Tag Archives: AWS GovCloud (US)

Amazon Relational Database Service – Looking Back at 2017

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-relational-database-service-looking-back-at-2017/

The Amazon RDS team launched nearly 80 features in 2017. Some of them were covered in this blog, others on the AWS Database Blog, and the rest in What’s New or Forum posts. To wrap up my week, I thought it would be worthwhile to give you an organized recap. So here we go!

Certification & Security

Features

Engine Versions & Features

Regional Support

Instance Support

Price Reductions

And That’s a Wrap
I’m pretty sure that’s everything. As you can see, 2017 was quite the year! I can’t wait to see what the team delivers in 2018.

— Jeff;

 

New – Amazon CloudWatch Agent with AWS Systems Manager Integration – Unified Metrics & Log Collection for Linux & Windows

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-cloudwatch-agent-with-aws-systems-manager-integration-unified-metrics-log-collection-for-linux-windows/

In the past I’ve talked about several agents, deaemons, and scripts that you could use to collect system metrics and log files for your Windows and Linux instances and on-premise services and publish them to Amazon CloudWatch. The data collected by this somewhat disparate collection of tools gave you visibility into the status and behavior of your compute resources, along with the power to take action when a value goes out of range and indicates a potential issue. You can graph any desired metrics on CloudWatch Dashboards, initiate actions via CloudWatch Alarms, and search CloudWatch Logs to find error messages, while taking advantage of our support for custom high-resolution metrics.

New Unified Agent
Today we are taking a nice step forward and launching a new, unified CloudWatch Agent. It runs in the cloud and on-premises, on Linux and Windows instances and servers, and handles metrics and log files. You can deploy it using AWS Systems Manager (SSM) Run Command, SSM State Manager, or from the CLI. Here are some of the most important features:

Single Agent – A single agent now collects both metrics and logs. This simplifies the setup process and reduces complexity.

Cross-Platform / Cross-Environment – The new agent runs in the cloud and on-premises, on 64-bit Linux and 64-bit Windows, and includes HTTP proxy server support.

Configurable – The new agent captures the most useful system metrics automatically. It can be configured to collect hundreds of others, including fine-grained metrics on sub-resources such as CPU threads, mounted filesystems, and network interfaces.

CloudWatch-Friendly – The new agent supports standard 1-minute metrics and the newer 1-second high-resolution metrics. It automatically includes EC2 dimensions such as Instance Id, Image Id, and Auto Scaling Group Name, and also supports the use of custom dimensions. All of the dimensions can be used for custom aggregation across Auto Scaling Groups, applications, and so forth.

Migration – You can easily migrate existing AWS SSM and EC2Config configurations for use with the new agent.

Installing the Agent
The CloudWatch Agent uses an IAM role when running on an EC2 instance, and an IAM user when running on an on-premises server. The role or the user must include the AmazonSSMFullAccess and AmazonEC2ReadOnlyAccess policies. Here’s my role:

I can easily add it to a running instance (this is a relatively new and very handy EC2 feature):

The SSM Agent is already running on my instance. If it wasn’t, I would follow the steps in Installing and Configuring SSM Agent to set it up.

Next, I install the CloudWatch Agent using the AWS Systems Manager:

This takes just a few seconds. Now I can use a simple wizard to set up the configuration file for the agent:

The wizard also lets me set up the log files to be monitored:

The wizard generates a JSON-format config file and stores it on the instance. It also offers me the option to upload the file to my Parameter Store so that I can deploy it to my other instances (I can also do fine-grained customization of the metrics and log collection configuration by editing the file):

Now I can start the CloudWatch Agent using Run Command, supplying the name of my configuration in the Parameter Store:

This runs in a few seconds and the agent begins to publish metrics right away. As I mentioned earlier, the agent can publish fine-grained metrics on the resources inside of or attached to an instance. For example, here are the metrics for each filesystem:

There’s a separate log stream for each monitored log file on each instance:

I can view and search it, just like I can do for any other log stream:

Now Available
The new CloudWatch Agent is available now and you can start using it today in all public AWS Regions, with AWS GovCloud (US) and the Regions in China to follow.

There’s no charge for the agent; you pay the usual CloudWatch prices for logs and custom metrics.

— Jeff;

Newly Updated Whitepaper: FERPA Compliance on AWS

Post Syndicated from Chris Gile original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/newly-updated-whitepaper-ferpa-compliance-on-aws/

One of the main tenets of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) is the protection of student education records, including personally identifiable information (PII) and directory information. We recently updated our FERPA Compliance on AWS whitepaper to include AWS service-specific guidance for 24 AWS services. The whitepaper describes how these services can be used to help secure protected data. In conjunction with more detailed service-specific documentation, this updated information helps make it easier for you to plan, deploy, and operate secure environments to meet your compliance requirements in the AWS Cloud.

The updated whitepaper is especially useful for educational institutions and their vendors who need to understand:

  • AWS’s Shared Responsibility Model.
  • How AWS services can be used to help deploy educational and PII workloads securely in the AWS Cloud.
  • Key security disciplines in a security program to help you run a FERPA-compliant program (such as auditing, data destruction, and backup and disaster recovery).

In a related effort to help you secure PII, we also added to the whitepaper a mapping of NIST SP 800-122, which provides guidance for protecting PII, as well as a link to our NIST SP 800-53 Quick Start, a CloudFormation template that automatically configures AWS resources and deploys a multi-tier, Linux-based web application. To learn how this Quick Start works, see the Automate NIST Compliance in AWS GovCloud (US) with AWS Quick Start Tools video. The template helps you streamline and automate secure baselines in AWS—from initial design to operational security readiness—by incorporating the expertise of AWS security and compliance subject matter experts.

For more information about AWS Compliance and FERPA or to request support for your organization, contact your AWS account manager.

– Chris Gile, Senior Manager, AWS Security Assurance

AWS Price List API Update – New Query and Metadata Functions

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-price-list-api-update-new-query-and-metadata-functions/

The original AWS Price List API, as described in New – AWS Price List API, gave you access to prices in JSON and CSV form by way of structured URLs. While this worked well for some types of cost management tools, the size and complexity of the files made them difficult to download and tedious to parse. Today we are updating the API by adding new functions that allow you to perform fine-grained price queries that return only the prices that you need. This will allow you to make use of the prices in mobile and browser-based applications.

New Functions
Here are the new functions:

DescribeServices – Returns sets of attribute keys that are used to define products within a service. For example, the keys returned for EC2 will include physicalProcessor, memory, operatingSystem, location, and tenancy.

GetAttributeValues – Returns all of the allowable values for a given attribute key. For example, values for the operatingSystem key include Windows, RHEL, Linux, and SUSE; values for the location key include US East (N. Virginia) and Asia Pacific (Mumbai).

GetProducts -Returns all of the products, along with their public prices, that match a filter expression based on service name and attribute value.

You can access these functions from the AWS SDKs. In order to try them out I used Python and the AWS SDK for Python. I start by importing the SDK and creating a client:

import boto3
import json
import pprint

pricing = boto3.client('pricing')

Here’s how I list all of the services and attributes:

print("All Services")
print("============")
response = pricing.describe_services()
for service in response['Services']:
    print(service['ServiceCode'] + ": " + ", ".join(service['AttributeNames']))
print()

The output starts like this:

All Services
============
SnowballExtraDays: productFamily, termType, usagetype, locationType, snowballType, feeDescription, servicecode, feeCode, location, operation
OpsWorks: productFamily, servicecode, termType, usagetype, locationType, location, operation, serverLocation, group
mobileanalytics: productFamily, servicecode, includedEvents, termType, usagetype, description, locationType, location, operation
IngestionServiceSnowball: productFamily, fromLocationType, termType, usagetype, locationType, toLocationType, toLocation, snowballType, servicecode, groupDescription, transferType, location, fromLocation, operation, group
IngestionService: productFamily, termType, usagetype, locationType, servicecode, groupDescription, dataAction, location, operation, group
ElasticMapReduce: productFamily, softwareType, instanceType, termType, usagetype, locationType, instanceFamily, servicecode, location, servicename, operation
datapipeline: productFamily, frequencyMode, termType, usagetype, locationType, description, executionFrequency, servicecode, location, operation, group, executionLocation
...

Here’s how I get all of the values for all of EC2’s pricing attributes:

print("Selected EC2 Attributes & Values")
print("================================")
response = pricing.describe_services(ServiceCode='AmazonEC2')
attrs = response['Services'][0]['AttributeNames']

for attr in attrs:
    response = pricing.get_attribute_values(ServiceCode='AmazonEC2', AttributeName=attr)

    values = []
    for attr_value in response['AttributeValues']:
        values.append(attr_value['Value'])

    print("  " + attr + ": " + ", ".join(values))

The output starts like this:

Selected EC2 Attributes & Values
================================
  volumeType: Throughput Optimized HDD, Provisioned IOPS, Magnetic, General Purpose, Cold HDD
  maxIopsvolume: 500 - based on 1 MiB I/O size, 40 - 200, 250 - based on 1 MiB I/O size, 20000, 10000
  instanceCapacity10xlarge: 1
  locationType: AWS Region
  instanceFamily: Storage optimized, Micro instances, Memory optimized, GPU instance, General purpose, Compute optimized
  operatingSystem: Windows, SUSE, RHEL, NA, Linux
...

