Tag Archives: AWS re:Invent

Announcing Amazon FSx Intelligent-Tiering, a new storage class for FSx for OpenZFS

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/announcing-amazon-fsx-intelligent-tiering-a-new-storage-class-for-fsx-for-openzfs/

When I speak to customers who are planning to migrate massive amounts of on-premises data to AWS, they tell me that they want to simplify their storage management, reduce their costs, and to make the data more accessible so that it can be used for analytics, machine learning training, genomics, and other use cases. Customers are already using Network Attached Storage (NAS) on-premises, and are looking for a cloud-based upgrade that offers similar capabilities including point-in-time snapshots, data clones, and user management.

AWS customers such as Amdocs, Vela Games, and Astera Labs have been running their mission-critical and performance-intensive NAS workloads like databases, game development and streaming, and semiconductor chip design on Amazon FSx for OpenZFS. They’ve been using the existing SSD storage class on FSx to provide the predictable, high performance these workloads need. However, many other customers have large data sets that are stored on HDD-based or hybrid SSD/HDD-based NAS storage on prem that find it cost-prohibitive to move their data sets to all-SSD storage. Additionally, these customers are finding it increasingly challenging and expensive to manage provisioned storage on prem for unpredictable data sets and avoid running out of space. And they are keeping their NAS data around for longer because it could have future value for building their next model, investment strategy, or product, but that means they need to spend more time and effort monitoring access patterns and moving data around between hot and cold storage media to optimize costs.

FSx Intelligent-Tiering
Taking all of this into account, I am happy to be able to tell you about the new Amazon FSx Intelligent-Tiering storage class, available today for use with Amazon FSx for OpenZFS file systems. The new storage class is priced 85% lower than the existing SSD storage class and 20% lower than traditional HDD-based deployments on premises, and brings full elasticity and intelligent tiering to NAS data sets.

Your data moves between three storage tiers (Frequent Access, Infrequent Access, and Archive) with no effort on your part, so you get automatic cost savings with no upfront costs or commitments. Here’s how the tiers work:

Frequent Access – Data that has been accessed within the last 30 days is stored in this tier.

Infrequent Access – Data that has been not been accessed for 30 to 90 days is stored in tier, at a 44% cost reduction from Frequent Access.

Archive – Data that has not been accessed for 90 or more days is stored in this tier, at a 65% cost reduction from Infrequent Access.

Regardless of the storage tier, your data is stored across multiple AWS Availability Zones (AZs) for redundancy and availability, and can be retrieved instantly in milliseconds.

There’s no need to manage or pre-provision storage, making this storage class a great fit for uses case such as genomics, financial data analytics, seismic imagery analysis, and machine learning where storage requirements can change dramatically over the course of days or weeks.

Along with the potential for cost savings, you get high performance: up to 400K IOPS and 20 GB/second of throughput for each OpenZFS file system, with a time-to-first-byte of tens of milliseconds for all data, regardless of storage class. You can also configure an SSD-based read cache (64 GiB to 512 TiB) to reduce the time-to-first-byte by 10x to 100x for cached data.

Creating a File System
I can create a file system using the AWS Management Console, CLI, API, or a AWS CloudFormation. From the Console I click Create file system to get started:

I choose Amazon FSx for OpenZFS and click Next:

Then I enter a name (jeff_fsx_openzfs_1) for my file system and select the Intelligent-Tiering storage class. I choose the desired Throughput capacity, and I select one of the three sizing mode options for the read cache, click Next, and confirm my choices in order to create my file system:

It is ready within minutes, and I can NFS mount it to my EC2 instance:

$ sudo mkfs /fsx_zfs
$ sudo mount -t nfs -o noatime,nfsvers=4.2,sync,nconnect=16,rsize=1048576,wsize=1048576 \
  fs-00fc74f020d1e6f4e.fsx.us-east-2.aws.internal:/fsx/ /fsx_zfs/

After I run a representative workload for a while I can look at the metrics and review the performance of my file system:

It appears that I have plenty of throughput, but my read cache may be larger than needed. I created it in Automatically Provisioned mode, which allocated 3200 GiB of cache. I can change that (and save some money) with a couple of clicks:

I can also change the throughput capacity as needed:

Amazon FSx NAS Features and Attributes
Let’s take a quick look at some of the features which make FSx for OpenZFS and the FSx Intelligent-Tiering storage class a great for for your NAS-level storage needs:

Built-in Backups – Amazon FSx automatically makes a daily backup of each file system during a specified backup window and retains them for a specified retention period. The backups are file-system consistent, highly durable, and incremental. You can also create backups on your own and retain them for as long as needed.

Point-In-Time Snapshots -You can create a read-only image of an OpenZFS volume at any time. The snapshots are stored within the file system and consume storage; they can be used to restore a volume, restore individual files and folders, or to create a new volume as either a clone or a full-copy.

Replication – You can replicate a point-in-time view of an OpenZFS volume to another volume across file systems, AWS Regions, and AWS accounts. FSx uses ZFS send/receive technology behind the scenes to perform this replication and automatically establishes and maintains network connectivity between file systems to handle interruptions and resume data transfer as needed.

Data Compression – You can enable ZSTD or LZ4 compression on your OpenZFS volumes to reduce storage cost and speed up data transfer.

User and Volume Quotas – You can limit the amount of storage consumed by an individual volume or user.

Things to Know
Here are a couple of things to keep in mind before we wrap up:

Regions – This new storage class is available in the US East (Ohio, N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo), Canada (Central), and Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland) AWS Regions.

Pricing – Pricing is based on the amount of primary storage consumed (GB/Month) and read cache provisioned (GB/Month). See the Amazon FSx for OpenZFS Pricing page for more information.

Jeff;

New RAG evaluation and LLM-as-a-judge capabilities in Amazon Bedrock

Post Syndicated from Danilo Poccia original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-rag-evaluation-and-llm-as-a-judge-capabilities-in-amazon-bedrock/

Today, we’re announcing two new evaluation capabilities in Amazon Bedrock that can help you streamline testing and improve generative AI applications:

Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases now supports RAG evaluation (preview) – You can now run an automatic knowledge base evaluation to assess and optimize Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) applications using Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases. The evaluation process uses a large language model (LLM) to compute the metrics for the evaluation. With RAG evaluations, you can compare different configurations and tune your settings to get the results you need for your use case.

Amazon Bedrock Model Evaluation now includes LLM-as-a-judge (preview) – You can now perform tests and evaluate other models with humanlike quality at a fraction of the cost and time of running human evaluations.

