Last Week In AWS Podcast

Last week in security news: The SEC has sued Soalrwinds as well as their CISO, Tracking Malicious Operations of Exposed IAM Keys, Security considerations for running containers on Amazon ECS, and more!

Links:

• The SEC has sued Soalrwinds as well as their CISO personally
• CloudKeys in the Air: Tracking Malicious Operations of Exposed IAM Keys 
• Refine permissions for externally accessible roles using IAM Access Analyzer and IAM action last accessed 
• Security considerations for running containers on Amazon ECS
• This article AWS put out on Approaches for migrating users to Amazon Cognito user pools is silly since it presupposes Cognito being used

AWS Morning Brief Extras edition for the week of November 8, 2023.

Links

• AWS has been making a lot of noise about generative AI
• AWS's Responsible AI page
• AWS's Service Terms
• Amazon's updated management policy language
• Opt-Out of Amazon AI
• Opt-Out Terraform module
• Opt-Out Python script

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What's Corey up to?

• Follow Corey on Twitter (@quinnypig)
• See our recent work at the Duckbill Group
• Apply to work with Corey and the Duckbill Group to help lower your AWS bill

AWS Morning Brief for the week of November 6, 2023, with Corey Quinn.

Links

• Amazon Athena announces one hour reservations for Provisioned Capacity
• AWS Neuron adds support for Llama-2 70b model and PyTorch 2.0 
• Filter and Stream Logs from Amazon S3 Logging Buckets into Splunk Using AWS Lambda
• Announcing Amazon EC2 Capacity Blocks for ML to reserve GPU capacity for your machine learning workloads
• GoDaddy benchmarking results in up to 24% better price-performance for their Spark workloads with AWS Graviton2 on Amazon EMR Serverless
• How contact center leaders can evaluate using generative AI for customer experience 
• Detect and fix low cardinality indexes in Amazon DocumentDB
• How power utilities analyze and detect harmonics issues using power quality and customer usage data with Amazon Timestream: Part 2 
• Techniques to improve the state-of-the-art in Cloud FinOps using Amazon Neptune
• Mark your calendars for AWS Mainframe Modernization sessions @ re: Invent 2023
• Ready for Flight: Announcing Finch 1.0 GA!
• Aggregating, searching, and visualizing log data from distributed sources with Amazon Athena and Amazon QuickSight
• How to monitor Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) storage costs
• Fullstack generative AI sample app for Amazon Bedrock

Last week in security news: Using AWS role session tags for GitHub Actions, A summary of the Okta hack is pretty damning, IAM Roles Anywhere with an external certificate authority, and more!

Links:

• I like this writeup of using AWS role session tags for GitHub Actions but I hate that I have to use Cognito to pull it off.
• This summary of the Okta hack is pretty damning.
• AWS Digital Sovereignty Pledge: Announcing a new, independent sovereign cloud in Europe 
• IAM Roles Anywhere with an external certificate authority 
• The key line from this 2018 post remains true: access to the root email and phone number is equivalent, if not more powerful, than the root password and MFA! 

AWS Morning Brief for the week of October 30, 2023 with Corey Quinn. 

Links:

• Amazon Aurora MySQL includes optimizations that reduce the database restart time by up to 65%
• Amazon EKS adds support for customer managed IAM policies
• AMI Block Public Access now enabled for all new accounts and existing accounts with no public AMIs
• AWS Config now supports 19 new resource types
• AWS Marketplace announces enhanced private offer user experience for sellers
• AWS re:Post introduces Selections
• EC2 Hibernate now supports 20 additional instance families on EC2 Spot 
• Announcing general availability of Amazon EC2 M2 Mac instances for macOS 
• Comparing AWS Lambda Arm vs. x86 Performance, Cost, and Analysis
• How Infosys Built an Enterprise Knowledge Management Assistant Using Generative AI on AWS
• Rotate Your SSL/TLS Certificates Now – Amazon RDS and Amazon Aurora Expire in 2024
• Build ROSA Clusters with Terraform
• Build a web-based cryptocurrency wallet tracker with Amazon Managed Blockchain Access and Query 
• Why AWS is the Best Place to Run Rust
• What’s top of mind for Chief Data Officers going into 2024?
• EFA: how fixing one thing, lead to an improvement for … everyone | AWS HPC Blog
• Is Generative AI the Answer to All Questions?
• How to download your AWS Resilience Hub assessment results 
• Gain practical experience building with Amazon CodeWhisperer through AWS Jam
• Boost your AWS proficiency with Solution-Focused Immersion Days
• Summary of the AWS Service Event in the Northern Virginia (US-EAST-1) Region
• AWS Disallowing Resale of Reserved Instances that were purchased at a discount