And here’s how I use the service name and attribute values to obtain price listings for EC2 instances with 64 vCPUs, 256 GiB of memory, pre-installed SQL Server Enterprise, in the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region. Each price is a JSON string:

print("Selected EC2 Products")
print("=====================")

response = pricing.get_products(
     ServiceCode='AmazonEC2',
     Filters = [
         {'Type' :'TERM_MATCH', 'Field':'operatingSystem', 'Value':'Windows'              },
         {'Type' :'TERM_MATCH', 'Field':'vcpu',            'Value':'64'                   },
         {'Type' :'TERM_MATCH', 'Field':'memory',          'Value':'256 GiB'              },
         {'Type' :'TERM_MATCH', 'Field':'preInstalledSw',  'Value':'SQL Ent'              },
         {'Type' :'TERM_MATCH', 'Field':'location',        'Value':'Asia Pacific (Mumbai)'}
     ],
     MaxResults=100
)

for price in response['PriceList']:
 pp = pprint.PrettyPrinter(indent=1. width=300)
 pp.pprint(json.loads(price))
 print()

The output starts like this (there’s a lot more):

Selected EC2 Products
=====================
{'product': {'attributes': {'clockSpeed': '2.3 GHz',
                            'currentGeneration': 'Yes',
                            'dedicatedEbsThroughput': '10000 Mbps',
                            'ecu': '188',
                            'enhancedNetworkingSupported': 'Yes',
                            'instanceFamily': 'General purpose',
                            'instanceType': 'm4.16xlarge',
                            'licenseModel': 'No License required',
                            'location': 'Asia Pacific (Mumbai)',
                            'locationType': 'AWS Region',
                            'memory': '256 GiB',
                            'networkPerformance': '20 Gigabit',
                            'normalizationSizeFactor': '128',
                            'operatingSystem': 'Windows',
                            'operation': 'RunInstances:0102',
                            'physicalProcessor': 'Intel Xeon E5-2686 v4 (Broadwell)',
                            'preInstalledSw': 'SQL Ent',
                            'processorArchitecture': '64-bit',
                            'processorFeatures': 'Intel AVX, Intel AVX2, Intel Turbo',
                            'servicecode': 'AmazonEC2',
                            'servicename': 'Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud',
                            'storage': 'EBS only',
                            'tenancy': 'Shared',
                            'usagetype': 'APS3-BoxUsage:m4.16xlarge',
                            'vcpu': '64'},
             'productFamily': 'Compute Instance',
             'sku': '24GRA8RB2KZ9NPCS'},
 'publicationDate': '2017-10-07T00:26:55Z',
 'serviceCode': 'AmazonEC2',
...

The next part of the response contains an array of terms, each describing a particular way to purchase the instance (On-Demand or various types of Reserved Instance):

 'terms': {'OnDemand': {'24GRA8RB2KZ9NPCS.JRTCKXETXF': {'effectiveDate': '2017-09-01T00:00:00Z',
                                                        'offerTermCode': 'JRTCKXETXF',
                                                        'priceDimensions': {'24GRA8RB2KZ9NPCS.JRTCKXETXF.6YS6EN2CT7': {'appliesTo': [],
                                                                                                                       'beginRange': '0',
                                                                                                                       'description': '$30.88 per On Demand Windows with SQL Server Enterprise m4.16xlarge Instance Hour',
                                                                                                                       'endRange': 'Inf',
                                                                                                                       'pricePerUnit': {'USD': '30.8800000000'},
                                                                                                                       'rateCode': '24GRA8RB2KZ9NPCS.JRTCKXETXF.6YS6EN2CT7',
                                                                                                                       'unit': 'Hrs'}},
                                                        'sku': '24GRA8RB2KZ9NPCS',
                                                        'termAttributes': {}}},
           'Reserved': {'24GRA8RB2KZ9NPCS.38NPMPTW36': {'effectiveDate': '2017-04-30T23:59:59Z',
                                                        'offerTermCode': '38NPMPTW36',
                                                        'priceDimensions': {'24GRA8RB2KZ9NPCS.38NPMPTW36.2TG2D8R56U': {'appliesTo': [], 'description': 'Upfront Fee', 'pricePerUnit': {'USD': '374227'}, 'rateCode': '24GRA8RB2KZ9NPCS.38NPMPTW36.2TG2D8R56U', 'unit': 'Quantity'},
                                                                            '24GRA8RB2KZ9NPCS.38NPMPTW36.6YS6EN2CT7': {'appliesTo': [],
                                                                                                                       'beginRange': '0',
                                                                                                                       'description': 'Windows with SQL Server Enterprise (Amazon VPC), m4.16xlarge reserved instance applied',
                                                                                                                       'endRange': 'Inf',
                                                                                                                       'pricePerUnit': {'USD': '14.2400000000'},
                                                                                                                       'rateCode': '24GRA8RB2KZ9NPCS.38NPMPTW36.6YS6EN2CT7',
                                                                                                                       'unit': 'Hrs'}},
                                                        'sku': '24GRA8RB2KZ9NPCS',
                                                        'termAttributes': {'LeaseContractLength': '3yr', 'OfferingClass': 'standard', 'PurchaseOption': 'Partial Upfront'}},
...

Read Using the AWS Price List API to learn more about these functions and the data that they return.

Now Available
The new functions are available now and you can start using them today in the US East (Northern Virginia) and Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Regions to access metadata and price listings for all public AWS Regions and AWS GovCloud (US), at no charge.

To see a real-world example of how to use these functions, take a look at the new post, Controlling Projected User Costs Through Monthly Budget Policies on the AWS Management Tools Blog.

— Jeff;

AWS Earns Department of Defense Impact Level 5 Provisional Authorization

Post Syndicated from Chris Gile original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-earns-department-of-defense-impact-level-5-provisional-authorization/

AWS GovCloud (US) Region image

The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) has granted the AWS GovCloud (US) Region an Impact Level 5 (IL5) Department of Defense (DoD) Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide (CC SRG) Provisional Authorization (PA) for six core services. This means that AWS’s DoD customers and partners can now deploy workloads for Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) exceeding IL4 and for unclassified National Security Systems (NSS).

We have supported sensitive Defense community workloads in the cloud for more than four years, and this latest IL5 authorization is complementary to our FedRAMP High Provisional Authorization that covers 18 services in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region. Our customers now have the flexibility to deploy any range of IL 2, 4, or 5 workloads by leveraging AWS’s services, attestations, and certifications. For example, when the US Air Force needed compute scale to support the Next Generation GPS Operational Control System Program, they turned to AWS.

In partnership with a certified Third Party Assessment Organization (3PAO), an independent validation was conducted to assess both our technical and nontechnical security controls to confirm that they meet the DoD’s stringent CC SRG standards for IL5 workloads. Effective immediately, customers can begin leveraging the IL5 authorization for the following six services in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region:

AWS has been a long-standing industry partner with DoD, federal-agency customers, and private-sector customers to enhance cloud security and policy. We continue to collaborate on the DoD CC SRG, Defense Acquisition Regulation Supplement (DFARS) and other government requirements to ensure that policy makers enact policies to support next-generation security capabilities.

In an effort to reduce the authorization burden of our DoD customers, we’ve worked with DISA to port our assessment results into an easily ingestible format by the Enterprise Mission Assurance Support Service (eMASS) system. Additionally, we undertook a separate effort to empower our industry partners and customers to efficiently solve their compliance, governance, and audit challenges by launching the AWS Customer Compliance Center, a portal providing a breadth of AWS-specific compliance and regulatory information.

We look forward to providing sustained cloud security and compliance support at scale for our DoD customers and adding additional services within the IL5 authorization boundary. See AWS Services in Scope by Compliance Program for updates. To request access to AWS’s DoD security and authorization documentation, contact AWS Sales and Business Development. For a list of frequently asked questions related to AWS DoD SRG compliance, see the AWS DoD SRG page.

To learn more about the announcement in this post, tune in for the AWS Automating DoD SRG Impact Level 5 Compliance in AWS GovCloud (US) webinar on October 11, 2017, at 11:00 A.M. Pacific Time.

– Chris Gile, Senior Manager, AWS Public Sector Risk & Compliance

 

 

New – High-Resolution Custom Metrics and Alarms for Amazon CloudWatch

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-high-resolution-custom-metrics-and-alarms-for-amazon-cloudwatch/

Amazon CloudWatch has been an important part of AWS since early 2009! Launched as part of a three-pack that also included Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing, CloudWatch has evolved into a very powerful monitoring service for AWS resources and the applications that you run on the AWS Cloud. CloudWatch custom metrics (launched way back in 2011) allow you to store business and application metrics in CloudWatch, view them in graphs, and initiate actions based on CloudWatch Alarms. Needless to say, we have made many enhancements to CloudWatch over the years! Some of the most recent include Extended Metrics Retention (and a User Interface Update), Dashboards, API/CloudFormation Support for Dashboards, and Alarms on Dashboards.

Originally, metrics were stored at five minute intervals; this was reduced to one minute (also known as Detailed Monitoring) in response to customer requests way back in 2010. This was a welcome change, but now it is time to do better. Our customers are streaming video, running flash sales, deploying code tens or hundreds of times per day, and running applications that scale in and out very quickly as conditions change. In all of these situations, a minute is simply too coarse of an interval. Important, transient spikes can be missed; disparate (yet related) events are difficult to correlate across time, and the MTTR (mean time to repair) when something breaks is too high.

New High-Resolution Metrics
Today we are adding support for high-resolution custom metrics, with plans to add support for AWS services over time. Your applications can now publish metrics to CloudWatch with 1-second resolution. You can watch the metrics scroll across your screen seconds after they are published and you can set up high-resolution CloudWatch Alarms that evaluate as frequently as every 10 seconds.

Imagine alarming when available memory gets low. This is often a transient condition that can be hard to catch with infrequent samples. With high-resolution metrics, you can see, detect (via an alarm), and act on it within seconds:

In this case the alarm on the right would not fire, and you would not know about the issue.

Publishing High-Resolution Metrics
You can publish high-resolution metrics in two different ways:

  • API – The PutMetricData function now accepts an optional StorageResolution parameter. Set this parameter to 1 to publish high-resolution metrics; omit it (or set it to 60) to publish at standard 1-minute resolution.
  • collectd plugin – The CloudWatch plugin for collectd has been updated to support collection and publication of high-resolution metrics. You will need to set the enable_high_definition_metrics parameter in the config file for the plugin.

CloudWatch metrics are rolled up over time; resolution effectively decreases as the metrics age. Here’s the schedule:

  • 1 second metrics are available for 3 hours.
  • 60 second metrics are available for 15 days.
  • 5 minute metrics are available for 63 days.
  • 1 hour metrics are available for 455 days (15 months).

When you call GetMetricStatistics you can specify a period of 1, 5, 10, 30 or any multiple of 60 seconds for high-resolution metrics. You can specify any multiple of 60 seconds for standard metrics.

