AWS EC2 Compute Guide 2025: Instance Types and Best Practices

What’s New in 2025

Key Updates and Changes

• 7th Generation Intel Instances: M7i, C7i, and R7i families with Sapphire Rapids processors
• 15% Better Performance: Custom Intel processors exclusive to AWS
• Graviton3 Dominance: Up to 40% better price-performance than Intel counterparts
• Enhanced Networking: Up to 200 Gbps network performance on select instances
• Intel Advanced Features: AMX for ML workloads, QAT, IAA, and DSA accelerators

Instance Family Updates

• Deprecated: M3, C3 instances - migrate to M7i, C7i
• New Compute: C7i with Intel AMX for ML inference
• Memory Optimized: R7i supports up to 24TB memory
• Storage Optimized: I4i with up to 30TB NVMe SSD
• ML/AI Focus: P5 instances with H100 GPUs, Trn1 with Trainium chips

Major AWS Announcements

• EC2 Capacity Blocks: Reserve GPU capacity for ML training
• Spot Instance Integration: Better integration with EKS and ECS
• Windows Server 2025: Full support with optimized AMIs

Understanding what AWS/EC2 provides for provisioning on-demand computing is essential for all DevOps. In 2025, choosing the right instance type can reduce costs by 40% or more.

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AWS VPC Guide 2025: From Basic Networking to VPC Lattice

What’s New in 2025

Key Updates and Changes

• VPC Lattice GA: Application-layer networking for microservices across VPCs
• IPAM Tiers: Free tier for single region, Advanced tier ($0.00027/IP/hour) for multi-region
• IPv6 Adoption: Dual-stack configurations now standard practice
• Enhanced Security: VPC Lattice enables zero-trust networking patterns
• Service Network Endpoints: Connect services across accounts without complex routing

Major Service Evolution

• VPC Peering: Still relevant for simple, pairwise connections
• Transit Gateway: Remains the choice for hub-and-spoke architectures
• VPC Lattice: New paradigm for application-layer connectivity
• IPAM Integration: Automated IP management across organizations
• Resource Gateways: New construct for secure resource sharing

Understanding what AWS provides for setting up private networks, security groups and more is important for anyone who calls themselves DevOps. In 2025, the networking landscape has evolved significantly with VPC Lattice and enhanced IPAM capabilities.

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Apache Cassandra Deployment Guide for AWS and Kubernetes - 2025 Edition

🚀 What’s New in This 2025 Update

Major Changes Since 2017

• Cassandra 5.0 - ACID transactions, cost-based query optimizer, vector search for AI workloads
• Cloud-Native Deployment - 85% of users now deploy on cloud with Kubernetes operators
• Modern AWS Instances - Graviton (r6g), Im4gn series for better price/performance
• Container Orchestration - Kubernetes operators (Cass Operator, K8ssandra) for automated management
• Advanced Security - Encryption, RBAC, IAM integration, TLS automation
• Modern Observability - Prometheus/Grafana integration with automated alerting

Key Improvements

• ✅ Better Performance - 50% improvement with modern instance types and storage
• ✅ Enhanced Security - Zero-trust architecture with comprehensive encryption
• ✅ Automated Operations - Kubernetes operators handle scaling, upgrades, and repairs
• ✅ AI-Ready - Vector search and machine learning workload support

Modern Cassandra Architecture Overview

Apache Cassandra 5.0 represents a significant evolution in distributed database technology, now supporting ACID transactions, advanced query optimization, and AI workloads. Modern deployments emphasize cloud-native patterns, containerization, and automated operations.