Last week in security news: PR pushback from Microsoft, AWS Cloud Companion Guide for the CSA Cyber Trust Mark, and more!

Links:

• My intense 2am conversation with MSRC a week before BlackHat
• AWS announces Cloud Companion Guide for the CSA Cyber Trust mark
• Securing generative AI: An introduction to the Generative AI Security Scoping Matrix

AWS Morning Brief Extras edition for the week of October 25, 2023.

Want to give your ears a break and read this as an article? You’re looking for this link.

https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/the-new-frontier-of-cloud-economics-why-aws-costs-are-a-weighty-issue

Never miss an episode

• Join the Last Week in AWS newsletter
• Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts

Help the show

• Leave a review
• Share your feedback
• Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts

Buy our merch 

• https://store.lastweekinaws.com

What's Corey up to?

• Follow Corey on Twitter (@quinnypig)
• See our recent work at the Duckbill Group
• Apply to work with Corey and the Duckbill Group to help lower your AWS bill

AWS Morning Brief for the week of October 23, 2023, with Corey Quinn. 

Links:

• Introducing Amazon EC2 R7i instances
• AWS announces Amazon Redshift integration with Visual Studio Code
• AWS announces member account level credit sharing preferences
• CloudWatch launches out-of-the-box alarm recommendations for AWS services
• Leapfrog from CentOS 7.9 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.9 with Convert2RHEL and Leapp Utilities on AWS
• Enhance your security posture by storing Amazon Redshift admin credentials without human intervention using AWS Secrets Manager integration
• Archive to cold storage with Amazon DynamoDB 
• Keeping an eye on your cattle using AI technology 
• Top 10 unforgettable moments from AWS GenAI Day 
• Stellantis: driving innovation by investing in employees’ digital skills

Last week in security news: Delegating permission set management and account assignment in AWS IAM Identity Center, How AWS protects customers from DDoS events, The Tip of the Week, and more!

Links:

• Rhino Security has a two part post that talks about how they find Cognito misconfigurations
• Delegating permission set management and account assignment in AWS IAM Identity Center 
• How AWS protects customers from DDoS events 
• Now available: Building a scalable vulnerability management program on AWS
• Issue with Amazon WorkSpaces Windows Client Version 5.9 and 5.10
• The Tip of the Week is to delegate as much as humanly possible to accounts that aren't the management account for the org. As more services gain the ability to delegate management to designated accounts, it gets easier to restrict access to it

AWS Morning Brief for the week of October 16, 2023 with Corey Quinn.
 
Links:

• New Amazon CloudWatch metric monitors EC2 instance reachability to EBS volumes
• Announcing AWS Lambda’s support for Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) for outbound connections in VPC 
• Announcing new AWS Network Load Balancer (NLB) availability and performance capabilities 
• Two billion downloads of Terraform AWS Provider shows value of IaC for infrastructure management
• Why purpose-built artificial intelligence chips may be key to your generative AI strategy
• How Zalando migrated their shopping carts to Amazon DynamoDB from Apache Cassandra 
• Unlocking cost-optimization: Open Raven’s journey with Amazon Aurora I/O-Optimized leads to 60% savings
• How does Cloud enable the transformation of Bank finance functions? 
• AWS Cloud Institute: Virtual training program for cloud developers