AWS re:Invent re:Cap 2015

Editor's Notes

• #5: QuickSight (Preview – us-east-1) What is it? A fast and intuitive Business Intelligence (BI) service that allows business users to interactively explore and visualize data. With QuickSight, there is no need to learn SQL, APIs or wait for weeks or months for IT to build complex data models or cleanse and format data to make it ready for analysis. As users explore the data using a simple and intuitive user interface, QuickSight discovers the data types and relationships, issues optimal queries to extract the data, aggregates the results in memory, and automatically provides suggestions for best possible visualizations of the data. What is the customer value? Amazon QuickSight will enable business users to ask any question, get fast answers and reduce business intelligence costs to 1/10th of existing solutions. Today customers find it difficult to explore and get insights from data they already have. Kinesis Firehose (GA - us-east-1, eu-west-1 (Ireland), us-west-2 (Oregon) ) What is it? A new fully managed service that automatically loads streaming data into AWS. What is the customer value? Makes it much easier for our customers to ingest large data streams into AWS. Customers will no longer have to manage the sub-components or write code to begin working with their steaming data giving them faster time to market for their applications. Customers can use their existing BI tools to analyze streaming data. AWS Import/Export Snowball (GA – us-east-1) What is it? Snowball is a new AWS Import/Export offering that provides a petabyte-scale data transfer service that uses Amazon-provided storage appliances for transport. What is the customer value? Customers asked for a solution to transfer large amounts of data quickly at low cost. High speed lines are expensive. With Snowball, customers no longer need to invest in storage hardware to transfer large amounts of data. Snowball provides data transfer directly into and out of S3 leveraging speed-optimized software that maximizes data transfer and is fast and secure. All data transferred into Snowball devices is automatically encrypted by using KMS keys.
• #6: Amazon Inspector (Preview, us-west-2 Oregon ) What is it? Allows developers and infrastructure owners to request an automated security assessment of their application environment, including services, software and infrastructure such as EC2 instances hosted in AWS as well as machines located on customer premises. What is the customer value? Securing infrastructure is often expensive and hard to do effectively. We are making it much easier and less expensive for our customers to run securely. Inspector is automated, repeatable and utilizes AWS security knowledge to strengthen customer servers, services and infrastructure. Actionable findings are delivered and carefully explained to our customers. Amazon RDS for MariaDB (GA, all RDS Regions) What is it? Amazon RDS makes it easy to set up, operate, and scale MariaDB deployments in the cloud. With Amazon RDS, you can deploy scalable MariaDB databases in minutes with cost-efficient and resizable hardware capacity. What is the customer value? Amazon RDS frees you up to focus on your application by managing time-consuming database administration tasks including backups, software patching, monitoring, scaling and replication. AWS Database Migration Service (Preview us-east-1) and AWS Schema Conversion tool (GA – desktop software) What is it? AWS Database Migration Service helps our customers migrate databases to AWS easily and securely. With AWS Database Migration Service, the source database remains fully operational during the migration, minimizing downtime to applications that rely on the database. What is the customer value? Customers have asked for a better way to migrate their on premises databases to AWS with minimal disruption, effort and cost. This service allows our customers to keep their applications running while migrating their databases. Data changes to the source database that occur during and after the migration are continuously replicated to the target. This makes it much easier for customers to accelerate their migrations to the cloud. This will also ease the migration from certain more expensive database engines to open source or AWS built options such as Aurora.
• #7: AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) (GA – All CloudFront Edge locations) What is it? Web Application Firewall (WAF) is an appliance, server plugin or filter that applies a set of rules to HTTP traffic in order to protect web sites and applications against attacks that cause data breaches and downtime. What is the customer value? Customers will be able to protect their web sites and applications against attacks that cause data breaches and downtime. This includes protection from SQL Injection, Cross Site Scripting, Web Site Scraping, Crawlers, and BOTs. The service also helps customers achieve PCI compliance. AWS Config Rules (Preview) What is it? A new cloud governance capability of the AWS Config service that allows IT Administrators to define guidelines for provisioning and configuring AWS resources and then continuously monitor compliance with those guidelines. What is the customer value? For organizations subject to established industry standards, Config Rules can help to ensure compliance. Using the new dashboard, an IT Administrator can quickly determine when and how a resource went out of compliance. Elasticsearch (GA, all public regions)
• #8: EC2 Dedicated Hosts (Pre-Announce) What is it? An Amazon EC2 Dedicated Host is a physical server with EC2 instance capacity fully dedicated to your use. An important difference between a Dedicated Host and a Dedicated Instance is that a Dedicated Host gives you additional visibility and control over how instances are placed on a physical server, and you can continually use the same physical server over time. What is the customer value? Dedicated Hosts can help our customers address compliance requirements and reduce costs by allowing customers to use their existing server-bound software licenses (examples: Microsoft Windows Server, Microsoft SQL Server, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, or other software licenses that are bound to VMs, sockets, or physical cores).
• #25: Fast Data Transfer Snowball includes a high-speed, 10 Gbps network connection to minimize data transfer times. The Snowball appliance is designed to transfer up to 50 terabytes of data from your data source to the appliance in less than one day, plus shipping time. Encryption All data transferred to Snowball is automatically encrypted with 256-bit encryption keys that are managed by AWS KMS. The encryption keys are never sent to, or stored on the appliance, to help ensure your data stays secure during transit. Rugged and Portable Snowball includes a ruggedized case that was designed to be both durable and portable. The Snowball appliance weighs less than 50 pounds and can be lifted and moved by a single person. Tamper Resistant The Snowball appliance is equipped with tamper-resistant seals and includes a built-in Trusted Platform Module (TPM) that uses a dedicated processor designed to detect any unauthorized modifications to the hardware, firmware, or software. AWS inspects every appliance for any signs of tampering and to verify that no changes were detected by the TPM. End-to-End Tracking Snowball uses an innovative, E Ink shipping label designed to ensure the appliance is automatically sent to the correct AWS facility and also aids in tracking. Once you have completed your data transfer job, it can be tracked via Amazon SNS, text messages, and the Console. Secure Erasure Once the data transfer job has been processed and verified, AWS performs a software erasure of the Snowball appliance that follows the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) guidelines for media sanitization.