These new capabilities make it easier to go into production by providing fast, automated evaluation of AI-powered applications, shortening feedback loops and speeding up improvements. These evaluations assess multiple quality dimensions including correctness, helpfulness, and responsible AI criteria such as answer refusal and harmfulness.

To make it easy and intuitive, the evaluation results provide natural language explanations for each score in the output and on console, and the scores are normalized from 0 to 1 for ease of interpretability. Rubrics are published in full with the judge prompts in the documentation so non-scientists can understand how scores are derived.

Let’s see how they work in practice.

Using RAG evaluations in Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases
In the Amazon Bedrock console, I choose Evaluations in the Inference and Assessment section. There, I see the new Knowledge Bases tab.

Console screenshot.

I choose Create, enter a name and a description for the evaluation, and select the Evaluator model that will compute the metrics. In this case, I use Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet.

Console screenshot.

I select the knowledge base to evaluate. I previously created a knowledge base containing only the AWS Lambda Developer Guide PDF file. In this way, for the evaluation, I can ask questions about the AWS Lambda service.

I can evaluate either the retrieval function alone or the complete retrieve-and-generate workflow. This choice affects the metrics that are available in the next step. I choose to evaluate both retrieval and response generation and select the model to use. In this case, I use Anthropic’s Claude 3 Haiku. I can also use Amazon Bedrock Guardrails and adjust runtime inference settings by choosing the configurations link after the response generator model.

Console screenshot.

Now, I can choose which metrics to evaluate. I select Helpfulness and Correctness in the Quality section and Harmfulness in the Responsible AI metrics section.

Console screenshot.

Now, I select the dataset that will be used for evaluation. This is the JSONL file I prepared and uploaded to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for this evaluation. Each line provides a conversation, and for each message there is a reference response.

{"conversationTurns":[{"referenceResponses":[{"content":[{"text":"A trigger is a resource or configuration that invokes a Lambda function such as an AWS service."}]}],"prompt":{"content":[{"text":"What is an AWS Lambda trigger?"}]}}]}
{"conversationTurns":[{"referenceResponses":[{"content":[{"text":"An event is a JSON document defined by the AWS service or the application invoking a Lambda function that is provided in input to the Lambda function."}]}],"prompt":{"content":[{"text":"What is an AWS Lambda event?"}]}}]}

I specify the S3 location in which to store the results of the evaluation. The evaluation job requires that the S3 bucket is configured with the cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) permissions described in the Amazon Bedrock User Guide.

For service access, I need to create or provide an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) service role that Amazon Bedrock can assume and that allows access to the Amazon Bedrock and Amazon S3 resources used by the evaluation.

After a few minutes, the evaluation has completed, and I browse the results. The actual duration of an evaluation depends on the size of the prompt dataset and on the generator and the evaluator models used.

At the top, the Metric summary evaluates the overall performance using the average score across all conversations.

Console screenshot.

After that, the Generation metrics breakdown gives me details about each of the selected evaluation metrics. My evaluation dataset was small (two lines), so there isn’t a large distribution to look at.

From here, I can also see example conversations and how they were rated. To view all conversations, I can visit the full output in the S3 bucket.

I’m curious why Helpfulness is slightly below one. I expand and zoom Example conversations for Helpfulness. There, I see the generated output, the ground truth that I provided with the evaluation dataset, and the score. I choose the score to see the model reasoning. According to the model, it would have helped to have more in-depth information. Models really are strict judges.

Console screenshot.

Comparing RAG evaluations
The result of a knowledge base evaluation can be difficult to interpret by itself. For this reason, the console allows comparing results from multiple evaluations to understand the differences. In this way, you can understand if you’re improving or not for the metrics you care about.

For example, I previously ran two other knowledge base evaluations. They’re related to knowledge bases with the same data sources but different chunking and parsing configurations and different embedding models.

I select the two evaluations and choose Compare. To be comparable in the console, the evaluations need to cover the same metrics.

Console screenshot.

In the At a glance tab, I see a visual comparison of the metrics using a spider chart. In this case, the results are not much different. The main difference is the Faithfulness score.

Console screenshot.

In the Evaluation details tab, I find a detailed comparison of the results for each metric, including the difference in scores.

Console screenshot.

Using LLM-as-a-judge in Amazon Bedrock Model Evaluation (preview)
In the Amazon Bedrock console, I choose Evaluations in the Inference and Assessment section of the navigation pane. After I choose Create, I select the new Automatic: Model as a judge option.

I enter a name and a description for the evaluation and select the Evaluator model that is used to generate evaluation metrics. I use Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet.

Console screenshot.

Then, I select the Generator model, which is the model I want to evaluate. Model evaluation can help me understand if a smaller and more cost-effective model meets the needs of my use case. I use Anthropic’s Claude 3 Haiku.

Console screenshot.

In the next section I select the Metrics to evaluate. I select Helpfulness and Correctness in the Quality section and Harmfulness in the Responsible AI metrics section.

Console screenshot.

In the Datasets section I specify the Amazon S3 location where my evaluation dataset is stored and the folder in an S3 bucket where the results of the model evaluation job are stored.

For the evaluation dataset, I prepared another JSONL file. Each line provides a prompt and a reference answer. Note that the format is different compared to knowledge base evaluations.

{"prompt":"Write a 15 words summary of this text:\n\nAWS Fargate is a technology that you can use to run containers without having to manage servers or clusters. With AWS Fargate, you no longer have to provision, configure, or scale clusters of virtual machines to run containers. This removes the need to choose server types, decide when to scale your clusters, or optimize cluster packing.","referenceResponse":"AWS Fargate allows running containers without managing servers or clusters, simplifying container deployment and scaling."}
{"prompt":"Give me a list of the top 3 benefits from this text:\n\nAWS Fargate is a technology that you can use to run containers without having to manage servers or clusters. With AWS Fargate, you no longer have to provision, configure, or scale clusters of virtual machines to run containers. This removes the need to choose server types, decide when to scale your clusters, or optimize cluster packing.","referenceResponse":"- No need to manage servers or clusters.\n- Simplified infrastructure management.\n- Improved focus on application development."}

Finally, I can choose an IAM service role that gives Amazon Bedrock access to the resources used by this evaluation job.

I complete the creation of the evaluation. After a few minutes, the evaluation is complete. Similar to the knowledge base evaluation, the result starts with a Metrics Summary.

The Generation metrics breakdown details each metric, and I can look at details for a few sample prompts. I look at Helpfulness to better understand the evaluation score.

Console screenshot.