A Quick Demo
I grabbed my nearest EC2 instance, installed the latest version of collectd and the Python plugin:

$ sudo yum install collectd collectd-python

Then I downloaded the setup script for the plugin, made it executable, and ran it:

$ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/awslabs/collectd-cloudwatch/master/src/setup.py
$ chmod a+x setup.py
$ sudo ./setup.py

I had already created a suitable IAM Role and added it to my instance; it was automatically detected during setup. I was asked to enable the high resolution metrics:

collectd started running and publishing metrics within seconds. I opened up the CloudWatch Console to take a look:

Then I zoomed in to see the metrics in detail:

I also created an alarm that will check the memory.percent.used metric at 10 second intervals. This will make it easier for me to detect situations where a lot of memory is being used for a short period of time:

Now Available
High-resolution custom metrics and alarms are available now in all Public AWS Regions, with support for AWS GovCloud (US) coming soon.

As was already the case, you can store 10 metrics at no charge every month; see the CloudWatch Pricing page for more information. Pricing for high-resolution metrics is identical to that for standard resolution metrics, with volume tiers that allow you to realize savings (on a per-metric) basis when you use more metrics. High-resolution alarms are priced at $0.30 per alarm per month.

New – Next-Generation GPU-Powered EC2 Instances (G3)

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-next-generation-gpu-powered-ec2-instances-g3/

I first wrote about the benefits of GPU-powered computing in 2013 when we launched the G2 instance type. Since that launch, AWS customers have used the G2 instances to deliver high performance graphics to mobile devices, TV sets, and desktops.

Today we are taking a step forward and launching the G3 instance type. Powered by NVIDIA Tesla M60 GPUs, these instances are available in three sizes (all VPC-only and EBS-only):

ModelGPUsGPU MemoryvCPUsMain MemoryEBS Bandwidth
g3.4xlarge18 GiB16122 GiB3.5 Gbps
g3.8xlarge216 GiB32244 GiB7 Gbps
g3.16xlarge432 GiB64488 GiB14 Gbps

Each GPU supports 8 GiB of GPU memory, 2048 parallel processing cores, and a hardware encoder capable of supporting up to 10 H.265 (HEVC) 1080p30 streams and up to 18 H.264 1080p30 streams, making them a great fit for 3D rendering & visualization, virtual reality, video encoding, remote graphics workstation (NVIDIA GRID), and other server-side graphics workloads that need a massive amount of parallel processing power. The GPUs support OpenGL 4.5, DirectX 12.0, CUDA 8.0, and OpenCL 1.2. When you launch a G3 instance you have access to an NVIDIA GRID Virtual Workstation License and can make use of the NVIDIA GRID driver without purchasing a license on your own.

The instances use Intel Xeon E5-2686 v4 (Broadwell) processors running at 2.7 GHz. On the networking side, Enhanced Networking (via the Elastic Network Adapter) provides up to 20 Gbps of aggregate network bandwidth within a Placement Group, along with up to 14 Gbps of EBS bandwidth.

Our customers have told us that they are looking forward to visualizing large 3D seismic models, configuring cars in 3D, and providing students with the ability to run high-end 2D and 3D applications. For example, Calgary Scientific can take applications that are powered by the Unreal Engine and make them accessible on mobile devices and from within web pages, with collaborative viewing support. Visit their Demo Gallery to see PureWeb Reality in action:

You can launch these instances today in the US East (Ohio), US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), US West (Northern California), AWS GovCloud (US), and EU (Ireland) Regions as On-Demand, Reserved Instances, Spot Instances, and Dedicated Hosts, with more Regions coming soon.

— Jeff;

AWS GovCloud (US) and Amazon Rekognition – A Powerful Public Safety Tool

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-govcloud-us-and-amazon-rekognition-a-powerful-public-safety-tool/

I’ve already told you about Amazon Rekognition and described how it uses deep neural network models to analyze images by detecting objects, scenes, and faces.

Today I am happy to tell you that Rekognition is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region. To learn more, read the Amazon Rekognition FAQ, and the Amazon Rekognition Product Details, review the Amazon Rekognition Customer Use Cases, and then build your app using the information on the Amazon Rekognition for Developers page.

Motorola Solutions for Public Safety
While I have your attention, I would love to tell you how Motorola Solutions is exploring how Rekognition can enhance real-time intelligence for public safety personnel in the field and at the command center.

Motorola Solutions provides over 100,000 public safety and commercial customers in more than 100 countries with software, services, and tools for mobile intelligence and digital evidence management, many powered by images captured using body, dashboard, and stationary cameras. Due to the exceptionally sensitive nature of these images, they must be stored in an environment that meets stringent CJIS (Criminal Justice Information Systems) security standards defined by the FBI.

For several years, researchers at Motorola Solutions have been exploring the use of artificial intelligence. For example, they have built prototype applications that use Rekognition, Lex, and Polly in conjunction with their own software to scan images from a body-worn camera for missing persons and to raise alerts without requiring continuous human attention or interaction. With approximately 100,000 missing people in the US alone, law enforcement agencies need to bring powerful tools to bear. At re:Invent 2016, Dan Law (Chief Data Scientist for Motorola Solutions) described how they use AWS to aid in this effort. Here’s the video (Dan’s section is titled AI for Public Safety):

AWS and CJIS
The applications that Dan described can run in AWS GovCloud (US). This is an isolated cloud built to protect and preserve sensitive IT data while meeting the FBI’s CJIS requirements (and many others). AWS GovCloud (US) resides on US soil and is managed exclusively by US citizens. AWS routinely signs CJIS security agreements with our customers and can either perform or allow background checks on our employees, as needed.

Here are some resources that you can use to learn more about AWS and CJIS:

— Jeff;

 

 

AWS GovCloud (US) Heads East – New Region in the Works for 2018

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-govcloud-us-heads-east-new-region-in-the-works-for-2018/

AWS GovCloud (US) gives AWS customers a place to host sensitive data and regulated workloads in the AWS Cloud. The first AWS GovCloud (US) Region was launched in 2011 and is located on the west coast of the US.

I’m happy to announce that we are working on a second Region that we expect to open in 2018. The upcoming AWS GovCloud (US-East) Region will provide customers with added redundancy, data durability, and resiliency, and will also provide additional options for disaster recovery.

Like the existing region, which we now call AWS GovCloud (US-West), the new region will be isolated and meet top US government compliance requirements including International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), NIST standards, Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) Moderate and High, Department of Defense Impact Levels 2-4, DFARs, IRS1075, and Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) requirements. Visit the GovCloud (US) page to learn more about the compliance regimes that we support.

Government agencies and the IT contactors that serve them were early adopters of AWS GovCloud (US), as were companies in regulated industries. These organizations are able to enjoy the flexibility and cost-effectiveness of public cloud while benefiting from the isolation and data protection offered by a region designed and built to meet their regulatory needs and to help them to meet their compliance requirements. Here’s a small sample from our customer base:

Federal (US) Government – Department of Veterans Affairs, General Services Administration 18F (Digital Services Delivery), NASA JPL, Defense Digital Service, United States Air Force, United States Department of Justice.

Regulated Industries – CSRA, Talen Energy, Cobham Electronics.

SaaS and Solution Providers – FIGmd, Blackboard, Splunk, GitHub, Motorola.

Federal, state, and local agencies that want to move their existing applications to the AWS Cloud can take advantage of the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) offered by AWS Professional Services.

— Jeff;

 

 

Announcing the Availability of Hardware Multi-Factor Authentication in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region

Post Syndicated from Craig Liebendorfer original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/announcing-the-availability-of-hardware-multi-factor-authentication-in-the-aws-govcloud-us-region/

AWS GovCloud (US) Region image

Hardware multi-factor authentication (MFA) is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region to help strengthen data security while giving you control over token keys that have access to your data. MFA is a best practice that adds an extra layer of protection on top of users’ user names and passwords.

These token keys that are specific to the AWS GovCloud (US) Region are distributed by SurePassID, a third-party digital security company, and implement the Initiative for Open Authentication Time-Based One-Time Password (OATH TOTP) standard. SurePassID tokens are available for purchase on Amazon.com.

For more information about hardware MFA in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region, see the AWS Public Sector Blog post.

– Craig

More Than One Dozen AWS Cloud Services Receive Department of Defense Impact Level 4 Provisional Authorizations in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region

Post Syndicated from Chad Woolf original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/more-than-one-dozen-aws-cloud-services-receive-department-of-defense-impact-level-4-provisional-authorizations-in-the-aws-govcloud-us-region/

AWS GovCloud (US) Region logo

Today, I am pleased to announce that the AWS GovCloud (US) Region has received Defense Information Systems Agency Impact Level 4 (IL4) Provisional Authorization (PA) for more than one dozen new services. The IL4 PA enables Department of Defense (DoD) customers to operate their mission-critical and regulated workloads in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region, with data up to the DoD Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide IL4.

The new AWS services added to the authorization include advanced database, low-cost storage, data warehouse, security, and configuration automation solutions that will help organizations with IL4 workloads increase the productivity and security of their data in the AWS Cloud. For example, with AWS CloudFormation you can deploy AWS resources by automating configuration processes. AWS Key Management Service enables you to create and control the encryption keys that you use to encrypt your data. With Amazon Redshift, you can analyze all your data by using your existing business intelligence tools and automate common administrative tasks to manage, monitor, and scale your data warehouse.

For a list of frequently asked questions, see AWS DoD Compliance page. For more information about AWS security and compliance, see the AWS Security Center and the AWS Compliance Center.

– Chad

AWS Achieves FedRAMP Authorization for New Services in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region

Post Syndicated from Chad Woolf original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-achieves-fedramp-authorization-for-a-wide-array-of-services/

Today, we’re pleased to announce an array of AWS services that are available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region and have achieved Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) High authorizations. The FedRAMP Joint Authorization Board (JAB) has issued Provisional Authority to Operate (P-ATO) approvals, which are effective immediately. If you are a federal or commercial customer, you can use these services to process and store your critical workloads in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region’s authorization boundary with data up to the high impact level.

The services newly available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region include database, storage, data warehouse, security, and configuration automation solutions that will help you increase your ability to manage data in the cloud. For example, with AWS CloudFormation, you can deploy AWS resources by automating configuration processes. AWS Key Management Service (KMS) enables you to create and control the encryption keys used to secure your data. Amazon Redshift enables you to analyze all your data cost effectively by using existing business intelligence tools to automate common administrative tasks for managing, monitoring, and scaling your data warehouse.