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AWS CloudWatch Monitoring and Alerting - 2025 Edition

🚀 What’s New in This 2025 Update

Major Changes Since 2017

• Managed Observability - AWS managed Prometheus and Grafana services
• Container-Native Monitoring - Deep EKS/ECS integration with CloudWatch Container Insights
• Infrastructure as Code - CloudFormation/Terraform for monitoring automation
• AI/ML-Powered Alerts - Amazon Lookout for Metrics and SageMaker integration
• Enhanced Security - New IAM Access Analyzer and mandatory MFA for root users
• Cost Optimization - Advanced cost monitoring and resource optimization tools

Key Improvements

• ✅ Modern Observability Stack - Prometheus, Grafana, and CloudWatch integration
• ✅ Automated Monitoring - Infrastructure as Code and Lambda-based automation
• ✅ Multi-Cloud Support - Cloud-agnostic monitoring strategies
• ✅ Enhanced Security - Comprehensive security and compliance monitoring

Modern AWS Monitoring Architecture 2025

AWS monitoring has evolved significantly from custom solutions to managed observability platforms. This guide covers modern approaches using CloudWatch, Prometheus, Grafana, and Infrastructure as Code.

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Kinesis vs. Kafka - 2025 Comprehensive Comparison

🚀 What’s New in This 2025 Comparison

Platform Evolution Since 2017

• Kafka 4.0 Released - No ZooKeeper, improved performance, cloud-native features
• Kinesis Enhanced - 365-day retention, on-demand scaling, deeper AWS integration
• Managed Services Matured - Amazon MSK and Confluent Cloud now production-ready
• Cost Models Evolved - Better pricing for high-scale workloads
• Security Enhanced - Zero-trust architectures, advanced compliance
• Developer Experience - Improved tooling, SDKs, and monitoring

Key Differentiators in 2025

• ✅ Performance - Kafka leads in throughput, Kinesis in simplicity
• ✅ Cost - Kinesis for small/medium, Kafka for massive scale
• ✅ Operations - Kinesis is serverless, Kafka offers more control
• ✅ Ecosystem - Kinesis for AWS-native, Kafka for multi-cloud

Executive Summary

In 2025, both Amazon Kinesis and Apache Kafka have evolved into mature, enterprise-grade streaming platforms. This guide helps you choose the right platform based on your specific requirements, workload characteristics, and organizational capabilities.

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Amazon Textract: A Developer's Guide to Document Intelligence

Amazon Textract: A Developer’s Guide to Document Intelligence

Ever stared at a scanned document knowing all the data you need is right there—but completely trapped? Traditional OCR reads words. Textract understands meaning. Here’s how to liberate your documents.

mindmap
  root((Amazon Textract))
    Core Features
      Forms Detection
      Table Recognition
      Layout Analysis
      Natural Language Queries
    Document Types
      Invoices
      Receipts
      IDs & Licenses
      Contracts
      Medical Forms
    Processing Modes
      Synchronous
      Asynchronous
      Batch Processing
    Integration
      boto3 SDK
      TRP Library
      S3 Integration
      SNS Notifications

The Document Intelligence Revolution

You know that sinking feeling. Staring at a scanned invoice, knowing every piece of data you need is technically there—but it might as well be carved in stone. Traditional OCR might read the words, but you’re left playing detective. Which value belongs to which label? Where’s the table structure? How do these pieces connect?

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AWS VPC

Understanding what AWS provides for setting up private networks, security groups and more is important for anyone who calls themselves DevOps.

AWS allows you to define a software defined network. You do this with Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). You can define subnets, ingress rules, security groups, NAT gateways, Internet gateways, and more.

Amazon VPC

A VPC is a virtual private cloud. You can create multiple Amazon VPCs within a region that spans multiple availability zones. A VPC is an isolated area to deploy instances.

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EC2 Compute

Understanding what AWS/EC2 provides for provisioning on-demand computing is essential for all DevOps.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)

Amazon EC2 is AWS primary web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud.

EC2 Compute

Compute is computational power needed for your use case. Amazon EC2 allows add compute resources through its Web Service API. EC2 allows you to launch instances. An instance is a server and you can install whatever software you need for your service or web application: NGINX, Apache httpd, Cassandra, Kafka, etc. When you launch a virtual server, an instance in EC2 speak, you can use it as you like just like you would a server in your datacenter. You pay for the compute power that you use. There are different instance types with various ranges of CPU, RAM, IO, and networking power. You pay for compute resources by the hour. You can use more instances and you can reserve instances for longer periods of time for a price break.

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