The prompts in the evaluation have been correctly processed by the model, and I can apply the results for my use case. If my application needs to manage prompts similar to the ones used in this evaluation, the evaluated model is a good choice.

Things to know
These new evaluation capabilities are available in preview in the following AWS Regions:

  • RAG evaluation in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Mumbai, Sydney, Tokyo), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland, London, Paris), and South America (São Paulo)
  • LLM-as-a-judge in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Mumbai, Seoul, Sydney, Tokyo), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland, London, Paris, Zurich), and South America (São Paulo)

Note that the available evaluator models depend on the Region.

Pricing is based on the standard Amazon Bedrock pricing for model inference. There are no additional charges for evaluation jobs themselves. The evaluator models and models being evaluated are billed according to their normal on-demand or provisioned pricing. The judge prompt templates are part of the input tokens, and those judge prompts can be found in the AWS documentation for transparency.

The evaluation service is optimized for English language content at launch, though the underlying models can work with content in other languages they support.

To get started, visit the Amazon Bedrock console. To learn more, you can access the Amazon Bedrock documentation and send feedback to AWS re:Post for Amazon Bedrock. You can find deep-dive technical content and discover how our Builder communities are using Amazon Bedrock at community.aws. Let us know what you build with these new capabilities!

Danilo

Newly enhanced Amazon Connect adds generative AI, WhatsApp Business, and secure data collection

Post Syndicated from Elizabeth Fuentes original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/newly-enhanced-amazon-connect-adds-generative-ai-whatsapp-business-and-secure-data-collection/

Today, Amazon Connect introduces a set of new features that help businesses enhance their contact center operations through generative AI, advanced security features, and streamlined bot management. These innovations help businesses deliver better customer experiences by creating more time and space for meaningful human interactions, while maintaining security and compliance.

Contact center managers continually face challenges in optimizing self-service resolution rates, evaluating agent performance efficiently, and maintaining data privacy compliance. Additionally, creating and managing conversational AI experiences often requires specialized expertise and complex integrations across multiple services.

To address these challenges, Amazon Connect introduced key features such as generative AI–powered customer segmentation for targeted campaigns, native WhatsApp Business messaging for omnichannel support, secure collection of sensitive customer data in chat interactions, simplified conversational AI bot management in the Amazon Connect interface, and new enhancements to Amazon Q in Connect. Amazon Connect also added new analytics capabilities through Amazon Connect Contact Lens to help optimize bot performance and contact center operations.

Here are the new capabilities that will help you create more personalized and efficient customer experiences while maintaining the highest standards of data security and operational excellence.

Generative AI powered features
Amazon Connect integrates new generative AI capabilities to automate and enhance customer interactions, enabling smarter targeting and more efficient contact center management.

Generative AI segmentation and trigger-based campaigns – Uses generative AI–powered assistance to create customer segments using conversational prompts. This allows businesses to create precise customer segments using natural language descriptions, making it easier to identify and reach specific customer groups. Trigger campaigns enable organizations to communicate with their customers based on specific customer events, such as cart abandonment.

You can also start with ready-to-use suggestions.

Simplify conversational AI bot creation and enhance them with Amazon Q in Connect – Create, edit, and manage conversational AI bots powered by Amazon Lex directly within the Amazon Connect web interface. You can now enhance these bots with Amazon Q in Connect, a generative AI–powered assistant for customer service. Amazon Q in Connect now supports end-customer self-service interactions across interactive voice response (IVR) and digital channels, in addition to assisting contact center agents with recommended responses and actions.

This integration extends beyond traditional voice and chatbot Amazon Lex capabilities by providing advanced conversational abilities via large language models (LLMs). The system intelligently searches configured knowledge bases, customer information, web content, and third-party application data to respond to customer questions when they don’t match predefined intents. Administrators can set custom guardrails for their instance, defining restrictions on response generation and monitoring Amazon Q in Connect performance.

Generative AI–powered automated evaluations: Supervisors can automatically evaluate up to 100 percent of contacts using generative AI.

Generative AI–powered contact categorization: Improves existing semantic match functionality using natural language intents.

Improved interfaces and tools
Enhanced capabilities for bot management and monitoring, simplifying the creation and optimization of automated experiences.

Amazon Connect for WhatsApp Business messaging – Natively integrate with WhatsApp Business messaging so customers can receive support over WhatsApp in addition to existing Amazon Connect channels such as voice, SMS, chat, and Apple Messages for Business. This addition to Amazon Connect omnichannel capabilities helps businesses meet customers on their preferred communication channel while maintaining consistent service delivery and management within the Amazon Connect application.

Contact Lens conversational AI bot dashboards – Offers analytics to monitor the performance of your conversational AI bots built in Amazon Connect.

Self-service voice (IVR) recording and interaction logs on contact details – Provides comprehensive records of self-service interactions, including audio recordings.

Improved intraday forecasts – Allows comparison of intraday forecasts against previously published forecasts.

Salesforce Contact Center with Amazon Connect (Preview) – Natively integrates the digital channels and unified routing of Amazon Connect into Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM) system. This new offering allows companies to use a single routing and workflow system for both Amazon Connect and Salesforce channels, intelligently directing calls, chats, and cases to the appropriate self-service or agent interaction. If you’re interested, sign up to join the preview.

Enhanced security for chat
New features that enhance security and compliance in chat interactions, enabling secure handling of sensitive information.

Collection of sensitive customer data within chats – Amazon Connect chat and messaging now includes a data privacy option that enables secure handling of sensitive customer information during chat interactions. This feature protects personally identifiable information (PII) and payment card industry (PCI) data, promoting compliance with data protection regulations.

Key benefits
The latest features of Amazon Connect combine generative AI, enhanced security, and streamlined bot management to help businesses:

Transform customer experience – Amazon Connect elevates customer interactions through AI–powered segmentation, enabling personalized engagement strategies. The new WhatsApp Business messaging expands omnichannel support capabilities, meeting customers on their preferred channel. Additionally, advanced bot capabilities, including Amazon Q in Connect, enhance self-service resolution rates, delivering more efficient customer experiences.

Enhance security and operations – Contact centers can now strengthen their security posture with PCI-compliant chat interactions while maintaining operational efficiency. Custom AI guardrails promote appropriate response generation, while the simplified bot management interface eliminates the need for specialized expertise. Analytics and forecasting capabilities provide comprehensive performance monitoring, enabling data-driven decision-making for optimal contact center operations.

Pricing and availability – These features are available today in all AWS Regions where Amazon Connect is supported. For pricing, visit the Amazon Connect Pricing. For implementation guidance, visit the Amazon Connect documentation.