Our federal and commercial customers can now leverage our FedRAMP P-ATO to access the following services:

  • CloudFormation – CloudFormation gives developers and systems administrators an easy way to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources, provisioning and updating them in an orderly and predictable fashion. You can use sample templates in CloudFormation, or create your own templates to describe the AWS resources and any associated dependencies or run-time parameters required to run your application.
  • Amazon DynamoDB – Amazon DynamoDB is a fast and flexible NoSQL database service for all applications that need consistent, single-digit-millisecond latency at any scale. It is a fully managed cloud database and supports both document and key-value store models.
  • Amazon EMR – Amazon EMR provides a managed Hadoop framework that makes it efficient and cost effective to process vast amounts of data across dynamically scalable Amazon EC2 instances. You can also run other popular distributed frameworks such as Apache Spark, HBase, Presto, and Flink in EMR, and interact with data in other AWS data stores such as Amazon S3 and DynamoDB.
  • Amazon Glacier – Amazon Glacier is a secure, durable, and low-cost cloud storage service for data archiving and long-term backup. Customers can reliably store large or small amounts of data for as little as $0.004 per gigabyte per month, a significant savings compared to on-premises solutions.
  • KMS – KMS is a managed service that makes it easier for you to create and control the encryption keys used to encrypt your data, and uses Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) to protect the security of your keys. KMS is integrated with other AWS services to help you protect the data you store with these services. For example, KMS is integrated with CloudTrail to provide you with logs of all key usage and help you meet your regulatory and compliance needs.
  • Redshift – Redshift is a fast, fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse that makes it simple and cost effective to analyze all your data by using your existing business intelligence tools.
  • Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) – Amazon SNS is a fast, flexible, fully managed push notification service that lets you send individual messages or “fan out” messages to large numbers of recipients. SNS makes it simple and cost effective to send push notifications to mobile device users and email recipients or even send messages to other distributed services.
  • Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) – Amazon SQS is a fully-managed message queuing service for reliably communicating among distributed software components and microservices—at any scale. Using SQS, you can send, store, and receive messages between software components at any volume, without losing messages or requiring other services to be always available.
  • Amazon Simple Workflow Service (SWF) – Amazon SWF helps developers build, run, and scale background jobs that have parallel or sequential steps. SWF is a fully managed state tracker and task coordinator in the cloud.

AWS works closely with the FedRAMP Program Management Office (PMO), National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and other federal regulatory and compliance bodies to ensure that we provide you with the cutting-edge technology you need in a secure and compliant fashion. We are working with our authorizing officials to continue to expand the scope of our authorized services, and we are fully committed to ensuring that AWS GovCloud (US) continues to offer government customers the most comprehensive mix of functionality and security.

– Chad

New – Tag EC2 Instances & EBS Volumes on Creation

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-tag-ec2-instances-ebs-volumes-on-creation/

Way back in 2010, we launched Resource Tagging for EC2 instances and other EC2 resources. Since that launch, we have raised the allowable number of tags per resource from 10 to 50, and we have made tags more useful with the introduction of resource groups and a tag editor. Our customers use tags to track ownership, drive their cost accounting processes, implement compliance protocols, and to control access to resources via IAM policies.

The AWS tagging model provides separate functions for resource creation and resource tagging. While this is flexible and has worked well for many of our users, it does result in a small time window where the resources exist in an untagged state. Using two separate functions means that resource creation could succeed only for tagging to fail, again leaving resources in an untagged state.

Today we are making tagging more flexible and more useful, with four new features:

Tag on Creation – You can now specify tags for EC2 instances and EBS volumes as part of the API call that creates the resources.

Enforced Tag Usage – You can now write IAM policies that mandate the use of specific tags on EC2 instances or EBS volumes.

Resource-Level Permissions – By popular request, the CreateTags and DeleteTags functions now support IAM’s resource-level permissions.

Enforced Volume Encryption – You can now write IAM policies that mandate the use of encryption for newly created EBS volumes.

Tag on Creation
You now have the ability to specify tags for EC2 instances and EBS volumes as part of the API call that creates the resources (if the call creates both instances and volumes, you can specify distinct tags for the instance and for each volume). The resource creation and the tagging are performed atomically; both must succeed in order for the operation (RunInstances, CreateVolume, and other functions that create resources) to succeed. You no longer need to build tagging scripts that run after instances or volumes have been created.

Here’s how you specify tags when you launch an EC2 instance (the CostCenter and SaveSnapshotFlag tags are also set on any EBS volumes created when the instance is launched):

To learn more, read Using Tags.

Resource-Level Permissions
CreateTags and DeleteTags now support IAM’s resource-level permissions, as requested by many customers. This gives you additional control over the tag keys and values on existing resources.

Also, RunInstances and CreateVolume now support additional resource-level permissions. This allows you to exercise control over the users and groups that can tag resources on creation.

To learn more, see Example Policies for Working with the AWS CLI or an AWS SDK.

Enforced Tag Usage
You can now write IAM policies that enforce the use of specific tags. For example, you could write a policy that blocks the deletion of tags named Owner or Account. Or, you could write a “Deny” policy that disallows the creation of new tags for specific existing resources. You could also use an IAM policy to enforce the use of Department and CostCenter tags to help you achieve more accurate cost allocation reporting. In order to implement stronger compliance and security policies, you could also restrict access to DeleteTags if the resource is not tagged with the user’s name. The ability to enforce tag usage gives you precise control over access to resources, ownership, and cost allocation.

Here’s a statement that requires the use of costcenter and stack tags (with values of “115” and “prod,” respectively) for all newly created volumes:

"Statement": [
    {
      "Sid": "AllowCreateTaggedVolumes",
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Action": "ec2:CreateVolume",
      "Resource": "arn:aws:ec2:us-east-1:123456789012:volume/*",
      "Condition": {
        "StringEquals": {
          "aws:RequestTag/costcenter": "115",
          "aws:RequestTag/stack": "prod"
         },
         "ForAllValues:StringEquals": {
             "aws:TagKeys": ["costcenter","stack"]
         }
       }
     },
     {
       "Effect": "Allow",
       "Action": [
         "ec2:CreateTags"
       ],
       "Resource": "arn:aws:ec2:us-east-1:123456789012:volume/*",
       "Condition": {
         "StringEquals": {
             "ec2:CreateAction" : "CreateVolume"
        }
      }
    }
  ]

Enforced Volume Encryption
Using the additional IAM resource-level permissions now supported by RunInstances and CreateVolume, you can now write IAM policies that mandate the use of encryption for any EBS boot or data volumes created. You can use this to comply with regulatory requirements, enforce enterprise security policies, and to protect your data in compliance with applicable auditing requirements.

Here’s a sample statement that you can incorporate into an IAM policy for RunInstances and CreateVolume to enforce EBS volume encryption:

"Statement": [
        {
            "Effect": "Deny",
            "Action": [
                       "ec2:RunInstances",
                       "ec2:CreateVolume"
            ],
            "Resource": [
                "arn:aws:ec2:*:*:volume/*"
            ],
            "Condition": {
                "Bool": {
                    "ec2:Encrypted": "false"
                }
            }
        },

To learn more and to see some sample policies, take a look at Example Policies for Working with the AWS CLI or an AWS SDK and IAM Policies for Amazon EC2.

Available Now
As you can see, the combination of tagging and the new resource-level permissions on the resource creation and tag manipulation functions gives you the ability to track and control access to your EC2 resources.

This new feature is available now in all regions except AWS GovCloud (US) and China (Beijing). You can start using it today from the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), AWS Tools for Windows PowerShell, or the AWS APIs.

We are planning to add support for additional EC2 resource types over time; stay tuned for more information!

— Jeff;

In Case You Missed These: AWS Security Blog Posts from January, February, and March

Post Syndicated from Craig Liebendorfer original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/in-case-you-missed-these-aws-security-blog-posts-from-january-february-and-march/

Image of lock and key

In case you missed any AWS Security Blog posts published so far in 2017, they are summarized and linked to below. The posts are shown in reverse chronological order (most recent first), and the subject matter ranges from protecting dynamic web applications against DDoS attacks to monitoring AWS account configuration changes and API calls to Amazon EC2 security groups.

March

March 22: How to Help Protect Dynamic Web Applications Against DDoS Attacks by Using Amazon CloudFront and Amazon Route 53
Using a content delivery network (CDN) such as Amazon CloudFront to cache and serve static text and images or downloadable objects such as media files and documents is a common strategy to improve webpage load times, reduce network bandwidth costs, lessen the load on web servers, and mitigate distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. AWS WAF is a web application firewall that can be deployed on CloudFront to help protect your application against DDoS attacks by giving you control over which traffic to allow or block by defining security rules. When users access your application, the Domain Name System (DNS) translates human-readable domain names (for example, www.example.com) to machine-readable IP addresses (for example, 192.0.2.44). A DNS service, such as Amazon Route 53, can effectively connect users’ requests to a CloudFront distribution that proxies requests for dynamic content to the infrastructure hosting your application’s endpoints. In this blog post, I show you how to deploy CloudFront with AWS WAF and Route 53 to help protect dynamic web applications (with dynamic content such as a response to user input) against DDoS attacks. The steps shown in this post are key to implementing the overall approach described in AWS Best Practices for DDoS Resiliency and enable the built-in, managed DDoS protection service, AWS Shield.

March 21: New AWS Encryption SDK for Python Simplifies Multiple Master Key Encryption
The AWS Cryptography team is happy to announce a Python implementation of the AWS Encryption SDK. This new SDK helps manage data keys for you, and it simplifies the process of encrypting data under multiple master keys. As a result, this new SDK allows you to focus on the code that drives your business forward. It also provides a framework you can easily extend to ensure that you have a cryptographic library that is configured to match and enforce your standards. The SDK also includes ready-to-use examples. If you are a Java developer, you can refer to this blog post to see specific Java examples for the SDK. In this blog post, I show you how you can use the AWS Encryption SDK to simplify the process of encrypting data and how to protect your encryption keys in ways that help improve application availability by not tying you to a single region or key management solution.

