Hello, Cloud Gurus and welcome to another episode of AWS this week,
where we process the goings on of the last week to bring you only the finest AWS
news. This week, we'll be covering:
CodeGuru Reviewer now has a new detector library and log injection detection,
EFS now supports sub-millisecond latency,
Web Application Firewall launches its new account takeover prevention feature,
and AWS Budgets now have an option for auto adjusting limits.
I'm Steven Sennett here to bring you another episode of AWS this week.
Amazon's CodeGuru Reviewer - no relation - has had two new interesting updates
with the new detector library being announced and new security detectors for log
injection vulnerabilities.
We only need to cast our minds back to December when security researchers from
Alibaba cloud published a now infamous log4shell vulnerability with the popular
Java logging utility log4J.
This impacted everything from Twitter to Minecraft,
to internet connected toasters. Anyone involved in remediating this issue
in their organization will know what a challenge it was.
This new log injection detector makes it easier to ensure our applications are
preventing forged malicious entries from being made to applications we're
developing. Granted this won't solve everything, but it gets us to step closer.
The new detector library contains information on all the different security and
quality detectors used by CodeGuru, including examples of the code,
compliance indicators and other information to help you dive deeper,
to understand their findings. Also,
if you're not entirely familiar with the log4shell vulnerability,
our team at Pluralsight have put together a really cool blog post explaining it
further,
and also have an upcoming webinar discussing the aftermath and remaining
concerns, both of which you can find in the links below.
Amazon Elastic File System now supports sub millisecond read latency for general
purpose storage.
The distributed nature of EFS has meant that it incurred some latency dealing
with files across such a distributed system.
While many applications may be able to tolerate this latency,
solutions with high performance standards need that leaner efficiency.
How long it takes for that first byte to arrive makes a difference and dropping
that latency as low as 600 milliseconds cut those times in half.
Write operations for general purpose EFS are still in the low single digit
millisecond range while EFS max IO latency remains higher.
The trade off for higher throughput is still worth for many scenarios.
For full details, check out the AWS documentation on EFS performance,
linked in description.
This is available right now in all regions where EFS is available and requires
no changes to take effect for those general purpose volumes.
The new AWS Web Application Firewall fraud control account takeover prevention
solution (breathes)
has been launched to help you protect your web app login pages against a range
of threats.
Account takeover prevention looks at the attempted login activities and
registers any anomalous behavior,
which may indicate attempted compromise such as credential stuffing,
where an attacker attempts to use a variety of stolen credentials from previous
data breaches,
or brute forcing by simply throwing random passwords at the login page until it
works. It's only available in a few regions so far,
and there is an additional cost to activate this feature.
With both monthly subscription fee and a cost of $1 per thousand login attempt,.
it's certainly not cheap, but for large enterprises,
that's a small cost overall.
And since it's part of the Web Application Firewall and blocking attacks at
network edge,
I'd expect bruteforce attacks to be shut down before they incur substantial
costs. If you're running your own login solution that doesn't already have this
protection included, it's probably worth checking out.
AWS budgets now supports auto adjusting budgets,
which can dynamically update their limits based on your usage.
Alongside fixed and planned budgets, auto adjusting budgets,
track your average spend across your previous budgeting period and uses it to
set a new baseline,
while sending the alert about the updated limit to any budget subscribers.
Now to address the elephant in the room, yes,
this is AWS taking a service design to limit your spending with a feature
designed to increase your spending.
Corey Quinn summarizes this brilliantly with his tweet explaining "AWS budget go
brrrrr."
One of the challenges of organizations and their cloud bills is financial
management is often second tier to just building stuff.
This means when your newly deployed database cluster starts running up an extra
$20,000 a month. It's sometimes not accounted for in the budget forecast.
Costs go up,
alerts get triggered and they just become white noise until someone readjusts
the budget with the new levels,
often weeks or months after the changes was first made.
This is what auto adjusting budgets aims to smooth out.
Organizations need to have solid management practices for understanding their
cloud costs. You absolutely can't grow a mature cloud organization without it,
but where organizations would otherwise completely ignore budgeting as just
being too hard. I could see this being a handy feature,
if used with the absolute care it deserves.
That's it for the news this week. We hope you've enjoyed it.
If you're enjoying our content,
we're currently running a special promo to help you boost your cloud career with
our personal plans available at 40% off until March 7th.
This includes access to all of our courses, hands on labs and cloud playgrounds,
check out the link to get started.
So until next time go forth and learn all the things and as always keeping
awesome Cloud Gurus.