Eli

Securely share AWS resources across VPC and account boundaries with PrivateLink, VPC Lattice, EventBridge, and Step Functions

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/securely-share-aws-resources-across-vpc-and-account-boundaries-with-privatelink-vpc-lattice-eventbridge-and-step-functions/

At some point, every AWS customer tells me that they have the desire to move into the future as quickly as possible. They want to simplify their modernization efforts, drive growth, and adapt to the cloud, while also reducing costs as they proceed. These customers typically have a large suite of legacy applications, possibly running on-premises, that are running on diverse technology stacks managed by disparate parts of the organization. To make things even more challenging, these organizations often have to meet stringent security and compliance requirements.

Prepare to Share
You can now share AWS resources such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) container services, and your own HTTPS services across Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) and AWS account boundaries and use them to build event-driven apps via Amazon EventBridge and orchestrate workflows with AWS Step Functions. You can update your existing workloads, connect your modern cloud-native apps to on-premises legacy systems, with all communication routed across private endpoints and networks.

These new features build on Amazon VPC Lattice and AWS PrivateLink, and give you a lot of new options to design and control your network, along with some cool new ways to integrate and orchestrate across all of your technology stacks. For example, you can build hybrid event-driven architectures that make use of your existing on-premises applications.

Today, some customers use AWS Lambda functions or Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) queues to transfer data into VPCs. This undifferentiated heavy lifting can now be replaced with a simpler and more efficient solution.

Bringing all of this together, you get a set of services that will help you to accelerate your modernization efforts and simplify integration between your applications, regardless of where they are situated. EventBridge and Step Functions work hand-in-hand with PrivateLink and VPC Lattice to enable integration of public and private HTTPS-based applications into your event-driven architectures and workflows.

Here are the essential terms and concepts:

Resource Owner VPC – A VPC that has resources to be shared. The owner of this VPC creates a Resource Gateway with one or more associated Resource Configurations, then uses AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM) to share the Resource Configuration with the Resource Consumer, such as another AWS account, or a developer building event-driven architectures and workflows using EventBridge and Step Functions. Let’s define the Resource Owner as the person (maybe you) in your organization who is responsible for the care and feeding of this VPC.

Resource Gateway – Provides a point of ingress to a VPC so that clients can access resources in the Resource Owner VPC, as indicated by the Resource Configurations that are associated with the gateway. One Resource Gateway can make multiple resources available.

Resource – This can be a HTTPS endpoint, a database, a database cluster, an EC2 instance, an Application Load Balancer in front of multiple EC2 instances, an ECS service discoverable via AWS Cloud Map, an Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) service behind a Network Load Balancer, or a legacy service running in the Resource Owner VPC or running in on-premises across AWS Site-to-Site VPN or AWS Direct Connect.

Resource Configuration – Defines a set of resources that can be accessed through a particular Resource Gateway. The resources can be referenced by IP address, DNS name, or (for AWS resources) an ARN.

Resource Consumer – The person in your organization who is responsible for building applications that connect with and consume services provided by resources in a Resource Owner VPC.

Sharing Resources
You can put all of this power to use in a lot of different ways; I’ll focus on one for this post.

First, I will play the role of the Resource Owner. I click Resource gateways in the VPC Console, see that I don’t have a gateway, and click Create resource gateway to get started:

I assign a name (main-rg) and an IP address type, then pick the VPC and the private subnets where the gateway will have a presence (this is a one-shot selection that cannot be changed without creating a new Resource Gateway). I also choose up to five security groups to control inbound traffic:

I scroll down, assign any desired tags, and click Create resource gateway to proceed:

My new gateway is active within seconds; I nod in appreciation and click Create resource configuration to move ahead:

Now I need to create my first Resource Configuration. Let’s say that I have a HTTPS service running on an EC2 instance on a private subnet in my Resource Owner VPC. I assign a DNS name to the service and use a Amazon Route 53 Alias record which returns the IP address of the instance:

I am using a public hosted zone in this example. We already working on support for private hosted zones.

With DNS all set up, I click Create resource configuration to move ahead. I enter a name (rc-service1), choose Resource as the type, and select the Resource Gateway that I created earlier:

I scroll down and define my EC2 instance as a resource, entering the DNS name and setting up sharing for ports 80 and 443:

Now I take a small detour, and hop over to the RAM Console to create a Resource Share so that other AWS accounts can access the resources (this is optional, and only relevant for cross-account scenarios). I could create one Resource Share for each service, but in most cases I would create one share and use it to package up a collection of related services. I’ll do that, and call it shared-services:

Returning from my detour, I refresh the list of resource shares, pick the one that I created, and click Create resource configuration:

The resource configuration is ready within seconds.

Recap and Planning Time
Before moving ahead, let’s do a quick recap and make some plans. Here’s what I (in the role of Resource Provider) have so far:

  • MainVPC – My Resource Owner VPC.
  • main-rg – A Resource Gateway in MainVPC.
  • rc-service1 – The Resource Configuration for main-rg.
  • service1 – An HTTPS service hosted on an EC2 instance in a private subnet of MainVPC, at a fixed IP address.

Ok, so what’s next?

Share – This is the first and most obvious use use. I can use AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM) to share the Resource Configuration with another AWS account and access the service from another VPC. On the other side (as the Resource Consumer), I take a couple of quick steps to connect to the service that has been shared with me:

  • Service Network – I can create a service network, add the Resource Configuration to the Service Network, and create a VPC endpoint in a VPC to connect to the service network.
  • Endpoint – I can create a VPC endpoint in a VPC and access the shared resource via the endpoint.

Modernize – I can remove my legacy Lambda or SQS integration to get rid of some undifferentiated heavy lifting.

Build – I can use EventBridge and Step Functions to build event-driven architectures and orchestrate applications. I’ll take this option!

Accessing Private Resources with EventBridge and Step Functions
EventBridge and Step Functions already make it easy access to public HTTPS endpoints such as those from SaaS providers like Slack, Salesforce, and Adobe. With today’s launch, consuming private HTTPS services is just as easy.

As a Resource Consumer, I simply create an EventBridge connection, reference a Resource Configuration that was shared with me, and call the service from my event-driven application. Everything that I already know still applies, and I now have the new-found power to access private services.

