News

What's New in AWS Quick Starts

• By David Ramel
• 11/06/2018

Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) Quick Starts promise to save time when learning a new service, technique or technology on the leading cloud services platform.

The cloud giant regularly publishes new Quick Starts to provide easy onramps to its wide gamut of services for those in a hurry to learn something. "Quick Starts are built by AWS solutions architects and partners to help you deploy popular solutions on AWS, based on AWS best practices for security and high availability," says the AWS Quick Starts site. "These reference deployments implement key technologies automatically on the AWS Cloud, often with a single click and in less than an hour. You can build your test or production environment in a few steps, and start using it immediately."

However, they're published so regularly it can be hard to keep track of what's available for your favorite cloud service. To help sort all that out, here's a recap of Quick Starts published within the last month.

Build a CI/CD pipeline to test AWS CloudFormation templates using AWS TaskCat
This Oct. 30 Quick Start deploys a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline in about 15 minutes, to automatically test AWS CloudFormation templates from a GitHub repository. The CI/CD environment includes AWS TaskCat for testing, AWS CodePipeline for continuous integration, and AWS CodeBuild as the build service. TaskCat is an open source tool that tests AWS CloudFormation templates. It creates stacks in multiple AWS Regions simultaneously and generates a report with a pass/fail grade for each region. Users can specify the regions, indicate the number of Availability Zones they want to include in the test, and pass in the AWS CloudFormation parameter values they want to test. Customers can use the CI/CD pipeline to test any AWS CloudFormation templates, including nested templates, from a GitHub repository.

Deploy Microsoft Exchange Server
This Oct 29 offering is actually an update, showing how to automatically deploy Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 or Exchange Server 2016 in a highly available architecture in about 90 minutes. The deployment includes Microsoft Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) for directory services and Remote Desktop Gateway (RD Gateway) for remote administration over the Internet. Exchange Server is a messaging and collaboration solution, with support for mailboxes, calendars, compliance, and e-archival. When users deploy an Exchange Server environment on AWS, they can scale an environment based on demand. Customers get the functionality of Exchange Server and the flexibility and security of AWS.

Deploy Autodesk Forge
This Oct. 25 Quick Start builds an Autodesk Forge environment for customizable building blocks in the form of Web service APIs, tools and services in about 15 minutes. Autodesk Forge is a cloud developer platform for building custom software applications, workflows, and integrations across industries such as manufacturing, architecture, engineering, and construction. With Autodesk Forge, teams, third-party developers, and customers can design, build, and integrate workflows.

Deploy Tableau Server for healthcare
This Oct. 23 Quick Start deploys Tableau Server into an environment that can help organizations with workloads that fall within the scope of the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Tableau Server is a scalable, enterprise-class analytics platform that enables users to securely scale data and analytics across an organization. This deployment of Tableau Server addresses certain technical requirements in the Privacy, Security, and Breach Notification Rules under the HIPAA Administrative Simplification Regulations (45 C.F.R. Parts 160 and 164).

Deploy Spotinst Elastigroup for Amazon ECS
This Oct. 9 Quick Start deploys Spotinst Elastigroup for Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS). Spotinst Elastigroup enables the use of production-grade Spot Instances by leveraging a prediction algorithm to predict the Spot Instance interruption 15 minutes ahead of time.

While the above show the newest Quick Starts, remember that you can browse all of them in different technology categories, including: databases & storage; machine learning; compliance; Big Data & analytics; blockchain; and many more. Go here to see all the categories.