March 21: Updated CJIS Workbook Now Available by Request
The need for guidance when implementing Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS)–compliant solutions has become of paramount importance as more law enforcement customers and technology partners move to store and process criminal justice data in the cloud. AWS services allow these customers to easily and securely architect a CJIS-compliant solution when handling criminal justice data, creating a durable, cost-effective, and secure IT infrastructure that better supports local, state, and federal law enforcement in carrying out their public safety missions. AWS has created several documents (collectively referred to as the CJIS Workbook) to assist you in aligning with the FBI’s CJIS Security Policy. You can use the workbook as a framework for developing CJIS-compliant architecture in the AWS Cloud. The workbook helps you define and test the controls you operate, and document the dependence on the controls that AWS operates (compute, storage, database, networking, regions, Availability Zones, and edge locations).

March 9: New Cloud Directory API Makes It Easier to Query Data Along Multiple Dimensions
Today, we made available a new Cloud Directory API, ListObjectParentPaths, that enables you to retrieve all available parent paths for any directory object across multiple hierarchies. Use this API when you want to fetch all parent objects for a specific child object. The order of the paths and objects returned is consistent across iterative calls to the API, unless objects are moved or deleted. In case an object has multiple parents, the API allows you to control the number of paths returned by using a paginated call pattern. In this blog post, I use an example directory to demonstrate how this new API enables you to retrieve data across multiple dimensions to implement powerful applications quickly.

March 8: How to Access the AWS Management Console Using AWS Microsoft AD and Your On-Premises Credentials
AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory, also known as AWS Microsoft AD, is a managed Microsoft Active Directory (AD) hosted in the AWS Cloud. Now, AWS Microsoft AD makes it easy for you to give your users permission to manage AWS resources by using on-premises AD administrative tools. With AWS Microsoft AD, you can grant your on-premises users permissions to resources such as the AWS Management Console instead of adding AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) user accounts or configuring AD Federation Services (AD FS) with Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML). In this blog post, I show how to use AWS Microsoft AD to enable your on-premises AD users to sign in to the AWS Management Console with their on-premises AD user credentials to access and manage AWS resources through IAM roles.

March 7: How to Protect Your Web Application Against DDoS Attacks by Using Amazon Route 53 and an External Content Delivery Network
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are attempts by a malicious actor to flood a network, system, or application with more traffic, connections, or requests than it is able to handle. To protect your web application against DDoS attacks, you can use AWS Shield, a DDoS protection service that AWS provides automatically to all AWS customers at no additional charge. You can use AWS Shield in conjunction with DDoS-resilient web services such as Amazon CloudFront and Amazon Route 53 to improve your ability to defend against DDoS attacks. Learn more about architecting for DDoS resiliency by reading the AWS Best Practices for DDoS Resiliency whitepaper. You also have the option of using Route 53 with an externally hosted content delivery network (CDN). In this blog post, I show how you can help protect the zone apex (also known as the root domain) of your web application by using Route 53 to perform a secure redirect to prevent discovery of your application origin.

Image of lock and key

February

February 27: Now Generally Available – AWS Organizations: Policy-Based Management for Multiple AWS Accounts
Today, AWS Organizations moves from Preview to General Availability. You can use Organizations to centrally manage multiple AWS accounts, with the ability to create a hierarchy of organizational units (OUs). You can assign each account to an OU, define policies, and then apply those policies to an entire hierarchy, specific OUs, or specific accounts. You can invite existing AWS accounts to join your organization, and you can also create new accounts. All of these functions are available from the AWS Management Console, the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), and through the AWS Organizations API.To read the full AWS Blog post about today’s launch, see AWS Organizations – Policy-Based Management for Multiple AWS Accounts.

February 23: s2n Is Now Handling 100 Percent of SSL Traffic for Amazon S3
Today, we’ve achieved another important milestone for securing customer data: we have replaced OpenSSL with s2n for all internal and external SSL traffic in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) commercial regions. This was implemented with minimal impact to customers, and multiple means of error checking were used to ensure a smooth transition, including client integration tests, catching potential interoperability conflicts, and identifying memory leaks through fuzz testing.

February 22: Easily Replace or Attach an IAM Role to an Existing EC2 Instance by Using the EC2 Console
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles enable your applications running on Amazon EC2 to use temporary security credentials. IAM roles for EC2 make it easier for your applications to make API requests securely from an instance because they do not require you to manage AWS security credentials that the applications use. Recently, we enabled you to use temporary security credentials for your applications by attaching an IAM role to an existing EC2 instance by using the AWS CLI and SDK. To learn more, see New! Attach an AWS IAM Role to an Existing Amazon EC2 Instance by Using the AWS CLI. Starting today, you can attach an IAM role to an existing EC2 instance from the EC2 console. You can also use the EC2 console to replace an IAM role attached to an existing instance. In this blog post, I will show how to attach an IAM role to an existing EC2 instance from the EC2 console.

February 22: How to Audit Your AWS Resources for Security Compliance by Using Custom AWS Config Rules
AWS Config Rules enables you to implement security policies as code for your organization and evaluate configuration changes to AWS resources against these policies. You can use Config rules to audit your use of AWS resources for compliance with external compliance frameworks such as CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark and with your internal security policies related to the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), and other regimes. AWS provides some predefined, managed Config rules. You also can create custom Config rules based on criteria you define within an AWS Lambda function. In this post, I show how to create a custom rule that audits AWS resources for security compliance by enabling VPC Flow Logs for an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). The custom rule meets requirement 4.3 of the CIS AWS Foundations Benchmark: “Ensure VPC flow logging is enabled in all VPCs.”

February 13: AWS Announces CISPE Membership and Compliance with First-Ever Code of Conduct for Data Protection in the Cloud
I have two exciting announcements today, both showing AWS’s continued commitment to ensuring that customers can comply with EU Data Protection requirements when using our services.

February 13: How to Enable Multi-Factor Authentication for AWS Services by Using AWS Microsoft AD and On-Premises Credentials
You can now enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) for users of AWS services such as Amazon WorkSpaces and Amazon QuickSight and their on-premises credentials by using your AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (Enterprise Edition) directory, also known as AWS Microsoft AD. MFA adds an extra layer of protection to a user name and password (the first “factor”) by requiring users to enter an authentication code (the second factor), which has been provided by your virtual or hardware MFA solution. These factors together provide additional security by preventing access to AWS services, unless users supply a valid MFA code.

February 13: How to Create an Organizational Chart with Separate Hierarchies by Using Amazon Cloud Directory
Amazon Cloud Directory enables you to create directories for a variety of use cases, such as organizational charts, course catalogs, and device registries. Cloud Directory offers you the flexibility to create directories with hierarchies that span multiple dimensions. For example, you can create an organizational chart that you can navigate through separate hierarchies for reporting structure, location, and cost center. In this blog post, I show how to use Cloud Directory APIs to create an organizational chart with two separate hierarchies in a single directory. I also show how to navigate the hierarchies and retrieve data. I use the Java SDK for all the sample code in this post, but you can use other language SDKs or the AWS CLI.

February 10: How to Easily Log On to AWS Services by Using Your On-Premises Active Directory
AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory (Enterprise Edition), also known as Microsoft AD, now enables your users to log on with just their on-premises Active Directory (AD) user name—no domain name is required. This new domainless logon feature makes it easier to set up connections to your on-premises AD for use with applications such as Amazon WorkSpaces and Amazon QuickSight, and it keeps the user logon experience free from network naming. This new interforest trusts capability is now available when using Microsoft AD with Amazon WorkSpaces and Amazon QuickSight Enterprise Edition. In this blog post, I explain how Microsoft AD domainless logon works with AD interforest trusts, and I show an example of setting up Amazon WorkSpaces to use this capability.

February 9: New! Attach an AWS IAM Role to an Existing Amazon EC2 Instance by Using the AWS CLI
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles enable your applications running on Amazon EC2 to use temporary security credentials that AWS creates, distributes, and rotates automatically. Using temporary credentials is an IAM best practice because you do not need to maintain long-term keys on your instance. Using IAM roles for EC2 also eliminates the need to use long-term AWS access keys that you have to manage manually or programmatically. Starting today, you can enable your applications to use temporary security credentials provided by AWS by attaching an IAM role to an existing EC2 instance. You can also replace the IAM role attached to an existing EC2 instance. In this blog post, I show how you can attach an IAM role to an existing EC2 instance by using the AWS CLI.

February 8: How to Remediate Amazon Inspector Security Findings Automatically
The Amazon Inspector security assessment service can evaluate the operating environments and applications you have deployed on AWS for common and emerging security vulnerabilities automatically. As an AWS-built service, Amazon Inspector is designed to exchange data and interact with other core AWS services not only to identify potential security findings but also to automate addressing those findings. Previous related blog posts showed how you can deliver Amazon Inspector security findings automatically to third-party ticketing systems and automate the installation of the Amazon Inspector agent on new Amazon EC2 instances. In this post, I show how you can automatically remediate findings generated by Amazon Inspector. To get started, you must first run an assessment and publish any security findings to an Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) topic. Then, you create an AWS Lambda function that is triggered by those notifications. Finally, the Lambda function examines the findings and then implements the appropriate remediation based on the type of issue.

February 6: How to Simplify Security Assessment Setup Using Amazon EC2 Systems Manager and Amazon Inspector
In a July 2016 AWS Blog post, I discussed how to integrate Amazon Inspector with third-party ticketing systems by using Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) and AWS Lambda. This AWS Security Blog post continues in the same vein, describing how to use Amazon Inspector to automate various aspects of security management. In this post, I show you how to install the Amazon Inspector agent automatically through the Amazon EC2 Systems Manager when a new Amazon EC2 instance is launched. In a subsequent post, I will show you how to update EC2 instances automatically that run Linux when Amazon Inspector discovers a missing security patch.

