Okay. Hello, Cloud Gurus, how y'all doing?
Scott Pletcher here 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 and I chose some from the machine learning space
that I think have some pretty big implications.
We're also bringing back ACG training architects Craig Arcuri and Errol Hooper
to provide their take on the latest security and container announcements.
Plus we'll reveal the guru of the week. So stick.
Around.
Last week, Faye mentioned Amazon Lookout for Equipment,
which uses machine learning to identify anomalies and industrial data.
This week,
I also wanted to mention Amazon Lookout for Metrics and Amazon Lookout for
Vision.
Lookout for Metrics uses anomaly detection algorithms to analyze your data on a
schedule you define, triggering notifications or a Lambda function.
This is a neat turnkey way to add anomaly detection on existing data sources
without having to create your own custom model. Now, similarly,
Lookout for Vision uses image analysis to detect visual anomalies.
And this is useful for performing high volume visual inspection of products as
they speed down a production line.
Vision systems have been in use in industrial applications for a long time now,
but having a fully managed vision system as a service is certainly going to
appeal to some.
If your vision needs just can't wait for a round trip to the cloud,
enter AWS Panorama Appliance,
an on-prem device that brings computer vision onsite.
Along with visual inspection, other use cases include site safety, monitoring,
retail, traffic patterns, or inventory management,
where you could automatically send a replenishment signal when a visual minimum
inventory level is reached.
For all the potential that machine learning holds,
there's still some pretty dicey problems we're trying to solve.
One of these problems is bias.
Training ML models requires lots and lots of data,
but whether we realize it or not, many times,
the training data that we happen to have on hand might not be fully
representative of realworld scenarios or how we want decisions to be made in the
future. When these incomplete models are used to make real-world decisions,
the results can range anywhere from embarrassing to downright immoral.
Announced during re:iIvent SageMaker Clarify can help root out possible sources
of bias in your raw data prior to training and call out potential model
drift over time. Model drift happens as the world changes,
but your model doesn't.
So it's sort of stuck in the past and will get less and less accurate over time.
SageMaker Clarify also attempts to help with explainability of machine
learning models. And this is another hot topic. Now,
as most people aren't very comfortable blindly accepting a decision from some
mysterious black box. If we create decision-making models,
we should be able to explain how our model made that decision.
But that can be really,
really difficult when dealing with complex datasets.
SageMaker Clarify can help with this by bringing some transparency and
visualization to how the model used the input data to arrive at the
result. Our beloved DeepRacer league is getting some new features in 2021.
New open and pro divisions will be introduced in March 2021,
creating a more competitive landscape and more chances to win prizes.
Everyone will start out in the open division and must earn their way into the
pro division,
or you can win fabulous prizes and qualify for the championship cup at re:Invent
2021. Also announced,
we'll soon be able to create our own custom virtual circuits with community
leagues. And this is a great way for user groups, schools,
and companies to use DeepRacer to promote and develop reinforcement learning
skills.
I'll tell you another great way to get started on your machine learning journey.
ACG's Intro to Machine Learning course by yours truly
is designed to be accessible and entertaining. And fortunately,
others seem to agree too. Enough of my shameless plugs.
Let's head on over to ACG training architects Craig Arcuri and Errol
Hooper for the lowdown on all the latest re:Invent updates in the
security and container space.
Thank you Scott for the introduction. How's it going this week, Craig,
how's your second week of re:Invent going? Good to be here.
I finally found an advantage to re:Invent being virtual.
If I, or some of us, were in our second week of re:iIvent,
we might be broke by now and trying to get a part-time job at maybe the Hard
Rock Cafe or some other place. So there's a plus, it's always,
you know, it's always glass half full. Yeah,
that's the silver lining is that we got,
we got a chance to save a couple of dollars, this, uh, this,
uh re:Invent since we're all home. So I'm with you there.
How's your second week at re-invent been so far.
Did you have any security updates you'd like to, uh, give us?
Absolutely.
I was able to check out the security keynote and there's a lot of
stuff going on in security, but of course with our limited time,
I'll just focus on one announcement. in particular.
I have a background in healthcare IT and also banking.
And I was really interested in the AWS Audit Manager
that was announced new this week at re:Invent.
So what it's going to do is allow you to go in and set up audits for your
organization. And like with many things,
the goal is to automate this.
So you can have your audits constantly running in the background
as you're going throughout your year.
So this is a pretty big development in that area.
Now what they do is,
and the AWS Audit Manager is already up in the AWS
management console. I was able to check it out a little bit,
maybe apply an audit to my personal account. We'll see how that goes. But,
uh, you go into the Audit Manager. It's really easy to set up,
but they provide these pre-configured frameworks and
maybe banking folks or anybody in, in, in the financial field.
One of the frameworks is PCI DSS.
So you can just go into Audit Manager and apply this framework
to your organization. So they have,
they have four or five canned frameworks,
or you can take one of those frameworks and customize them a bit,
or you can make your own frameworks. So it's really easy. It's really quick.
You go in and you set it up and anytime throughout your year,
if you're going to come, come upon an audit,
you're going to be able to produce reports right on the spot and hand them
to your auditor and happy auditor might be a happy,
happy organization.
Yeah. Yeah. I think that's going to be key. Um, and then maybe you're,
you're probably familiar with this too. How at every company you work for,
it's like when, when it's time to audit,
it's like we have to gather these records and get this information together.
So having something like that,
that already does it for us and is proactive in organizing audit information is,
is really key. That sounds like it's going to be really beneficial.