To create the EventBridge connection, I open the EventBridge console and click Connections in the Integration  menu:

I review my existing connections (none so far), then click Create connection to move ahead:

I enter a name (MyService1) and a description for my connection, select Private as the API type, and choose the Resource Configuration that I created earlier:

Scrolling down, I need to configure the authorization for the service that I am connecting to. I select Custom configuration and Basic authorization, and enter the Username and Password for my service. I also add Action=Forecast to the query string (as you can see there are a lot of options for authorization), and click Create:

The connection is created and ready within minutes. Then I use it in my Step Functions workflows by using the HTTP Task, selecting the connection, entering the URL of my API endpoint, and choosing an HTTP method:

And that’s all there is to it: your Step Functions workflows can now make use of Private Resources!

I can also use this connection as an EventBridge API destination target in Event Buses and Pipes.

Things to Know
Here a couple of things to know about these cool new features:

Pricing – Existing pricing for Step Functions, EventBridge, PrivateLink, and VPC Lattice apply including the per-GB charge for data transfer into the VPC.

Regions – You can create and use Resource Gateways and Resource Configurations in 21 AWS Regions: US East (Ohio, N. Virginia), US West (N. California, Oregon), Africa (Cape Town), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong, Mumbai, Osaka, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland, London, Milan, Paris, Stockholm), Middle East (Bahrain), and South America (São Paulo).

In the Works – As I noted earlier, we are already working on support for private hosted zones. We are also planning to support access to other types of AWS resources through EventBridge and Step Functions .

Jeff;

New AWS Security Incident Response helps organizations respond to and recover from security events

Post Syndicated from Betty Zheng (郑予彬) original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-security-incident-response-helps-organizations-respond-to-and-recover-from-security-events/

Today, we announce AWS Security Incident Response, a new service designed to help organizations manage security events quickly and effectively. The service is purpose-built to help customers prepare for, respond to, and recover from various security events, including account takeovers, data breaches, and ransomware attacks.

Security Incident Response automates the triage and investigation of security findings from Amazon GuardDuty and integrated third party threat detection tools through AWS Security Hub. It facilitates communication and coordination and provides 24/7 access to security experts from the AWS Customer Incident Response Team (CIRT) who can assist during security events. The service aims to provide customers with more comprehensive support across the phases of incident response lifecycle, from preparation to detection, analysis, and recovery.

Security events are becoming more pervasive and complex for customers. Security teams often face an overwhelming number of daily alerts, leading to potential misplaced priorities of resources and reduced effectiveness. Manual investigation of findings strains resources and may cause customers to overlook critical security alerts. Additionally, coordinating responses across multiple stakeholders, managing permissions in various environments, and documenting actions complicate the process. There is an opportunity to better support customers and remove various points of undifferentiated heavy lifting that customers face during security events.

Key capabilities

AWS Security Incident Response addresses these challenges through three main core capabilities that help customers effectively prepare for, respond to, and recover from security events :

  1. Security Incident Response automatically triages security findings from GuardDuty and supported third-party tools through Security Hub to identify high-priority incidents requiring immediate attention. The service uses automation and customer-specific information to filter and suppress security findings based on expected behavior, helping teams focus on critical security alerts.
  2. The service simplifies incident response by offering preconfigured notification rules and permission settings that can be extended to both internal and external stakeholders, including third-party security providers. Customers can access a centralized console with integrated features, such as messaging, secure data transfer, and video conference scheduling, all accessible through service APIs or the AWS Management Console. Additional capabilities include automated case history tracking and reporting, allowing security teams to focus on remediation and recovery efforts.
  3. Customers gain access to self-service investigation tools and 24/7 support from the AWS CIRT. Customers also have the ability to handle incidents independently or interoperate with third-party security vendors. These options allow customers to choose, manage, and conduct their incident response based on their specific needs and requirements.

In addition to the core capabilities, customers benefit from a service dashboard with metrics that help them measure, monitor, and improve their security incident response performance over time. These metrics include mean time to resolution (MTTR), number of active and closed cases within a specific period, number of triaged findings, and other key performance indicators. Customers can access these metrics instantly without needing to collate information or create one-time reports.

How to get started

The onboarding process can be completed in a few steps. Security Incident Response integrates with AWS Organizations to provide comprehensive security coverage for your current and future accounts with an added layer of security. Customers begin by selecting a central account within their organization, where all active and historical security events can be created and managed.

Next, customers can enable the proactive incident response feature, which creates service-level permissions allowing Security Incident Response to monitor and investigate findings from GuardDuty or third-party detection tools through Security Hub. These findings are then automatically sorted and remediated using service automation and customer-specific data, including common IP addresses, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) principals, and other relevant attributes. For findings that can’t be automatically remediated, Security Incident Response creates a security case and notifies the appropriate stakeholders within the customer’s organization.

Customers can also configure permissions for the service to execute containment actions by deploying specific IAM roles. By using these Security Incident Response containment capabilities, customers can achieve faster incident response times and potentially minimize the impact of security events on accounts and resources.

Availability and getting started

AWS Security Incident Response is now available in 12 AWS Regions globally: US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo), Canada (Central), and Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland, London, Stockholm).

Learn more about AWS Security Incident Response by visiting the product page.

Betty

New APIs in Amazon Bedrock to enhance RAG applications, now available

Post Syndicated from Veliswa Boya original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-apis-in-amazon-bedrock-to-enhance-rag-applications-now-available/

Amazon Bedrock is a fully managed service that offers a choice of high-performing foundation models (FMs) from leading AI companies like AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, Mistral AI, Stability AI, and Amazon through a single API, along with a broad set of capabilities you need to build generative AI applications with security, privacy, and responsible AI. Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases is a fully managed service that empowers developers to create highly accurate, low latency, secure, and customizable generative AI applications cost effectively. Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases connects foundation models (FMs) to a company’s internal data using Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). RAG helps FMs deliver more relevant, accurate, and customized responses.

In this post, we detail two announcements related to Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases:

  • Support for custom connectors and ingestion of streaming data.
  • Support for reranking models.

Support for custom connectors and ingestion of streaming data
Today, we announced support for custom connectors and ingestion of streaming data in Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases. Developers can now efficiently and cost-effectively ingest, update, or delete data directly using a single API call, without the need to perform a full sync with the data source periodically or after every change. Customers are increasingly developing RAG-based generative AI applications for various use cases such as chatbots and enterprise search. However, they face challenges in keeping the data up-to-date in their knowledge bases so that the end users of the applications always have access to the latest information. The current process of data synchronization is time-consuming, requiring a full sync every time new data is added or removed. Customers also face challenges in integrating data from unsupported sources, such as Google Drive or Quip, into their knowledge base. Typically, to make this data available in Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases, they must first move it to a supported source, such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and then start the ingestion process. This extra step not only creates additional overhead but also introduces delays in making the data accessible for querying. Additionally, customers who want to use streaming data (for example, news feeds or Internet of Things (IoT) sensor data) face delays in real-time data availability due to the need to store the data in a supported data source before ingestion. As customers scale up their data, these inefficiencies and delays can become significant operational bottlenecks and increase costs. Keeping all these challenges in mind, it’s important to have a more efficient and cost-effective way to ingest and manage data from various sources to ensure that the knowledge base is up-to-date and available for querying in real-time. With support for custom connector and ingestion of streaming data, customers can now use direct APIs to efficiently add, check the status of, and delete data, without the need to list and sync the entire dataset.

