Okay. Hello, cloud gurus.
Y'all doing Scott Pletcher here with another dose of AWS news goodness.
This week IAM Access Analyzer gets some new features.
Amazon comprehend gets smarter and fault injection simulator lets us
sprinkle a little chaos on things.
But first I would like to mention that we recently reached an important
milestone on YouTube - 100,000 subscribers.
Now like any content creators,
we're always thinking of new ways to increase viewership. So in honor,
of our 100,000 milestone,
I thought I'd share a few of the YouTube video concepts that well
never made it off the ground.
This new feature helps customers ensure that clients connect the same load
balance the target for the duration of their session using application cookies.
Yeah, Ryan has much better hair and Faye they has nice hair too.
And Nick too impeccable hair. I mean, it looks like he's in a barn.
Does he live in a barn? What's with all the tigers?
Does he think this is some toy store? You get a big thumbs down. Mr tiger Man.
I'm hungry. Have you eaten? Let's call some door dash. Where's my phone.
Okay. Hello cloud gurus.
How y'all doing I'm Scott Pletcher and welcome to another special
re-invent edition of AWS this week.
So many announcements across the board in week two,
but I had to pick just a few. Nope, can't do it. Too creepy.
No matter how Bulletproof or durable we think our architectures are the only
real way to test our designs is to try to break them.
This is why companies conduct disaster recovery drills, and fail over tests.
These events are usually complex and can only occur every so often,
but wouldn't it be great if we could bake a DR Test right into our
CICD pipeline announced back at re-invent AWS Fault
Injector simulator is now generally available.
FIS as it's called lets us create experiment templates that
simulate fault events like an EC2 instance being terminated or an
API throttling issue.
We can then observe how our landscape responds and perhaps uncover some gaps or
bottlenecks in our design. Now,
of course you could test these things manually by going out to the console and
triggering these events yourself,
but having an automated and repeatable way to validate resiliency
is way better in my book. Right now only EC2, ECS,
EKS and RDS are supported,
but AWS will be rolling out additional resources. Later this year.
As cloud architectures become more complex,
keeping everything safe and secure becomes an exponentially more difficult
challenge. Sure.
It's one thing to think we've done all the right things to secure a landscape,
but as we've seen all too often,
it only takes a little small oversight and things can turn out really bad.
This has led many organizations to double down on the old adage "trust,
but verify" by implementing provable security approaches.
In other words, we should be secure, but how can we prove that? Well,
one way is to hire an external pen testing team to assess your defenses,
but this just like disaster recovery drills,
just isn't practical for every change.
AWS has created some tools to help with this in a more automated manner.
One such tool is IAM access analyzer.
Access analyzer has been around for a while,
but it was more of an after the fact tool recently,
AWS announced that we can now use access analyzer to validate permission
changes before we deploy them thus potentially preventing
mistakes. Additionally,
AWS has added over 100 more policy checks and corresponding
actionable recommendations to access analyzer.
If it's not something you're using yet,
I would definitely recommend adding it to your toolbox.
Payment card numbers, bank, account numbers, passport numbers,
social security numbers. These are all things that you do not want lying around.
This stuff is known as personally identifiable information or PII
and can really cause troubles If we're not careful,
you really don't want anything to do with this stuff unless you really need it.
And even then we go to great links to secure and obfuscate the stuff for good
reason,
while it may be pretty easy to identify PII in structured data,
it's pretty difficult to identify it in unstructured data.
Amazon Macie is a managed service that helps with this task,
but that's for data in S3 buckets. What if we need something more portable.
Enter Amazon comprehend with a new feature that can identify
PII in documents.
Comprehend as a natural language processing service that could already
detect phrases and sentiment in free form text and can now
call out instances of potentially sensitive information.
You can now integrate this functionality directly into your own applications as
a simple API call and that my friends is all the AWS news that's fit to print
this week. Thank you again to our YouTube family,
especially all 100,000 of you. Who've allowed us onto your subscription list.
Stay safe, take care of one another and keep being awesome Cloud Gurus.
[Inaudible].