Hello Cloud Gurus and welcome to AWS This Week and there are loads of awesome announcements this week, including: AWS organizations can now close member accounts without root user login, CloudWatch adds one click Application Insights, AWS network security gets an upgrade with Next Generation Firewall for AWS EC2 instances now automatically recovered by default, and the Sustainability pillar has been added to the AWS Well-Architected Tool. You're watching AWS this week with me, Faye Ellis. A new feature has been released for AWS organizations, giving administrators the ability to close member accounts. And this is very cool because previously the only way to close an AWS account was to log in as the root user. Now accounts can be closed using the CLI, AWS SDK or from AWS Console in the management account.

So this is a great way to retire legacy accounts in your organization without having to dig up root user credentials. And it should be noted that closing accounts in this way is rate limited. So you can close up to 10% of your organization's accounts within a 30 day period, up to a maximum of 200 accounts. Getting started with automatic monitoring of your applications is now easier than ever because Application Insights can now be provisioned directly from the getting started page of CloudWatch. And if you haven't heard about Application Insights, it's a machine learning powered service that allows you to continuously monitor and analyze your application resources like backend databases and application servers.

And it will scan the components that make up your application recommend metrics that you should be monitoring. And it will even detect things like SQL server failed backups, memory links, and canceled IO operations. So if you want to step up your resource monitoring, but you are not sure where to start then Application Insights is a great feature to check out. AWS has partnered with Palo Alto networks to bring us the cloud Next Generation Firewall integrated with AWS Firewall Manager. So this means that you can now use Firewall Manager to provision and manage cloud Next Generation Firewalls as a managed service with pay as you go pricing.

And this is great because with Cloud Next Generation Firewall, you get incredible features like deep packet inspection, the ability to identify applications based on signatures and behavior and implement application-centric security, rather than focusing just on ports and protocols. You also get advanced URL filtering based on deep learning algorithms and tools to prevent vulnerability, exploits, malware, and command and control communication. This week, AWS announced that simplified automatic recovery will now be the default behavior for all compatible EC2 instances and automatic recovery is a feature that can detect underlying hardware issues with your EC2 instances and quickly migrate impaired instances to new hardware. And it does all of this without changing the instance ID, private IP address, elastic IP address, or instance metadata. And automatic recovery has been possible for some time for compatible EC2 instance types.

But historically you've had to opt in to automatic recovery for your instances, but they are now making it the default behavior for all compatible general purpose, compute-optimized, memory-optimized, and accelerated computing instance types. At re:Invent 2021, AWS made the big announcement that they were introducing a sixth pillar to their Well-Architected Framework, and it's called the sustainability pillar. Since then they've developed the Customer Carbon Footprint Tool to help customers audit the environmental impact of the energy that they're using on AWS resources. As organizations increasingly adopt sustainability targets and environmental initiatives, there has been a rising demand for tools can provide insights and suggestions on how to reduce your carbon footprint on AWS. To address this, it was announced this week that the Sustainability pillar has been added to the Well-Architected Tool.

And this means that you can submit your architecture for review and the Well-Architected Tool will analyze your workloads and generate an action plan to help you align with the best practices in sustainability. And we think that using less energy on AWS is usually good for your wallet. And it's always good for the planet. Finally, here at ACG, we are making it even easier to grow your cloud skills right now. You can save on our Personal Plus annual plan with the link in the description or the QR code here on the screen. Well that's all for this week.

Keep being awesome Cloud Gurus. Take care of yourselves, and I'll look forward to seeing you soon.