Hello, cloud gurus and welcome to AWS this week, where we refine all the goings on of the cloud to bring you only the finest and recent announcements from AWS. This week, we'll be covering AWS migration hub now offers migration strategy recommendations, fault injection simulator can now create spot interruptions. AWS SAM has some handy new features with AWS, SAM accelerate and Amazon RDS custom for Oracle and just general availability. I'm Stephen Sennett here to bring you another episode of AWS this week. AWS migration hub has been expanded to provide advice on cloud strategy recommendations.

Suppose you've got an application server running on premise and you want to migrate it to the cloud. We could just lift and shift it to an EC2 instance, but maybe we could do something else we might consider containerizing it. And we might consider whether we want to replatform our database at the same time. These are really cool ideas, but it's kind of hard to know how and where to get started. Strategy recommendations analyzes your application and asks a number of questions about your business priorities.

Like whether you need a really fast migration or looking to reduce costs and gives you a list of options to help rehost, replatform or refactor your application along with AWS services to help you do it. This doesn't replace the value of having skilled cloud architects and your team, but it can make the task easier. The AWS Faullt Injection Simulator has been given a really useful update, now being able to create spot interruptions. EC2 spot instances are great for running non-urgent analysis or data processing workloads that are really low cost. And while we design our workloads using spot instances, to be able to withstand interruptions, it's sometimes harder to know how it would work in the real world with an actual interruption.

Fault Injection simulator's new feature lets you specifically trigger a spot interruption on one or many of your spot instances to see just how your workload will react for anyone using spot instances out there. This would be a great thing to test in your production environment. Just make sure to let someone know before you push the button. AWS SAM has also had a new release, which they're calling AWS SAM accelerate. This new feature is going to allow us to perform incremental builds on our Lambda functions, but also to test our serverless applications by deploying them in the cloud.

Quick refresher AWS: SAM allows us to develop serverless solutions and test them locally on our machine in a Lambda like Docker container. This is really great, but faced by the limitations that while a Docker container can be like it's running on AWS, it's just not running on AWS. There are differences in what works on your machine may not actually work when you deploy it in production. AWS has decided to solve this problem by just saying, well, how about just running the test in an isolated environment on AWS? And you know what that kind of makes sense. Lastly, for those customers out there still running Oracle databases, AWS is filling a gap that you've been requesting for years with Amazon RDS custom for Oracle.

Oracle databases have been used in many specialized applications. And especially in the past, this has included special customizations to both the database engine and even the underlying operating system. This makes it really unsuitable for Amazon RDS being so heavily locked down. So we end up hosting them ourselves on EC2 instances. Amazon RDS custom for Oracle gives us a lot more flexibility with custom engine versions, giving us a mix of customization that we have available for us on EC2, but with some of that overhead taken off our shoulders with RDS.

If you're still running Oracle databases on EC2 or even still on prem, this could be a huge boost to your AWS experience. That's all the news we have for this week, but we do have some links to further resources at the bottom of this video, including the ACG blog, where you can dive deeper. Let us know what you think. And just one last thing, if you're enjoying our content, consider checking out a free plan on our website, which we change out every month. For example, this month you can get access to Amazon dynamoDB deep dive course, where we explore extensively one of the most powerful technologies in AWS. So until next time go forth and learn all the things and as always keeping awesome cloud gurus.