Image of lock and key

January

January 30: How to Protect Data at Rest with Amazon EC2 Instance Store Encryption
Encrypting data at rest is vital for regulatory compliance to ensure that sensitive data saved on disks is not readable by any user or application without a valid key. Some compliance regulations such as PCI DSS and HIPAA require that data at rest be encrypted throughout the data lifecycle. To this end, AWS provides data-at-rest options and key management to support the encryption process. For example, you can encrypt Amazon EBS volumes and configure Amazon S3 buckets for server-side encryption (SSE) using AES-256 encryption. Additionally, Amazon RDS supports Transparent Data Encryption (TDE). Instance storage provides temporary block-level storage for Amazon EC2 instances. This storage is located on disks attached physically to a host computer. Instance storage is ideal for temporary storage of information that frequently changes, such as buffers, caches, and scratch data. By default, files stored on these disks are not encrypted. In this blog post, I show a method for encrypting data on Linux EC2 instance stores by using Linux built-in libraries. This method encrypts files transparently, which protects confidential data. As a result, applications that process the data are unaware of the disk-level encryption.

January 27: How to Detect and Automatically Remediate Unintended Permissions in Amazon S3 Object ACLs with CloudWatch Events
Amazon S3 Access Control Lists (ACLs) enable you to specify permissions that grant access to S3 buckets and objects. When S3 receives a request for an object, it verifies whether the requester has the necessary access permissions in the associated ACL. For example, you could set up an ACL for an object so that only the users in your account can access it, or you could make an object public so that it can be accessed by anyone. If the number of objects and users in your AWS account is large, ensuring that you have attached correctly configured ACLs to your objects can be a challenge. For example, what if a user were to call the PutObjectAcl API call on an object that is supposed to be private and make it public? Or, what if a user were to call the PutObject with the optional Acl parameter set to public-read, therefore uploading a confidential file as publicly readable? In this blog post, I show a solution that uses Amazon CloudWatch Events to detect PutObject and PutObjectAcl API calls in near-real time and helps ensure that the objects remain private by making automatic PutObjectAcl calls, when necessary.

January 26: Now Available: Amazon Cloud Directory—A Cloud-Native Directory for Hierarchical Data
Today we are launching Amazon Cloud Directory. This service is purpose-built for storing large amounts of strongly typed hierarchical data. With the ability to scale to hundreds of millions of objects while remaining cost-effective, Cloud Directory is a great fit for all sorts of cloud and mobile applications.

January 24: New SOC 2 Report Available: Confidentiality
As with everything at Amazon, the success of our security and compliance program is primarily measured by one thing: our customers’ success. Our customers drive our portfolio of compliance reports, attestations, and certifications that support their efforts in running a secure and compliant cloud environment. As a result of our engagement with key customers across the globe, we are happy to announce the publication of our new SOC 2 Confidentiality report. This report is available now through AWS Artifact in the AWS Management Console.

January 18: Compliance in the Cloud for New Financial Services Cybersecurity Regulations
Financial regulatory agencies are focused more than ever on ensuring responsible innovation. Consequently, if you want to achieve compliance with financial services regulations, you must be increasingly agile and employ dynamic security capabilities. AWS enables you to achieve this by providing you with the tools you need to scale your security and compliance capabilities on AWS. The following breakdown of the most recent cybersecurity regulations, NY DFS Rule 23 NYCRR 500, demonstrates how AWS continues to focus on your regulatory needs in the financial services sector.

January 9: New Amazon GameDev Blog Post: Protect Multiplayer Game Servers from DDoS Attacks by Using Amazon GameLift
In online gaming, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks target a game’s network layer, flooding servers with requests until performance degrades considerably. These attacks can limit a game’s availability to players and limit the player experience for those who can connect. Today’s new Amazon GameDev Blog post uses a typical game server architecture to highlight DDoS attack vulnerabilities and discusses how to stay protected by using built-in AWS Cloud security, AWS security best practices, and the security features of Amazon GameLift. Read the post to learn more.

January 6: The Top 10 Most Downloaded AWS Security and Compliance Documents in 2016
The following list includes the 10 most downloaded AWS security and compliance documents in 2016. Using this list, you can learn about what other people found most interesting about security and compliance last year.

January 6: FedRAMP Compliance Update: AWS GovCloud (US) Region Receives a JAB-Issued FedRAMP High Baseline P-ATO for Three New Services
Three new services in the AWS GovCloud (US) region have received a Provisional Authority to Operate (P-ATO) from the Joint Authorization Board (JAB) under the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP). JAB issued the authorization at the High baseline, which enables US government agencies and their service providers the capability to use these services to process the government’s most sensitive unclassified data, including Personal Identifiable Information (PII), Protected Health Information (PHI), Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI), criminal justice information (CJI), and financial data.

January 4: The Top 20 Most Viewed AWS IAM Documentation Pages in 2016
The following 20 pages were the most viewed AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) documentation pages in 2016. I have included a brief description with each link to give you a clearer idea of what each page covers. Use this list to see what other people have been viewing and perhaps to pique your own interest about a topic you’ve been meaning to research.

January 3: The Most Viewed AWS Security Blog Posts in 2016
The following 10 posts were the most viewed AWS Security Blog posts that we published during 2016. You can use this list as a guide to catch up on your blog reading or even read a post again that you found particularly useful.

January 3: How to Monitor AWS Account Configuration Changes and API Calls to Amazon EC2 Security Groups
You can use AWS security controls to detect and mitigate risks to your AWS resources. The purpose of each security control is defined by its control objective. For example, the control objective of an Amazon VPC security group is to permit only designated traffic to enter or leave a network interface. Let’s say you have an Internet-facing e-commerce website, and your security administrator has determined that only HTTP (TCP port 80) and HTTPS (TCP 443) traffic should be allowed access to the public subnet. As a result, your administrator configures a security group to meet this control objective. What if, though, someone were to inadvertently change this security group’s rules and enable FTP or other protocols to access the public subnet from any location on the Internet? That expanded access could weaken the security posture of your assets. Consequently, your administrator might need to monitor the integrity of your company’s security controls so that the controls maintain their desired effectiveness. In this blog post, I explore two methods for detecting unintended changes to VPC security groups. The two methods address not only control objectives but also control failures.

If you have questions about or issues with implementing the solutions in any of these posts, please start a new thread on the forum identified near the end of each post.

– Craig

Launch: Amazon ElastiCache Launches Enhanced Redis Backup and Restore with Cluster Resizing

Post Syndicated from Tara Walker original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/launch-amazon-elasticache-launches-enhanced-redis-backup-and-restore-with-cluster-resizing/

Most of us equate in-memory caching with improved performance and lower cost at scale when designing applications or building solutions. Now if there was only a service that would continually make it simpler to deploy and utilize in-memory cache in the cloud while increasing the ability to scale.

Okay no more joking around, the cloud service that provides this great functionality is, of course, Amazon ElastiCache. Amazon ElastiCache is an AWS managed service that provides a performant in-memory data store or cache in the cloud while offering a straightforward way to create, scale, and manage a distributed environment for low-latency, secure, access of I/O intensive or compute heavy data. Additionally, ElastiCache reduces the overhead of managing infrastructure for your in-memory data structure server or cache by detecting and replacing failed nodes while providing enhanced visibility into key performance metrics of the caching system nodes via Amazon CloudWatch. This exciting service is now launching support for Enhanced Redis Backup and Restore with Cluster Resizing.

For those of you familiar with Amazon ElastiCache, you are likely aware that ElastiCache currently supports two in-memory key-value engines:

  • Memcached: an open source, high-performing, distributed memory object caching system developed in 2003 with the initial goal of speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load
  • Redis: an open source in-memory data structure store launched in 2009 developed as a broker for caching, messaging, and databases with built-in replication, atomic operation support, various levels of on-disk persistence, and high availability via Redis Cluster.

In October of 2016, support was added for Redis Cluster with Redis 3.2.4. This allowed ElastiCache Redis users to, not only take advantage of Redis clusters, but also gave users the ability to:

  • Create cluster-level backups.
  • Produce snapshots of each of the cluster’s shards contained within backups.
  • Scale their workloads with 3.5TiB of data across up to 15 shards.

You can read more about using Redis with ElastiCache and the related features by reviewing the product page for Amazon ElastiCache for Redis.

With the launch of the Enhanced Backup and Restore with Cluster Resizing feature, ElastiCache is providing even deeper support for Redis with a clear-cut migration path to a managed Redis Cluster experience. There are several benefits of this enhancement for ElastiCache and Redis users alike, such as:

  • Ability to restore backup into a Redis Cluster with a different number of shards and slot distribution
  • Deliver the capability for users to resize Redis workloads
  • Allow Redis database file (RDB) snapshots as input for creating a sharded Redis Cluster
  • Offer option to use snapshot(s) of Redis on EC2 implementations (both Redis Cluster and single-shard Redis) as data input for sharded Redis Cluster creation

To accomplish these tasks, ElastiCache will parse the Redis key space across the backup’s individual snapshots, and redistribute the keys in the new Cluster according to the requested number of shards and hash slots. You would simply take your RDB snapshots and store them on S3, then provide ElastiCache with the desired number of shards and the snapshot file. ElastiCache handles the heavy lifting of restoring the Redis data store into a Redis cluster.

I am sure that you all may be thinking; Is it really that easy to leverage the Enhanced Redis Backup and Restore with Cluster Resizing feature in ElastiCache? Well, there is no time like the present to find out. Let’s take a trip to the AWS Management Console, and put this newly launched enhancement in action by restoring an external RDB snapshot to a new cluster using ElastiCache.

My first stop in the AWS Management console is to the Amazon S3 console. I have some Redis .rdb snapshot files I received from some of my peers here at AWS in order to test the restore of an external Redis snapshot to ElastiCache. I will need to put these files into Amazon S3 so that I can access the snapshots as input for my ElastiCache Redis cluster.

In the S3 console, I will go to my S3 bucket, aws-blog-tew-posts, that I created for testing and development purposes. I’ll upload the .rdb snapshot files that were provided to me into this S3 bucket.

 

It is important to note that the name of your S3 bucket must conform to DNS standards. To be DNS-compliant, the name must be at least three characters, must contain only lowercase letters, numbers, and/or dashes, and it must start and end with a lowercase letter or number. While this may be obvious, I will also note that the bucket name cannot be in an IP address format. You can learn more about the S3 Bucket Restrictions at the link provided here.

With my .rdb files successfully uploaded into my aws-blog-tew-posts bucket, I need to take note of the S3 path to these backup files. For these files, the path would be aws-blog-tew-posts/dump_1.rdb or aws-blog-tew-posts/dump_10.rdb. If you have placed your files into a folder, the folder name would need to be included in this path, i.e. thebucketname/thefoldername/thefilename.