How it works
Custom connectors and ingestion of streaming data can be accessed using the Amazon Bedrock console or the AWS SDK.

  1. Add Document
    The Add Document API is used to add new files to the knowledge base without having to perform a full sync after the document has been added. Customers can add content by specifying the Amazon S3 path of the document, the text content to add as a document to the source, or as a Base64-encoded string. For example:

    PUT /knowledgebases/KB12345678/datasources/DS12345678/documents HTTP/1.1
    Content-type: application/json
    {
      "documents": [{
        "content": {
          "dataSourceType": "CUSTOM",
          "custom": {
            "customDocumentIdentifier": {
              "id": "MyDocument"
            },
            "inlineContent": {
              "textContent": {
                "data": "Hello world!"
              },
              "type": "TEXT"
            },
            "sourceType": "IN_LINE"
          }
        }
      }]
    }
    
  2. Delete Document
    The Delete Document API is used to delete data from the knowledge base without needing to perform a full sync after the document has been deleted. For example:

    POST /knowledgebases/KB12345678/datasources/DS12345678/documents/deleteDocuments/ HTTP/1.1
    Content-type: application/json
    {
      "documentIdentifiers": [{
        "custom": {
          "id": "MyDocument"
        },
        "dataSourceType": "CUSTOM"
      }]
    }
  3. List Document(s)
    The List Document API returns a list of records that match the criteria that is specified in the request parameters. For example:

    POST /knowledgebases/KB12345678/datasources/DS12345678/documents/ HTTP/1.1
    Content-type: application/json 
    {
      "maxResults": 10
    }
  4. Get Document
    The Get Document API returns information about the document(s) that match the criteria that is specified in the request parameters. For example:

    POST /knowledgebases/KB12345678/datasources/DS12345678/documents/getDocuments/ HTTP/1.1
    Content-type: application/json
    {
      "documentIdentifiers": [{
        "custom": {
          "id": "MyDocument"
        },
        "dataSourceType": "CUSTOM"
      }]
    }

Now available
Support for custom connectors and ingestion of streaming data in Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases is available today in all AWS Regions where Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases is available. Check the Region list for details and future updates. To learn more about Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases, visit the Amazon Bedrock product page. For pricing details, review the Amazon Bedrock pricing page.

Send feedback to AWS re:Post for Amazon Bedrock or through your usual AWS contacts, and engage with the generative AI builder community at community.aws.

Support for reranking models
Today we also announced the new Rerank API in Amazon Bedrock to offer developers a way to use reranking models to enhance the performance of their RAG-based applications by improving the relevance and accuracy of responses. Semantic search, supported by vector embeddings, embeds documents and queries into a semantic high-dimension vector space where texts with related meanings are nearby in the vector space and therefore semantically similar, so that it returns similar items even if they don’t share any words with the query. Semantic search is used in RAG applications because the relevance of retrieved documents to a user’s query plays a critical role in providing accurate responses and RAG applications retrieve a range of relevant documents from the vector store.

However, semantic search has limitations in prioritizing the most suitable documents based on user preferences or query context especially when the user query is complex, ambiguous, or involves nuanced context. This can lead to retrieving documents that are only partially relevant to the user’s question. This leads to another challenge where proper citation and attribution of sources is not attributed to the correct sources, leading to loss of trust and transparency in the RAG-based application. To address these limitations, future RAG systems should prioritize developing robust ranking algorithms that can better understand user intent and context. Additionally, it is important to focus on improving source credibility assessment and citation practices to confirm the reliability and transparency of the generated responses.

Advanced reranking models solve for these challenges by prioritizing the most relevant content from a knowledge base for a query and additional context to ensure that foundation models receive the most relevant content, which leads to more accurate and contextually appropriate responses. Reranking models may reduce response generation costs by prioritizing the information that is sent to the generation model.

How it works
At launch, we’re supporting Amazon Rerank 1.0 and Cohere Rerank 3.5 reranking models. For the walkthrough, I will use the Amazon Rerank 1.0 model, I will start by requesting access to this model.


Once access has been granted, I create a knowledge base using the existing Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases Console experience (an API process is also available as an alternative). The knowledge base contains two data sources; a music playlist, and a list of films.


As soon as the knowledge base has been created I edit the Service Role to add the policy that contains the bedrock:Rerank action. The API takes the user query as the input along with the list of documents that needs to be reranked. The output will be a reranked prioritized list of documents.

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Sid": "Statement1",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "bedrock:InvokeModel"
            ],
            "Resource": [
                "arn:aws:bedrock:us-west-2::foundation-model/amazon.rerank-v1:0"
            ]
        },
        {
            "Sid": "Statement2",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "bedrock:Rerank"
            ],
            "Resource": [
                "*"
            ]
        }
    ]
}

The last step is to sync the data sources to index their contents for searching. A sync can take between a few minutes to a few hours.

The knowledge base is ready for use. The RetrieveAndGenerate API reranks the results retrieved from the vector datastore based on their relevance with the query.

To contrast, I ran the same query against the same data in a separate account that doesn’t have the Rerank API. The outcome is that results aren’t reranked on their relevance with the query. This could affect performance and compromise the accuracy of the responses.

Now available
The Rerank API in Amazon Bedrock is available today in the following AWS Regions: US West (Oregon), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo). Check the Region list for details and future updates. Rerank API can be used independently to rerank documents even if you are not using Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases. To learn more about Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases, visit the Amazon Bedrock product page. For pricing details, review the Amazon Bedrock pricing page.

Send feedback to AWS re:Post for Amazon Bedrock or through your usual AWS contacts, and engage with the generative AI builder community at community.aws.

Veliswa.

Connect users to data through your apps with Storage Browser for Amazon S3

Post Syndicated from Matheus Guimaraes original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/connect-users-to-data-through-your-apps-with-storage-browser-for-amazon-s3/

Today, we’re introducing Storage Browser for Amazon S3, an open source UI component you can add to your web applications to enable end users to interact with your data stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). With this frontend component, authorized end users can browse, upload, download, copy, and delete data from Amazon S3 based on their specific permissions, which you control using AWS identity and security services or custom managed solutions.