• #27: Not available directly from the AWS console without completing the sign-up process. From Virginia: Only available to be shipped to certain US states
• #32: Once you have configured which functions can be invoked from the app, the mobile hub creates a source package that you can use to get started.
• #34: Billions of devices, trillions of messages. Create internet of things applications without hosting any infrastructure using AWS’ serverless architecture.
• #35: Simple to follow tutorial also available for this.
• #37: Key features of Amazon Inspector: Configuration Scanning and Activity Monitoring Engine - Amazon Inspector provides an engine that analyzes system and application configuration and monitors activity to determine what an application looks like, how it behaves, and its dependent components. The combination of this telemetry provides a complete picture of the application and its potential security or compliance issues. Built-in Content Library - Amazon Inspector incorporates a built-in library of rules and reports. These include checks against best practices, common compliance standards (e.g. PCI, ISO27001) and vulnerabilities. These checks include detailed recommended steps for resolving potential security issues. Automatable via API - Amazon Inspector is fully automatable via APIs. This allows organizations to incorporate security testing into the development and design process, including selecting, executing and reporting the results of those tests.
• #38: Identify Security Issues in Your Web Applications Amazon Inspector helps you to identify security vulnerabilities as well as deviations from security best practices in applications, both before they are deployed, and while they are running in a production environment. This helps to improve to overall security posture of your applications deployed on AWS. Enforce your Organization’s Security Standards Amazon Inspector allows you to define standards and best practices for your applications, and validate that applications are adhering to these standards. This enables you to more easily enforce your organization’s security standards, and manage security issues proactively before they impact your production application. Increased Agility without Compromising Security Amazon Inspector reduces the risk of introducing security issues during the development lifecycle by automating the security assessment of your applications and proactively identifying security vulnerabilities. This allows you to develop and iterate on new applications quickly and assess compliance with best practices and policies. Apply AWS Security Expertise to your Application The AWS security organization is constantly assessing the AWS environment and updating a database of security best practices and rules. Amazon Inspector, takes this AWS security expertise and make it available to customers in the form of managed services that makes it easier for customers to establish and enforce best practices within their AWS environments. This adds to the expertise of your in-house security team, allowing them to provide more value to your organization. Streamline Security Compliance Amazon Inspector gives security teams and auditors visibility into security testing that is performed when developing applications on AWS. This streamlines the process of validating and demonstrating that best practices are being followed in the development environment.
• #39: Built in content library of rules
• #40: Inspector works on an application-by-application basis. You start by defining a collection of AWS resources that make up your application
• #41: Specify a duration or the period of time during which Amazon Inspector monitors and collects your application's telemetry. You can set your assessment's duration to any of the following available values: 15 minutes 1 hour (recommended) 8 hours 12 hours 24 hours The longer your running assessment's duration is, the more thorough and complete is the set of telemetry that Amazon Inspector can collect and analyze.
• #54: S3 – IA high-performance, durable, and low- cost cloud storage service for long-term storage, backup, archive, and disaster recovery. It is a new storage class that delivers the performance and durability of S3 Standard in a low-cost offering optimized for long-lived and infrequently accessed data. Use cases: File sync and share | Active Archive | Enterprise backup | Media transcoding | Geo-redundancy/DR $0.0125/GB per month, $0.01/GB retrieval fee, 30 days minimum retention, 128KB minimum object size Ref: https://w.amazon.com/index.php/AWS-Sales-BD/AWS-Services-BD/What%27s_New#Get_Ready_for_re:Invent_.21_Do_not_disclose_until_each_service_is_announced
• #58: Spot SDW are only available through the CLI at the moment – specify the “block-duration-minutes” param. EC2 dedicated hosts are different from dedicated instances – they provide per-cost billing instead of per-instance, visibility of per sockets/cores/host-id, affinity between host & instance
• #61: Add a rule – preconfigured templates available to get you started Simple rules with supported configs can be configured directly within the wizard (see right), advanced rules may be created within lambda.
• #62: Shows previously created rule output – detected non-compliant resource – action can be manually taken or SNS notification can drive e-mails or other functionality such as removing offending resources.
• #67: Delivery Stream: The underlying entity of Firehose. Use Firehose by creating a delivery stream and then sending data to it. Data Producers: Producers send records to Amazon Kinesis delivery streams. For example, a web server sending log data to a delivery stream is a data producer. Records: The data producer sends data blobs as large as 1000 KB to a delivery stream. That data blob is called a Record. Buffer Size and Buffer Interval: Firehose buffers incoming streaming data to a certain size or for a certain period of time before delivering to destinations. Buffer Size is in MBs and Buffer Interval is in seconds.
• #68: Spark Includes new features and bug fixes, including additional functions for Spark SQL/Dataframes, new algorithms in MLlib, improvements in the Python API for Spark Streaming, support for Parquet 1.7 Hadoop User Experience (HUE) is an open source user interface which allows users to more easily develop and run queries and workflows for Hadoop ecosystem applications, view tables in the Hive Metastore, and browse files in Amazon S3 and on-cluster HDFS. The Hadoop Key Management Server (KMS) can supply keys for HDFS Transparent Encryption, Encryption in HDFS is transparent to applications reading from and writing to HDFS, and data is encrypted in in-transit in HDFS because encryption and decryption activities are carried out in the client.