Oh, okay. Hello, cloud gurus. How y'all doing I'm Scott Pletcher and fortunately the AWS certification body has deemed me fit to serve another three years as a certified solutions architect professional. Now, while I've recertified several times in the past, this was my first experience with remote proctoring. You can read all about my harrowing tale of intrigue, panic, and near disaster in an article I recently penned about the experience. We'll include a link down below. Enough about me.

You are here for the news. Third-party data access gets easier for Redshift. We have some nifty new AWS solutions to play with, and the time has finally come to migrate those EC2 launch configurations. This is AWS this week. [Inaudible]. Recently AWS announced the public preview of AWS data exchange for Amazon Redshift.

AWS data exchange is a service that allows those who have useful data to share it via the AWS marketplace sometimes for free or sometimes for subscription. Prior to this release, most all the data sets were made available via S3. And sure you could use Athena or Redshift spectrum to get to that data, but that's not ideal from a performance standpoint. Alternatively, you could use some batch ETL process to import the data into your existing Redshift warehouse. This preview of data exchange for Redshift aims to solve the performance challenge and remove the ETL steps by allowing customers to directly query other Redshift based datasets.

Since you're essentially reaching into the other provider's Redshift instance, the data is always up to date and will be much more performance than S3 based datasets. In other dataset news, AWS has added some new public data sets to their open data registry. This latest release includes topics like life sciences, climate, weather, cybersecurity, and machine learning. These data sets are provided free of charge for anyone to use as part of AWS's open data sponsorship program. For all those aspiring cloud architects out there, AWS solutions might just be the most wonderful resource that you may have never heard of.

Think of AWS solutions as a big database of recipes, but instead of helping you create a tasty meal, they help you create an equally tasty cloud-based application. They generally consist of a cloud formation template and a deployment guide, which stitched together multiple AWS services into a complete solution. Usually the solution can be deployed with little more than a mouse click. These solutions are vetted by professional AWS architects, So they tend to adhere to the best practices and can be very useful learning tools. Recently, AWS announced some new and improved AWS solutions that might be worth a look.

There is a distributed load testing solution that can help you find weak points and vulnerabilities in your applications. We also now have a Q and a chat bot solution and an updated version of AWS perspectives, a solution that helps inventory and visually document your existing AWS landscapes. If you haven't explored AWS solutions, do have a look. Just a friendly, EC2 service reminder. If you're still using launch configurations for your EC2 auto-scaling groups, the time has come for you to migrate those over to launch templates. AWS announced recently that they would no longer be building new features into launch configurations and instead focus on launch templates.

Now you do have some time as AWS expects all customers to be migrated by the end of 2022, but come on, launch configurations are so 2010. My recertification ordeal might've been white knuckle, but yours does not have to be. Drop by our certification office hours this Wednesday, October 26th, at 5:00 PM. Eastern on our discord server. Mattias Andersson, Lars Klint, and I will be hanging around ready to answer your questions, share exam strategies, or just talk about whatever's on your minds. Anytime the three of us get together, you can be assured silliness will ensue that my friends is all the AWS news fit to print this week. Stay safe,

take care of one another and keep being awesome cloud gurus.