Storage Browser for S3 eases the strain on developers looking to provide end users with access to data in S3, and it is designed so that end users, such as customers, partners, and employees, can efficiently work with data regardless of their familiarity with Amazon S3 or Amazon Web Services. Additionally, developers can customize the look and feel of the Storage Browser interface to align with their application’s design.

Let’s walk through a quick demo to show how you can get started.

Installation
Storage Browser for S3 is an AWS Amplify UI React component, therefore, you must use it in a web application built with React or a React-based framework such as Next.Js, Gatsby, Remix, or any others. You also must have both AWS Amplify and the AWS Amplify UI React packages installed.

This demo uses Next.js. If you want to learn how to set up an app from scratch, check out this step-by-step guide on configuring AWS Amplify and using the Amplify React UI components with a new Next.js application.

You don’t need to install the entire @aws-amplify/ui-react library to use Storage Browser for S3.You can install only the storage-specific package with the following command if that is all you intend to use.

npm i @aws-amplify/ui-react-storage aws-amplify

If you have an existing application that already has the Amplify UI React package installed, make sure to update your dependencies to import the latest version, and run npm install to update any existing installations.

Lastly, if you’re building an application from scratch, make sure to run npm create amplify@latest in your application’s directory so you’re able to use the various categories provided by Amplify like auth, storage, and others.

Choosing an authorization mode
Storage Browser for S3 requires authentication and authorization to be configured so it can render the S3 buckets or prefixes that end users can access as well as the actions they can perform.

There are three options for setting up permissions, each suitable for different use cases:

Using AWS Amplify Auth – This option is ideal when you want to provide your customers and third-party partners access to your data in Amazon S3. You can set up Amplify Storage which uses AWS Amplify Auth by default to manage access control and security for files. This is powered by Amazon Cognito and comes with pre-built UI components for implementing user registration, sign-in, and sign-out flows.

Using AWS IAM Identity Center – This option is ideal for a scalable solution providing your whole workforce with access to your data in S3 through Storage Browser for S3 . You associate an S3 Access Grants instance with your AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) Identity Center to centrally manage S3 Access Grants permissions for your users and groups, including those hosted on external identity providers such as Microsoft Entra ID, Okta, and others. Additionally, each AWS CloudTrail data event for S3 references the end-user identity that accessed your data which helps to increase the observability for your data access.

Using IAM roles with Amazon S3 Access Grants – This option is ideal when you want to provide IAM principals with access to your data through Storage Browser for S3. To set this up, you must first create an S3 Access Grants instance that you can use to map permissions for S3 buckets and prefixes to the desired IAM identities. Then you create an IAM role that has permissions to invoke s3:GetDataAccess to get temporary least-privilege access to S3 buckets or prefixes.

This demo assumes the end users are not part of our organization so Amplify Auth is a great match for this case.

Setting up permissions
First, you must set up Amplify Storage by following this guide. Then, open amplify/storage/resource.ts to declare an S3 bucket alongside the desired access rules following the Amplify authorization model which utilizes prefixes to configure isolated storage for authorized users.

Next, create a component called StorageBrowser which encapsulates the integration with Amplify Auth and that we can easily drop in a page later. Make sure to call Amplify.config() to stitch it all together with a a reference to amplify_outputs.json as a parameter.

Visit the S3 User Guide for detailed instructions for setting up authentication and authorization for Storage Browser for S3.

Adding Storage Browser for S3 to my application
Now that the component is created, you just need to add it to your application in a page where you want to render it by declaring <StorageBrowser/>.

Use npm run dev to run the application. After it loads, navigate to the page where you added Storage Browser For S3 and you should see it loaded with the default layout. Notice also that it is configured with the same paths and permissions that we defined in amplify/storage/resource.ts above allowing users to browse, read, write, and delete files inside the S3 buckets and prefixes that we have set up.

browser component

You can download files and browse folders while accessing management operations from the sub-menu which automatically greys out any unavailable actions.

storage-browser-new-2

Storage Browser for S3 automatically pages results and makes it possible to filter and search for files and folders, making it easy to navigate and manage data.

storage-browser-new-1

All data access is governed by the configured authorization model enabling end users to seamlessly interact with S3 buckets and prefixes through a highly intuitive interface without compromising your security or compliance requirements.

Customizing the interface
Thanks to its flexible design, you can customize Storage Browser For S3 to match the look and feel of your application. Much like any other Amplify UI components it will use the Amplify theme you have active in your application by default. However, you can easily modify any of its components such as the buttons, breadcrumb, the paging controls, text fields, and others, by creating your own theme or targeting elements directly using CSS.

To create a theme, first you must declare it using the defineComponentTheme() function from the @aws-amplify/ui-react/server library. You give it a name such as 'storage-browser' and then target the elements that you want to style.

You can even rearrange the layout as well if you want. In the code you can see that we are setting the flexDirection of all controls to 'row-reverse', for example.

Then you create the theme using the createTheme() function using the storage-browser theme we declared earlier and apply it. We also override the primaryColor and make it green.

After the page is reloaded, you should see the Storage Browser for S3 component with its new more compact layout and new color scheme with green text.

You can customize essentially any element of the UI interface including any of the display texts such as the title where it says Home, or any others. The only exceptions are the details about the data, of course, such as the bucket names and keys. You can take advantage of this to add support for different languages, for example.

Finally, if you prefer to create your own UI from scratch, you call the createStorageBrowser() function to create a Storage Browser for S3 component programatically. It returns a useView() hook that you can use to integrate with your own custom frontend, giving you full control over the look and feel while leveraging all of the same features. To learn more, see the documentation for more details on the various customization options and how to configure them.

Conclusion
Storage Browser for S3 is a highly customizable and user-friendly AWS Amplify UI React component which enables end users to interact with data on Amazon S3 securely. It gives you full control of the access rules to ensure the frontend complies with your access requirements while providing a great user experience through an interface that you can style to make it appear as a natural extension of your application.

Things to know

Getting started – You can install Storage Browser for S3 from the GitHub page. For more information on getting started, visit the UI documentation.

Compatibility – Storage Browser for S3 is compatible with all Amazon S3 storage classes except for Glacier Flexible Retrieval and S3 Glacier Deep Archive. It is compatible with S3 Intelligent-Tiering, but it’s not compatible with the S3 Intelligent-Tiering Archive Access Tier or the S3 Intelligent-Tiering Deep Archive Access Tier..