Absolutely. And, and additionally, as you might expect,
it interacts with a couple other AWS services such as
AWS config and a really cool feature is if let's,
if you have multiple accounts in your organization, well,
then you,
you should probably be using AWS Organizations already.
But you can use it and it interacts with the Audit Manager. Now,
one final thing I wanted to mention was that,
sort of hand in hand with this,
was AWS announced a curriculum for
audits.
So they announced a curriculum called the AWS Cloud Audit
Academy.
So it's actually going to allow folks in audit and compliance and risk
to take these, this curriculum. There's continuing education credits.
It's a pretty big deal actually. Um,
it can be sort of cloud agnostic or it can be really
focused on AWS. Additionally,
they're providing in-person classes of course, subject to our, our,
our COVID situation improving,
as well as free online courses. So again,
as far as audit and compliance,
these are really big developments in that field. And I, I,
it was really noteworthy for me from the security announcements.
Nice. That's nice. Sounds like a lot of good information there for sure.
That is correct. And I heard through the grapevine that, uh,
you have some in inside info on containers. Yeah.
Um, I may have just a couple of key details that,
that some of our students may benefit from knowing. I'm with you,
you can't really, we can't really discuss them all, but I do have a couple. Um,
so I was able to sit in on the modernizing containers, uh, leadership session,
this morning.
And it was just a really good session from a leadership perspective,
really speaking to the, the, uh, the students or, or in this case,
particularly those engineers who will be developing on AWS as it relates
to modernizing their applications.
And I really liked how the presentation was given,
kinda dumping these particular engineers into three buckets.
Those who are looking to replatform their application.
So you're looking at those users who are looking to go from traditional data
center to a cloud environment or users who may,
may already be on a cloud provider,
but may want to diversify their cloud tooling.
Also those people who want to refactor. That was another bucket we,
that was discussed in the leadership session,
those individuals who may just be interested in and changing their services
up, uh,
taking services that are ran an EC2 or Elastic Beanstalk,
and possibly containerizing those,
or architecting them to a more, uh, a more,
serverless way. And also those individuals, the final,
the final, bucket was those individuals building new applications.
We were able to go through those three scenarios where we discussed how we can
modernize our application through the use of containers.
As it relates to new announcements, really not too many new,
big announcements in this particular session. A lot of the announcements, uh,
wrote on the back of last week's announcements,
as it relates to ECS and EKS Anywhere.
AWS this year has really been just kind of putting that out there,
that this is a really a big change, a game changer.
And even we have individuals who even tried EKS and ECS Anywhere
by coding it onto their Raspberry Pi. So that's going to be really awesome.
And maybe that can be some content that we could,
we could bring to the platform. Other than that, uh,
another service that was mentioned isn't so new because it was released a little
earlier this year, was the App2Container service.
This was re-introduced if you would, uh,
just the ease of use for those individuals who,
who wish to containerize their applications,
but really don't have the tooling or the expertise.
App2container would definitely be a good,
a good pathway for you as that particular service will definitely help get your
app to a containerized, um, run time.
If I could make an analogy,
is it sort of like an Elastic Beanstalk for containers,
if that. Yeah. Yeah.
That's very valid. It's very similar to an Elastic Beanstalk for containers. Uh,
it really speaks directly to some of the challenges that a lot of engineers
have, uh,
that they go to the containerized environment to solve their problems, um,
like reducing their costs, deploying more often,
as well as maintaining a lot of those security guard rails through the isolation
that containers provide. So, uh, with that, um,
definitely like Elastic Beanstalk.
And the other things that AWS mentioned that they're going to use to combat,
particularly the observability issue was,
Amazon FireLens now being supported with EKS. So we'll be,
you'll be able to get a deeper level of observation into what's going on with
your containers. Also, um, Amazon is now,
AWS is now making it easier to use Prometheus,
Grafana and OpenTelemetry with, uh, with your container.
So what we see here is more serverless, more observability and more, uh,
more visibility into actually what's going on in the containerized environment.
That's really cool stuff. I'm, I'm very interested in, in the,
again that analogy, Elastic Beanstalk for containers,
because that can act as a stepping stone. You get into it and it's like,
hey this isn't so bad. I'll, I'll take it a step further and,
and really get into it. So it's a,
it's a good avenue into containers if you,
if you're not already involved with it.
Yeah. It definitely, it definitely does from a technological perspective,
lower the barrier of entry for those getting into containers.
And when we think about the marketplace right now, uh,
having the ability to scale up, uh, if you need to,
and then unfortunately, um, and sometimes scale down if you need to as well,
that's definitely starting to be one of the demands of the market.
So I really see that a lot of these announcements with containerization is
really going to drive some of our students to, to maybe do some,
complete some more of our courses on containers.
That's right. And hopefully we'll have some more on the way,
some more courses and some more students as well.
Absolutely. Thank you so much for sharing all your information that you,
that you were able to get over on the security side. No problem. Sure thing.
All right. We'll toss it back over to you, Scott. Big,
thanks to Craig and Errol for that update. Well done good sirs. And.
Now onto the Guru of the Week. This week's winner is Anil Kanwar,
a solutions architect at Terago networks in Mississauga, Ontario,
Canada. You sir have just earned yourself,
some swag from our swaggerific collection.
If you too want to take a swing at our new question,
head on over to our forum via the link down below. Speaking of swag,
do be sure to check out our A Cloud Guru 12 days of re:Invent
virtual booth at re:Invent for daily updates and a chance to win some
pretty cool giveaways.
And that my friends is nowhere near all the AWS news that's fit to print this
week, but we're out of time. Stay safe,
take care of one another and keep being awesome Cloud Gurus.