Well, hello gurus, how y'all doing? Scott Pletcher here, back with another download of AWS news goodness. This week, Kendra gets a query language, scaling SAP workloads on AWS gets way easier and Systems Manager gets outbound webhooks. So crank up ProCon Plus, set your parity to 8N1, your protocol to Zmodem, and let's get this download started. Oh, and comment down below if what I just said made perfect sense to you, you know who you are. Well, Amazon Kendra has gotten a bit easier to use recently through new support for a query language. Amazon Kendra is a machine learning enabled,

managed search service that you can point at sources like S3 buckets, ServiceNow, Salesforce, and SharePoint, and it will index those sources for quick and easy searching. With this query language announcement you can now use 'and', 'or', and 'not' as well as field level searches and range operators such as greater than or less than. Just a little Kendra pro tip, you can use Kendra to index virtually any URL, and it might be a good time for you to have Kendra crawl your own public facing website. You might be surprised what you find out there, and it might just keep your company out of the news if you know what I mean. And before you get the bright idea about crawling websites, other than those that belong to you do know that that violates the AWS acceptable use policy.

AWS recently announced a nifty new capability for Systems Manager, outbound webhooks. webhooks are a common way to integrate various applications and platforms for event based activities. Popular applications like Slack, Jira and ServiceNow offer webhooks for triggering events or taking certain actions. Now, right from within Systems Manager, we can reach out and do things with those other apps. For example, we can build a runbook within Systems Manager for say, a automated failover test. Before the test commences,

we could automatically add the notice to our internet site. Then post updates to a team slack channel as the test progresses. I can already see all those automation geeks tenting their fingers at the possibilities. Prior to getting into this whole cloud thing, I spent many years in the SAP ecosystem. SAP is a giant software company with a broad portfolio of applications and services, which help many organizations run their business efficiently.

Not too long ago SAP went all in on an in-memory database called HANA. HANA opened the door to many other innovations, such as blowing up this traditional notion that transactional analytic systems had to be separate. With HANA the same database can be used simultaneously for transactions and analytics, meaning more realtime agility and less data duplication. The caveat with HANA as an enterprise data store is that you needed enough memory to hold your data. And that could be terabytes. Now, back in the day, buying a system with enough RAM might have been cost prohibitive for all but the largest organizations, but the cloud has leveled the playing field.

The pay as you go, model enabled lots of companies to experiment with HANA, demonstrate the business value, then quickly scale into production without huge capital investments. Now, over the years, all the major cloud providers have cozied up to SAP certifying their platforms for running SAP production workloads, and even creating SAP specific skill certifications such as the new SAP on AWS specialty exam. Recently, AWS announced enhancements to its AWS Launch Wizard for HANA based SAP deployments. Launch Wizard can help you size configure and deploy your SAP HANA landscape with just a few mouse clicks. The new Launch Wizard enhancements lets you add additional nodes right from the Launch Wizard itself with no manual config. And trust me,

anyone who has manually stood up an SAP landscape will truly appreciate this miracle of miracles. As this is my first episode hosting in the new year have to be new year to everyone out there, including those getting ready for lunar new year. If you've taken on some new year's resolutions around learning and certifications and looking for some like-minded accountability partners, why not head on over to our discord server? You'll find many others just like you wanting to up their skills game. In fact, we're gonna be hosting another office hours session this week, it'll be on Wednesday, January 26th at 7:00 PM. Eastern 4:00 PM Pacific right there on discord.

And that my friends is all the AWS news that's fit to print this week. Stay safe, take care of one another and keep being awesome cloud gurus.