Weekly Cloud Info #W27 - 2025

Author

Walid LARABI
July 04, 2025

Hi!

This week, AWS brings stronger multi-region support in DynamoDB and faster container starts with Fargate. Azure improves DNS filtering and Blob Storage speed.
Google Cloud now lets you run custom code at the CDN edge and mix structured + unstructured data in BigQuery.

Have a great read. ☕

📰 Top picks of the week

DynamoDB Global Tables Introduce Multi-Region Strong Consistency for Enhanced Resilience

Amazon DynamoDB global tables now support multi-Region strong consistency, enabling highly available applications with zero recovery point objective (RPO). This feature allows applications to always read the latest data from any Region, simplifying the management of strongly consistent replication. It is particularly useful for global applications requiring strict consistency, such as user profile management and financial transactions. The feature is available in multiple AWS Regions and follows the current global tables pricing.

Amazon CloudFront Introduces HTTPS Resource Records in Route 53 for Enhanced Performance

Amazon CloudFront now supports HTTPS resource records in Amazon Route 53, allowing DNS to provide details like HTTP protocol versions and port numbers before establishing connections. This enhancement helps clients optimize performance by identifying CloudFront capabilities, such as HTTP/3 support, without extra round-trips. Additionally, Route 53 users can benefit from free HTTPS record queries for CloudFront alias records, reducing DNS costs. Note that this feature is not available in the AWS China regions.

AWS Fargate Enhances Deployment Consistency with SOCI Index Manifest v2 Support

Amazon ECS customers using AWS Fargate can now utilize SOCI Index Manifest v2, which enhances deployment consistency by allowing containers to start running before the full image is downloaded. This new version ensures integrity through a cryptographic link between the image and its manifest. Users are encouraged to upgrade from the legacy Manifest v1 for improved reliability.

Amazon S3 Express One Zone Introduces Tagging for Cost Allocation and ABAC

Amazon S3 Express One Zone now supports tagging for cost allocation and attribute-based access control (ABAC), allowing users to manage costs and access governance more efficiently. Tags can be added to S3 directory buckets in all regions where the storage class is available, simplifying the process of scaling access without frequent IAM or bucket policy updates. Users can implement tagging through the AWS Management Console, S3 REST API, AWS CLI, or AWS SDK.

AWS Clean Rooms Enhances ML Capabilities with Incremental and Distributed Training

AWS Clean Rooms has introduced two enhancements to its machine learning capabilities: incremental training and distributed training. Incremental training allows users to build new models from existing artifacts, reducing training time and resource usage, while distributed training enables simultaneous model training across multiple compute instances. These features facilitate data collaboration and analysis while ensuring the privacy of sensitive datasets.

Azure Blob Storage Enhances NFS 3.0 Support with Updated AZNFS for Improved Performance

Azure Blob Storage can now be accessed via an updated version of AZNFS for BlobNFS, which utilizes the libfuse3 library for enhanced performance and scalability. This update provides higher throughput, larger file support, improved metadata performance, and removes user group limits, benefiting demanding workloads. BlobNFS supports NFS 3.0 protocol, allowing legacy applications to access Blob Storage without modifications, although it requires a virtual network for access.

Azure DNS Security Policy Now Generally Available with Enhanced Traffic Filtering

Azure's DNS security policy is now generally available, enabling DNS traffic visibility at the VNET level. It allows users to filter DNS queries by allowing, alerting, or blocking access to known or malicious domains. Detailed DNS logs can be sent to a storage account, log analytics workspace, or event hubs, and the policy can be applied to multiple VNets within the same region.

Azure Arc Launches Workload Orchestration for Simplified Kubernetes Management

Azure has announced the General Availability of workload orchestration, a new feature of Azure Arc that streamlines the deployment and management of Kubernetes-based applications across distributed edge environments. This centralized, template-driven model allows organizations to define configurations once and deploy them across multiple sites, enhancing consistency, speed, and scalability while reducing errors. Users can start by creating templates and deploying applications to edge sites through the Azure Arc portal.

Google Cloud Launches Service Extensions Plugins for Enhanced Cloud CDN Customization

Google Cloud has introduced Service Extensions plugins for Cloud CDN, enabling users to run custom code directly in the request path. This feature supports various use cases such as custom traffic steering, cache optimization, and enhanced security. The plugins are built on WebAssembly, offering near-native execution speed and cross-platform portability, with the ability to run at both edge and traffic locations in the request processing path.

Google Cloud Introduces ObjectRef in BigQuery for Unified Multimodal Data Processing

Google Cloud has introduced a new data type, ObjectRef, in BigQuery, which allows users to reference unstructured data in Cloud Storage alongside structured data. This feature enables seamless integration of multimodal data, facilitating analytics and AI/ML use cases without the need for fragmented data pipelines. Users can now process unstructured data with SQL or Python scripts, enhancing data governance and access control across various data types.

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🎁 This week hidden gem

Join AWS EMEA Summit online, and get 25$ in Cloud credits LINK

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