Source: arnnet.com.au
AWS Expands Sydney Region with Three Major Releases
Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced a significant wave of updates for its Sydney region (ap-southeast-2), bringing two managed services into general availability (GA) and extending serverless container support to the region. The releases cover website monitoring via CloudWatch Synthetics, a managed Apache Cassandra-compatible database with Amazon Keyspaces, and the ability to run Kubernetes pods on AWS Fargate through Amazon EKS.
CloudWatch Synthetics Reaches General Availability
CloudWatch Synthetics entered GA in the Sydney region, having first been made available there in January 2020. The service lets you create canaries—configurable scripts that simulate the routes and actions taken by real users—so you can proactively detect problems before customers encounter them.
What Canaries Can Monitor
- REST API endpoints and URLs
- Website content availability
- Page-load errors and UI asset latencies
- Transaction completions and multi-step wizard flows
- Checkout flows in e-commerce applications
- Broken or dead links
Debugging and Integration
Each canary run produces debugging artifacts including screenshots, HTTP Archive (HAR) files, and log files. CloudWatch Synthetics integrates with CI/CD pipelines through AWS CloudFormation, the AWS SDK, and CloudWatch Synthetic APIs, making it straightforward to add synthetic monitoring as part of an automated deployment workflow.
Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra) Enters General Availability
Amazon Keyspaces—formerly known as Amazon Managed Apache Cassandra Service (MCS)—also reached GA after a preview period that began in March 2020. The service provides a scalable, serverless, and fully managed Cassandra-compatible database, meaning you can use existing Cassandra Query Language (CQL) code, Apache 2.0-licensed drivers, and standard developer tooling without modification.
Key Capabilities
- Automatic scaling: Tables scale throughput up and down based on actual request traffic.
- High availability: Data is automatically replicated across multiple AWS Availability Zones.
- Security: Encryption at rest is enabled by default; access is managed through AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) and can be scoped to a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).
- Observability: Integrated logging and monitoring are built in.
- Performance: AWS claims consistent, single-digit-millisecond read and write performance at scale.
Pricing (Sydney Region, at Time of Announcement)
Keyspaces is serverless—you pay only for what you use. The AWS Free Tier includes 30 million on-demand write request units, 30 million on-demand read request units, and 1 GB of storage per month.
| Resource | On-Demand Capacity Mode | Provisioned Capacity Mode |
|---|---|---|
| Write request units | US$1.6508 per million | US$0.0008538 per hour |
| Read request units | US$0.3306 per million | US$0.0001708 per hour |
| Storage | US$0.342 per GB per month | |
Note: Pricing figures are as reported at the time of the original announcement. Always verify current pricing on the official AWS Keyspaces pricing page.
Amazon EKS Adds AWS Fargate Support in Sydney
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) gained the ability to run containers on AWS Fargate in the Sydney (ap-southeast-2) region. Together, EKS and Fargate enable a fully serverless Kubernetes experience: EKS manages the Kubernetes control plane while Fargate eliminates the need to provision or manage the underlying EC2 worker nodes for your pods.
Why EKS on Fargate Matters
- No node management: AWS handles patching, scaling, and availability of the underlying compute.
- Pod-level isolation: Each pod runs in its own dedicated kernel runtime environment, improving security boundaries.
- Right-sized billing: You are charged for the vCPU and memory resources actually requested by each task or pod—not for idle capacity.
Fargate Pricing (at Time of Announcement)
- vCPU: US$0.04856 per vCPU per hour
- Memory: US$0.00532 per GB per hour
Verify current Fargate pricing on the official AWS Fargate pricing page.
Summary
These releases collectively reduce the operational overhead for Australian and Asia-Pacific customers using AWS. CloudWatch Synthetics enables proactive, code-driven monitoring of web applications and APIs. Amazon Keyspaces delivers a fully managed Cassandra-compatible database without cluster administration. And EKS with Fargate removes the last layer of server management from containerised Kubernetes workloads. Teams operating in the Sydney region can adopt all three services without provisioning or managing underlying infrastructure.