For ElastiCache to access these files, I need to ensure that the service has read permissions for each of the files. To provide access, I will update the permissions for each of .rdb files by assigning the Grantee as the canonical id for my region and grant the user Open/Download permissions. The canonical id for all regions, outside of China (Beijing) and AWS GovCloud (US), is as follows:

540804c33a284a299d2547575ce1010f2312ef3da9b3a053c8bc45bf233e4353

After I click the Save button, I am all set to use these files as input for an ElastiCache Redis cluster.

The next step is to go to the ElastiCache console. Here I will create a new ElastiCache Redis cluster and seed this new cluster with data from one of the RDB snapshots located in the files in my S3 bucket. I’ll choose the dump_1.rdb snapshot file to use as my data input to seed this new cluster. Since I want to explore the ElastiCache Redis capabilities added on this past October with 3.2.4 support of Redis Cluster, as well as, discuss the new Backup and Restore with Cluster Resizing enhancements, I’ll create a new Redis Cluster and ensure I have cluster mode enabled. At this point, I should note that you cannot restore from a backup created using a Redis (cluster mode enabled) cluster to a Redis (cluster mode disabled) cluster.

First, I will click the Get Started Now button from the ElastiCache console dashboard or the Create button based upon your console view.

In the Create your Amazon ElastiCache cluster dialog window, I’ll select Redis for my caching and make sure I click the checkbox for Cluster Mode enabled (Scale Out). The name of my new cluster will be, tew-rediscluster and I since I am enabling a Cluster mode, my ElastiCache Redis Engine version is 3.2.4. For this cluster, I will keep the default Redis port of 6379.

The key benefit of the ElastiCache enhanced Redis Backup and Restore feature is the cluster resizing capability that allows me to build a new cluster with a different number of shards than was originally used for the backup file. To build the new Redis Cluster, I am using only one RDB snapshot file, dump_1.rdb which is a small Redis instance backup with only one shard. However, in the creation of my new tew-rediscluster, I have opted for 3 shards with 2 replicas per shard.

In addition, I have the ability to specify a node type for my new cluster that is a different size than my original instance from the RDB snapshot. As I mentioned, the dump_1.rdb is a backup of a Redis instance that is significantly smaller than the size of the chosen node type for my tew-rediscluster shown below.

There are other options and data input needed in order to complete the creation of my ElastiCache Redis cluster that I will not show in this blog post. However, if you want to go through each of the steps necessary for creating an ElastiCache Redis cluster you can find more information in the AWS ElastiCache Getting Started documentation for Launch a Cluster.

Once I have provided all the information needed to create my ElastiCache Redis cluster, I will need to tell ElastiCache how to seed the cluster with the .rdb file by providing the file location from my S3 bucket. In the Import Data to Cluster section of the create dialog, I will enter the S3 path to my dump_1.rdb in the Seed RDB file S3 location textbox. Remember, the nomenclature for the S3 file path is Bucket/Folder/ObjectName so I will enter aws-blog-tew-posts/dump_1.rdb as the path to the RDB file in S3. All that is left now is to click the Create button.

 

That’s it! ElastiCache goes to work to creating the new Redis cluster. After a short time period, the ElastiCache console shows my new Amazon ElastiCache Redis cluster as available and I have successfully created this cluster with data restored from an external RDB snapshot file.

 

I just demonstrated how you have the capability to create an ElastiCache Redis cluster using an external RDB snapshot, but of course, you can create backups and restore from backups from your existing ElastiCache Redis clusters as well. To dig deeper into information about this newly launched feature, visit Restoring From a Backup with Cluster Resizing in the Amazon ElastiCache User Guide.

To learn more about making your applications more performant with Amazon ElastiCache, visit the AWS Amazon ElastiCache page for product details, resources, and customer testimonials.

– Tara

 

 

 

 

 

 

AWS Organizations – Policy-Based Management for Multiple AWS Accounts

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-organizations-policy-based-management-for-multiple-aws-accounts/

Over the years I have found that many of our customers are managing multiple AWS accounts. This situation can arise for several reasons. Sometimes they adopt AWS incrementally and organically, with individual teams and divisions making the move to cloud computing on a decentralized basis. Other companies grow through mergers and acquisitions and take on responsibility for existing accounts. Still others routinely create multiple accounts in order to meet strict guidelines for compliance or to create a very strong isolation barrier between applications, sometimes going so far as to use distinct accounts for development, testing, and production.

As these accounts proliferate, our customers find that they would like to manage them in a scalable fashion. Instead of dealing with a multitude of per-team, per-division, or per-application accounts, they have asked for a way to define access control policies that can be easily applied to all, some, or individual accounts. In many cases, these customers are also interested in additional billing and cost management, and would like to be able to control how AWS pricing benefits such as volume discounts and Reserved Instances are applied to their accounts.

AWS Organizations Emerges from Preview
To support this increasingly important use case, we are moving AWS Organizations from Preview to General Availability today. You can use Organizations to centrally manage multiple AWS accounts, with the ability to create a hierarchy of Organizational Units (OUs), assign each account to an OU, define policies, and then apply them to the entire hierarchy, to select OUs, or to specific accounts. You can invite existing AWS accounts to join your organization and you can also create new accounts. All of these functions are available from the AWS Management Console, the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), and through the AWS Organizations API.

Here are some important terms and concepts that will help you to understand Organizations (this assumes that you are the all-powerful, overall administrator of your organization’s AWS accounts, and that you are responsible for the Master account):

An Organization is a consolidated set of AWS accounts that you manage. Newly-created Organizations offer the ability to implement sophisticated, account-level controls such as Service Control Policies. This allows Organization administrators to manage lists of allowed and blocked AWS API functions and resources that place guard rails on individual accounts. For example, you could give your advanced R&D team access to a wide range of AWS services, and then be a bit more cautious with your mainstream development and test accounts. Or, on the production side, you could allow access only to AWS services that are eligible for HIPAA compliance.

Some of our existing customers use a feature of AWS called Consolidated Billing. This allows them to select a Payer Account which rolls up account activity from multiple AWS Accounts into a single invoice and provides a centralized way of tracking costs. With this launch, current Consolidated Billing customers now have an Organization that provides all the capabilities of Consolidated Billing, but by default does not have the new features (like Service Control Policies) we’re making available today. These customers can easily enable the full features of AWS Organizations. This is accomplished by first enabling the use of all AWS Organization features from the Organization’s master account and then having each member account authorize this change to the Organization. Finally, we will continue to support creating new Organizations that support only the Consolidated Billing capabilities. Customers that wish to only use the centralized billing features can continue to do so, without allowing the master account administrators to enforce the advanced policy controls on member accounts in the Organization.

An AWS account is a container for AWS resources.

The Master account is the management hub for the Organization and is also the payer account for all of the AWS accounts in the Organization. The Master account can invite existing accounts to join the Organization, and can also create new accounts.

Member accounts are the non-Master accounts in the Organization.

An Organizational Unit (OU) is a container for a set of AWS accounts. OUs can be arranged into a hierarchy that can be up to five levels deep. The top of the hierarchy of OUs is also known as the Administrative Root.

A Service Control Policy (SCP) is a set of controls that the Organization’s Master account can apply to the Organization, selected OUs, or to selected accounts. When applied to an OU, the SCP applies to the OU and to any other OUs beneath it in the hierarchy. The SCP or SCPs in effect for a member account specify the permissions that are granted to the root user for the account. Within the account, IAM users and roles can be used as usual. However, regardless of how permissive the user or the role might be, the effective set of permissions will never extend beyond what is defined in the SCP. You can use this to exercise fine-grained control over access to AWS services and API functions at the account level.

An Invitation is used to ask an AWS account to join an Organization. It must be accepted within 15 days, and can be extended via email address or account ID. Up to 20 Invitations can be outstanding at any given time. The invitation-based model allows you to start from a Master account and then bring existing accounts into the fold. When an Invitation is accepted, the account joins the Organization and all applicable policies become effective. Once the account has joined the Organization, you can move it to the proper OU.

AWS Organizations is appropriate when you want to create strong isolation boundaries between the AWS accounts that you manage. However, keep in mind that AWS resources (EC2 instances, S3 buckets, and so forth) exist within a particular AWS account and cannot be moved from one account to another. You do have access to many different cross-account AWS features including VPC peering, AMI sharing, EBS snapshot sharing, RDS snapshot sharing, cross-account email sending, delegated access via IAM roles, cross-account S3 bucket permissions, and cross-acount access in the AWS Management Console.

Like consolidated billing, AWS Organizations also provides several benefits when it comes to the use of EC2 and RDS Reserved Instances. For billing purposes, all of the accounts in the Organization are treated as if they are one account and can receive the hourly cost benefit of an RI purchased by any other account in the same Organization (in order for this benefit to be applied as expected, the Availability Zone and other attributes of the RI must match the attributes of the EC2 or RDS instance).

Creating an Organization
Let’s create an Organization from the Console, create some Organizational Units, and then create some accounts. I start by clicking on Create organization:

Then I choose ENABLE ALL FEATURES and click on Create organization:

My Organization is ready in seconds:

I can create a new account by clicking on Add account, and then selecting Create account:

Then I supply the details (the IAM role is created in the new account and grants enough permissions for the account to be customized after creation):

Here’s what the console looks like after I have created Dev, Test, and Prod accounts:

At this point all of the accounts are at the top of the hierarchy:

In order to add some structure, I click on Organize accounts, select Create organizational unit (OU), and enter a name:

I do the same for a second OU:

Then I select the Prod account, click on Move accounts, and choose the Operations OU:

Next, I move the Dev and Test accounts into the Development OU:

At this point I have four accounts (my original one plus the three that I just created) and two OUs. The next step is to create one or more Service Control Policies by clicking on Policies and selecting Create policy. I can use the Policy Generator or I can copy an existing SCP and then customize it. I’ll use the Policy Generator. I give my policy a name and make it an Allow policy:

Then I use the Policy Generator to construct a policy that allows full access to EC2 and S3, and the ability to run (invoke) Lambda functions:

Remember, that this policy defines the full set of allowable actions within the account. In order to allow IAM users within the account to be able to use these actions, I would still need to create suitable IAM policies and attach them to the users (all within the member account). I click on Create policy and my policy is ready:

Then I create a second policy for development and testing. This one also allows access to AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodeBuild, AWS CodeDeploy, and AWS CodePipeline:

Let’s recap. I have created my accounts and placed them into OUs. I have created a policy for the OUs. Now I need to enable the use of policies, and attach the policy to the OUs. To enable the use of policies, I click on Organize accounts and select Home (this is not the same as the root because Organizations was designed to support multiple, independent hierarchies), and then click on the checkbox in the Root OU. Then I look to the right, expand the Details section, and click on Enable:

Ok, now I can put all of the pieces together! I click on the Root OU to descend in to the hierarchy, and then click on the checkbox in the Operations OU. Then I expand the Control Policies on the right and click on Attach policy:

Then I locate the OperationsPolicy and click on Attach:

Finally, I remove the FullAWSAccess policy:

I can also attach the DevTestPolicy to the Development OU.

