Calm before the storm at AWS re:Invent 2019

Week started more quiet than what I would have anticipated. Hopefully this is fixed in tomorrow’s keynote.

Re:Invent week is officially on, first sessions are behind and so is the first customer event, which was the Nordic reception. Regarding releases and news, the start has been pretty quiet but we have still gotten some new services.

Nordic Customer Reception

Nordic customer reception is an event focused for AWS customers from nordics only. This year it was held at the Barrymore bar slightly outside of the busiest part of the strip. The event was again fully packed with people from all around nordics.

It was great to talk to everyone and have nice time with old and possible new customers. We had our whole team there representing Solita with Omar, Anniina, Miia and Anahit running the booth in the picture.

 

Releases and announcements

First day of the week had two new services and two new security features for existing services

Access analyzer for S3 and IAM

A new feature called Access analyzer was released for S3 and IAM. It is a feature inside these services that tries to automatically analyze created policies and verify that they only have the intended effect.

Access analyzer for S3 goes through bucket access policies and alerts and creates reports of misconfigured policies. This enables the reaction and remediation to be much faster than manually evaluating policies. AWS bucket policies already, by default, deny any public access to buckets so I am not sure how useful this is for S3 but that remains to be seen when we get to test it out better.

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/12/introducing-access-analyzer-for-amazon-s3-to-review-access-policies/

Access Analyzer for AWS IAM works in a very similar fashion as the previous one but with resource policies for Amazon S3 buckets, AWS KMS keys, Amazon SQS queues, AWS IAM roles, and AWS Lambda functions. This though could be a feature that becomes very useful in the future.

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/12/introducing-aws-identity-and-access-management-access-analyzer/

With both of these services, the good thing is that it can be enabled without any additional costs. Making it a no-brainer to enable and see how useful it is.

EC2 Image builder

EC2 Image builder is a service, which creates pipelines to automatically build and update golden images for EC2. There has already been a solution for this, called AWS Golden AMI pipeline, which has been deployable through AWS Marketplace. Still it has been more like a demonstration how it can be done and requiring quite a lot of tinkering to configure it. This could now be the actual, easy to use service, which enables fast implementation of golden AMI factory.

https://aws.amazon.com/image-builder/

Amazon Braket

Amazon braket is a new service for exploring and evaluating quantum computing. It should be an easy to use platform for scientist, researchers and developers to build, test and run quantum compute algorithms. With Amazon Braket, one can create algorithms from scratch or use pre-built algorithms and then utilize a fully managed simulation environment to test it. When the algorithm is ready, it can be deployed to a quantum computer with different hardware choices from hardware providers like D-Wave, IonQ, and Rigetti.

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/12/introducing-amazon-braket/

All in all, Monday was good with a lot of things happening. Next we have Andy Jassy’s Keynote and most likely the biggest event for the week. At least when it comes to any new releases.

Would you like to hear more what happens in re:Invent 2019? Sign up to our team’s Whatsapp group to chat with them and register to What happens in Vegas won’t stay in Vegas webinar to hear a whole sum-up after the event.

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