is often critical for your data management system, like Commvault where your protected workloads and data management workloads reside in different accounts.
  
  Commvault recommends using AWS resource tags on all your AWS resources to improve visibility, cost transparency, and support automation efforts. Commvault ensures tags are restored on all created resources and allows the setting of tags during recovery to align with your observability, cost management, and security needs.
• Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP announces four new ease-of-use features added more usability enhancements to the fully managed shared storage service built on NetApp’s popular ONTAP file system. Customers looking to expand into AWS, lift-and-shift applications with high-IOPS storage needs, or reuse on-prem storage management processes in AWS – can now adopt Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP.
  
  Commvault announced IntelliSnap® snapshot management for Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP in Commvault Platform Release 2023. Customers can orchestrate application-aware snapshots and service-independent streamed backup copies of Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP SMB shares, NFS exports, and iSCSI volumes. Snapshot-based backups can be replicated using NetApp SnapVault and SnapMirror between Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP file systems or between on-prem and the AWS Cloud.

Expanding to new Regions and Zones was a common theme across 2022 with AWS expanding availability into three new regions – Europe (Zurich) eu-central-2, Europe (Spain) eu-south-2, and Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) ap-south-2  and up to a total of 281 AWS Local Zones. AWS services and resources are now even more available to begin your 2023 migration projects.

Commvault makes migration simpler, more secure, and faster by converting and replicating UEFI-based VMs to Amazon EC2, including the programmatic modification of on-prem Linux hosts to automatically inject required Amazon EC2 nitro OS drivers. Get started today with a one-time conversion or set up periodic replication and cut-over to running in AWS when required.

New toys for builders is what re: Invent is all about, and 2022 was no exception.

• Amazon RDS Optimized Reads is now available for up to 50% faster queries on Amazon RDS for MySQL offers up to 50% faster query processing compared to previous generations. Depending on the data protection scheme employed, this performance may deliver significant performance to data management activities that share processing resources on Amazon RDS instances, more in the future when our lab testing completes…
• Introducing Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) Express for Amazon EC2 instances delivers enhanced networking performance via the introduction of the Scalable Reliable Datagram (SRD) protocol. Higher single flow bandwidth and lower latency between EC2 instances could deliver significant backup and recovery performance, more when we emerge from the Commvault labs…
• AWS announces Amazon VPC Lattice (Preview) is an application layer networking service that simplifies the connection, securing and monitoring of service-to-service communication. As monolithic applications become more and more decomposed, and more and more decoupled – Amazon VPC Lattice becomes crucial. Commvault will watch this service closely with potential applications to our Amazon EKS and Amazon VPC protection portfolio.

Commvault eagerly awaits the impact some of these performance improvements will deliver on data protection, replication, and recovery.

You can get started today by downloading Commvault Platform Release 2023 from the Commvault Software Store, or if you want don’t want to setup and configure a data protection system – sign up for a free 30-day Metallic Trial and start protecting your AWS resources today.

Have a happy holiday and rest up, as all the work you did to be Recovery Ready with Commvault and Metallic in 2022 will pay off during the holiday break… 😊