All of the operations that I described above could have been initiated from the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) or by making calls to functions such as CreateOrganization, CreateAccount, CreateOrganizationalUnit, MoveAccount, CreatePolicy, AttachPolicy, and InviteAccountToOrganization. To see the CLI in action, read Announcing AWS Organizations: Centrally Manage Multiple AWS Accounts.

Best Practices for Use of AWS Organizations
Before I wrap up, I would like to share some best practices for the use of AWS Organizations:

Master Account – We recommend that you keep the Master Account free of any operational AWS resources (with one exception). In addition to making it easier for you to make high-quality control decision, this practice will make it easier for you to understand the charges on your AWS bill.

CloudTrail – Use AWS CloudTrail (this is the exception) in the Master Account to centrally track all AWS usage in the Member accounts.

Least Privilege – When setting up policies for your OUs, assign as few privileges as possible.

Organizational Units – Assign policies to OUs rather than to accounts. This will allow you to maintain a better mapping between your organizational structure and the level of AWS access needed.

Testing – Test new and modified policies on a single account before scaling up.

Automation – Use the APIs and a AWS CloudFormation template to ensure that every newly created account is configured to your liking. The template can create IAM users, roles, and policies. It can also set up logging, create and configure VPCs, and so forth.

Learning More
Here are some resources that will help you to get started with AWS Organizations:

Things to Know
AWS Organizations is available today in all AWS regions except China (Beijing) and AWS GovCloud (US) and is available to you at no charge (to be a bit more precise, the service endpoint is located in US East (Northern Virginia) and the SCPs apply across all relevant regions). All of the accounts must be from the same seller; you cannot mix AWS and AISPL (the local legal Indian entity that acts as a reseller for AWS services accounts in India) in the same Organization.

We have big plans for Organizations, and are currently thinking about adding support for multiple payers, control over allocation of Reserved Instance discounts, multiple hierarchies, and other control policies. As always, your feedback and suggestions are welcome.

— Jeff;

Now Available – I3 Instances for Demanding, I/O Intensive Applications

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-available-i3-instances-for-demanding-io-intensive-applications/

On the first day of AWS re:Invent I published an EC2 Instance Update and promised to share additional information with you as soon as I had it.

Today I am happy to be able to let you know that we are making six sizes of our new I3 instances available in fifteen AWS regions! Designed for I/O intensive workloads and equipped with super-efficient NVMe SSD storage, these instances can deliver up to 3.3 million IOPS at a 4 KB block and up to 16 GB/second of sequential disk throughput. This makes them a great fit for any workload that requires high throughput and low latency including relational databases, NoSQL databases, search engines, data warehouses, real-time analytics, and disk-based caches. When compared to the I2 instances, I3 instances deliver storage that is less expensive and more dense, with the ability to deliver substantially more IOPS and more network bandwidth per CPU core.

The Specs
Here are the instance sizes and the associated specs:

Instance NamevCPU CountMemory
Instance Storage (NVMe SSD)Price/Hour
i3.large215.25 GiB0.475 TB$0.15
i3.xlarge430.5 GiB0.950 TB$0.31
i3.2xlarge861 GiB1.9 TB$0.62
i3.4xlarge16122 GiB3.8 TB (2 disks)$1.25
i3.8xlarge32244 GiB7.6 TB (4 disks)$2.50
i3.16xlarge64488 GiB15.2 TB (8 disks)$4.99

The prices shown are for On-Demand instances in the US East (Northern Virginia) Region; see the EC2 pricing page for more information.

I3 instances are available in On-Demand, Reserved, and Spot form in the US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), US West (Northern California), US East (Ohio), Canada (Central), South America (São Paulo), EU (Ireland), EU (London), EU (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. You can also use them as Dedicated Hosts and as Dedicated Instances.

These instances support Hardware Virtualization (HVM) AMIs only, and must be run within a Virtual Private Cloud. In order to benefit from the performance made possible by the NVMe storage, you must run one of the following operating systems:

  • Amazon Linux AMI
  • RHEL – 6.5 or better
  • CentOS – 7.0 or better
  • Ubuntu – 16.04 or 16.10
  • SUSE 12
  • SUSE 11 with SP3
  • Windows Server 2008 R2, 2012 R2, and 2016

The I3 instances offer up to 8 NVMe SSDs. In order to achieve the best possible throughput and to get as many IOPS as possible, you can stripe multiple volumes together, or spread the I/O workload across them in another way.

Each vCPU (Virtual CPU) is a hardware hyperthread on an Intel E5-2686 v4 (Broadwell) processor running at 2.3 GHz. The processor supports the AVX2 instructions, along with Turbo Boost and NUMA.

Go For Launch
The I3 instances are available today in fifteen AWS regions and you can start to use them right now.

— Jeff;

 

AWS IPv6 Update – Global Support Spanning 15 Regions & Multiple AWS Services

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-ipv6-update-global-support-spanning-15-regions-multiple-aws-services/

We’ve been working to add IPv6 support to many different parts of AWS over the last couple of years, starting with Elastic Load Balancing, AWS IoT, Amazon Route 53, Amazon CloudFront, AWS WAF, and S3 Transfer Acceleration, all building up to last month’s announcement of IPv6 support for EC2 instances in Virtual Private Clouds (initially available for use in the US East (Ohio) Region).

Today I am happy to share the news that IPv6 support for EC2 instances in VPCs is now available in a total of fifteen regions, along with Application Load Balancer support for IPv6 in nine of those regions.

You can now build and deploy applications that can use IPv6 addresses to communicate with servers, object storage, load balancers, and content distribution services. In accord with the latest guidelines for IPv6 support from Apple and other vendors, your mobile applications can now make use of IPv6 addresses when they communicate with AWS.

IPv6 Now in 15 Regions
IPv6 support for EC2 instances in new and existing VPCs is now available in the US East (Northern Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Northern California), US West (Oregon), South America (São Paulo), Canada (Central), EU (Ireland), EU (Frankfurt), EU (London), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions and you can start using it today!

You can enable IPv6 from the AWS Management Console when you create a new VPC:

Application Load Balancer
Application Load Balancers in the US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Northern California), US West (Oregon), South America (São Paulo), EU (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions now support IPv6 in dual-stack mode, making them accessible via IPv4 or IPv6 (we expect to add support for the remaining regions within a few weeks).

Simply enable the dualstack option when you configure the ALB and then make sure that your security groups allow or deny IPv6 traffic in accord with your requirements. Here’s how you select the dualstack option:

You can also enable this option by running the set-ip-address-type command or by making a call to the SetIpAddressType function. To learn more about this new feature, read the Load Balancer Address Type documentation.

IPv6 Recap
Here are the IPv6 launches that we made in the run-up to the launch of IPv6 support for EC2 instances in VPCs:

CloudFront, WAF, and S3 Transfer Acceleration – This launch let you enable IPv6 support for individual CloudFront distributions. Newly created distributions supported IPv6 by default and existing distributions could be upgraded with a couple of clicks (if you using Route 53 alias records, you also need to add an AAAA record to the domain). With IPv6 support enabled, the new addresses will show up in the CloudFront Access Logs. The launch also let you use AWS WAF to inspect requests that arrive via IPv4 or IPv6 addresses and to use a new, dual-stack endpoint for S3 Transfer Acceleration.

Route 53 – This launch added support for DNS queries over IPv6 (support for the requisite AAAA records was already in place). A subsequent launch added support for Health Checks of IPv6 Endpoints, allowing you to monitor the health of the endpoints and to arrange for DNS failover.

IoT – This product launch included IPv6 support for message exchange between devices and AWS IoT.

S3 – This launch added support for access to S3 buckets via dual-stack endpoints.

Elastic Load Balancing – This launch added publicly routable IPv6 addresses for Elastic Load Balancers.

— Jeff;

 

New SOC 2 Report Available: Confidentiality

Post Syndicated from Chad Woolf original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/new-soc-2-report-available-confidentiality/

AICPA SOC logo

As with everything at Amazon, the success of our security and compliance program is primarily measured by one thing: our customers’ success. Our customers drive our portfolio of compliance reports, attestations, and certifications that support their efforts in running a secure and compliant cloud environment. As a result of our engagement with key customers across the globe, we are happy to announce the publication of our new SOC 2 Confidentiality report. This report is available now through AWS Artifact in the AWS Management Console.

We’ve been publishing SOC 2 Security and Availability Trust Principle reports for years now, and the Confidentiality criteria is complementary to the Security and Availability criteria. The SOC 2 Confidentiality Trust Principle, developed by the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA) Assurance Services Executive Committee (ASEC), outlines additional criteria focused on further safeguarding data, limiting and reducing access to authorized users, and addressing the effective and timely disposal of customer content after deletion by the customer.

The AWS SOC Report covers the data centers in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), US West (N. California), AWS GovCloud (US), EU (Ireland), EU (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and South America (São Paulo) Regions. See AWS Global Infrastructure for more information.

To request this report:

  1. Sign in to your AWS account.
  2. In the list of services under Security, Identity, and Compliance, choose Compliance Reports, and on the next page choose the report you would like to review. Note that you might need to request approval from Amazon for some reports. Requests are reviewed and approved by Amazon within 24 hours.

Want to know more? See answers to some frequently asked questions about the AWS SOC program.  

– Chad