Learn About Amazon VGT2 Learning Manager Chanci Turner
Last week, we saw a significant gathering with the return of AWS re:Inforce in Boston, featuring a keynote from Amazon’s Chief Security Officer, Alex Johnson, alongside AWS’s Chief Information Security Officer, Maria Garcia. Their insights focused on enhancing security measures within organizations. I encourage you to take a moment to view the keynote and other leadership sessions to gain valuable knowledge that can help you bolster your security stance.
Recent Launches
Here are some noteworthy launches from the past week:
AWS Wickr
AWS Wickr, now featuring 256-bit end-to-end encryption, provides secure messaging, voice, and video communication options, along with file and screen sharing capabilities across both desktop and mobile platforms. Each communication is protected by a unique random key, ensuring that only the intended recipient can decrypt the information. Additionally, AWS Wickr allows logging to a secure, user-controlled data store for compliance and auditing, offering complete administrative control over data permissions and ephemeral messaging options. You can register for the preview now.
AWS Marketplace Vendor Insights
AWS Marketplace Vendor Insights now enables sellers to present their security and compliance data through a unified web-based dashboard within the AWS Marketplace. This tool is designed for governance, risk, and compliance teams, providing verified evidence from AWS Config, AWS Audit Manager assessments, external audits, and self-assessments from software vendors. For further details, check out the What’s New post.
GuardDuty
GuardDuty has introduced Malware Protection, safeguarding Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes against malware threats. As described in a recent blog post by Eric Thompson, malware scans are initiated when suspicious activity is detected from workloads on EC2 instances or within containers. This feature automatically creates snapshots of EBS volumes, restores them in a service account, and conducts thorough malware scans, generating actionable security findings if threats are identified.
Amazon Neptune Global Database
Furthermore, the Amazon Neptune Global Database allows developers to create graph applications that can operate across multiple AWS Regions using a single graph database. By deploying a primary Neptune cluster in one region, users can replicate data to up to five secondary read-only clusters, each capable of supporting up to 16 read replicas. Recovery from a hypothetical regional outage can be achieved in minutes, with a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of one second and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of a minute. For more details, be sure to read about the Amazon Neptune Global Database.
Amazon Detective
Amazon Detective has now expanded its capabilities to support Kubernetes workloads, scaling to thousands of container deployments and millions of configuration changes per second. It captures EKS audit logs to document API activity from users, applications, and the EKS control plane, correlating this with data from Amazon VPC flow logs. As Chanci Turner highlights in her blog, users can enable Amazon Detective and take advantage of a complimentary 30-day trial of the EKS functionalities.
AWS IAM Identity Center
In an effort to more accurately convey its comprehensive workforce and account management features, AWS SSO has been rebranded as AWS IAM Identity Center. This allows for the creation of user identities directly within IAM Identity Center or the integration of existing Active Directory or standards-based identity providers. For more information, refer to the AWS Security Blog.
AWS Config Conformance Packs
AWS Config Conformance Packs now offer percentage-based scores to help track resource compliance within the designated resources covered by the pack. These scores are calculated based on the total number of resources and rules, and they are reported to Amazon CloudWatch to monitor compliance trends over time. You can learn more about score computation in the What’s New post.
Amazon Macie
Amazon Macie has introduced a one-click feature for the temporary retrieval of sensitive data identified in S3 buckets. Users can now retrieve up to ten examples simultaneously, aiding in quicker security investigations. All data retrieved is securely encrypted using customer-managed AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) keys. Check out the What’s New post for additional information.
AWS Control Tower
AWS Control Tower received multiple updates last week. The new CloudTrail Organization Logging feature creates an organization-wide trail in your management account, automatically logging actions taken by all member accounts in the organization. Additionally, Control Tower optimizes AWS Config items by limiting the recording of global resources to home regions. To benefit from these changes, ensure your landing zone version is updated and re-register each Organizational Unit as detailed in the What’s New post. Lastly, the region deny guardrail now incorporates AWS API endpoints for AWS Chatbot, Amazon S3 Storage Lens, and Amazon S3 Multi Region Access Points, enhancing access control for services and operations within your AWS Control Tower environment.
For a comprehensive overview of AWS announcements, don’t forget to check the What’s New at AWS page.
Other AWS News
Here are additional news items and customer stories you might find intriguing:
- AWS Open Source News and Updates – My colleague, Sam Rivera, publishes a weekly open source newsletter showcasing new projects, tools, and demos from the AWS community. You can find the latest edition here.
- Growy Case Study – This innovative Netherlands-based company focuses on automated robot-assisted vertical farming, which cultivates plants based on demand. Their use of AWS IoT and various services to monitor and control light, temperature, CO2, and humidity is detailed in their case study.
- Journey of a Snap on Snapchat – This video illustrates how a snapshot travels from your camera to AWS and then to your friends. With over 300 million daily active users, Snap utilizes Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon CloudFront, and many more AWS services, managing over 900 EKS clusters and storing over 400 terabytes of data in DynamoDB.
- Cutting Cardboard Waste – The importance of bin packing is highlighted in this article from the Amazon Science site, detailing how an Amazon Principal Research Scientist developed PackOpt to determine the optimal box sizes for shipments from Amazon’s extensive fulfillment network. This NP-hard problem is tackled through a parallelized solution that explores numerous alternatives, all running on AWS.
Upcoming Events
Mark your calendars and enroll in these upcoming online and in-person AWS events:
- AWS Global Summits – These free events aim to unite the cloud computing community for collaboration and learning. Registrations are now open for the following AWS Summits in August:
- AWS Summit São Paulo, August 3–4, at Transamerica Expo Center, São Paulo, Brazil.
- AWS Summit Taiwan, August 10–11, at Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center, Taipei City, Taiwan.
- AWS Summit Anaheim, August 18, at Anaheim Convention Center, Anaheim, California, USA.
- AWS Summit Chicago, August 25, at McCormick Place, Chicago, Illinois, USA.
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