Performance and durability – Storage Browser for S3 includes built-in logic that enhances upload requests for high-throughput data transfer, calculates checksums of uploaded data (rejecting requests that fail these durability checks), and optimizes performance for faster load times in your application.

Pricing – Storage Browser for S3 is open source and you can integrate it with your applications at no extra cost. You only pay for your use of the underlying AWS resources you use with Storage Browser for S3.

Support – Storage Browser for S3 is backed by AWS Support just like any other feature of S3. Customers with Business and Enterprise Support plans get 24/7 access to AWS Support engineers to support their use of Storage Browser for S3.

Feedback – We invite you to share feedback on the functionality and the public roadmap for Storage Browser for S3.

Matheus Guimaraes | @codingmatheus

Introducing new PartyRock capabilities and free daily usage

Post Syndicated from Danilo Poccia original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-new-partyrock-capabilities-and-free-daily-usage/

PartyRock is an Amazon Bedrock playground that anyone can use to create generative AI-powered applications by simply describing the app you want to build without the need to write any code.

Since its launch in November 2023, over half a million apps have been built by users worldwide. These apps range from simple text generators to sophisticated productivity tools that combine multiple AI capabilities.

Throughout this year, we observed that as PartyRock users build skills and intuition by using the playground, they find interesting and useful ways to build apps for improving their daily lives. PartyRock apps increased their individual productivity, and they returned to PartyRock to use them regularly.

Today, we’re introducing improvements meeting the most requested customer needs:

Free daily usage – Previously, PartyRock offered a free trial period for a limited time. Starting in 2025, all users will have a recurring free daily usage granted, with no credit card required.

Search the app catalog – You can now explore hundreds of thousands of apps in the PartyRock catalog and find the right app for your use case by category or functionality. Relevant and popular apps are highlighted to showcase the creativity of the community. Results include app previews and last modified date to help you pick what’s best for you.

Do more with docs – You can upload and process multiple documents simultaneously, making it easier to build apps that handle batch processing, document comparison, or content aggregation.

Let’s see these some new features in action.

Searching and remixing a PartyRock app
I open PartyRock and sign in with my social credentials. In the Home section, I can use the search box to look for apps for a specific use case. I love traveling, and I’d like to improve the way I share my trips with family and friends. I enter travel and vlog in the search box. In the search results, I see an app that gets my attention.

Console screenshot.

I choose the Travel vlog script writer app and open it in a browser tab. The app generates a travel log script starting from a few inputs: the destination, the itinerary, and the tone.

I like to prepare some travel notes before a trip so that I know what the options are and what I want to visit. What if I can upload my notes and other documents to better personalize the vlog?

One of the key capabilities of PartyRock is that I can start with an existing app and “remix” it to tailor it to my needs. The resulting app can then be shared for others to use.

I choose Remix and then Edit to customize this app. I add a Document widget and edit it:

  • For Widget title, I use Notes.
  • For Instruction, I enter Upload your notes and documents with travel tips.

I save the new widget and move just after the other input fields.

To use these images in the app, I edit the Your Vlog script widget. I want the script to include the content of those images. In the prompt generating the script, I add a sentence to analyze and consider the image of the destination:

Get inspiration from what you see in @Notes.

I also update the Vlog cover widget prompt to consider the whole script when generating the cover image:

A portrait of a trip to @Destination considering the @Your Vlog script.

I save and leave edit. The remixed app is now ready to be tested.

Using the remixed PartyRock app
Let’s try the customized version of the app. I enter:

  • Rome, Italy as Destination
  • A walk in the old city center as Itinerary
  • Peaceful and relaxing as Tone.

Then, I upload my travel notes.

Console screenshot.

I choose the Play button to start the app. The app takes a few seconds to generate its output.

Console screenshot.

I like the result. The script is quite detailed, and the image cover a nice addition. I can further extend the app to use the image cover in a social media post generator for posting about the vlog to different platforms with different tones and styles. The possibilities are endless!

Things to know
PartyRock with these new capabilities is available at https://partyrock.aws.

No credit card or AWS account is required to use PartyRock, and you can explore hundreds of thousands of published apps even without signing in.

With PartyRock, everyone can become a builder. Apps can be generated from a textual description and then customized and extended with additional capabilities using the visual editor. All apps are automatically optimized for mobile devices and can be shared with others. To make it easier for others to view and use your apps, you can create your personalized playlist page.

For examples of how PartyRock can help you be more productive, refer to How 3 small businesses use PartyRock to help customers. And don’t forget to share your best apps with me!

Danilo

Amazon MemoryDB Multi-Region is now generally available

Post Syndicated from Betty Zheng (郑予彬) original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-memorydb-multi-region-is-now-generally-available/

Providing highly available applications while maintaining low latency reads and writes across AWS Regions is a common challenge faced by many customers. Accessing data from different Regions can cause a delay of hundreds of milliseconds compared to microseconds within the same Region. The necessity for developers to create complex custom solutions for data replication and conflict resolution can lead to increased operational workload and potential errors. Beyond multi-Region replication, these customers have to implement manual database failover procedures and provide data consistency and recovery to deliver highly available applications and data durability.

Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the general availability of Amazon MemoryDB Multi-Region, a fully managed, active-active, multi-Region database that you can use to build applications with up to 99.999 percent availability, microsecond read, and single-digit millisecond write latencies across multiple AWS Regions. MemoryDB Multi-Region is available for Valkey, which is a Redis Open Source Software (OSS) drop-in replacement stewarded by Linux Foundation. This new feature builds upon the existing benefits of Amazon MemoryDB, such as multi-AZ durability and high throughput across multiple AWS Regions, and addresses these common challenges faced by many customers.

In this post, we discuss the benefits of MemoryDB Multi-Region and demonstrate how to get started with it using the AWS Management Console and the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI).

Benefits of MemoryDB Multi-Region

MemoryDB Multi-Region provides the following benefits to customers:

  • High availability and disaster recovery – With MemoryDB Multi-Region, you can build applications with up to 99.999 percent availability. It also makes sure that if an application is unable to connect to MemoryDB in a local Region, the application can connect to MemoryDB from another AWS Regional endpoint with full read and write access to the data. When the application reconnects to the original MemoryDB Regional endpoint, MemoryDB Multi-Region will automatically synchronize data across all AWS Regions.
  • Microsecond read and single-digit millisecond write latency for multi-Region distributed applications – MemoryDB Multi-Region offers active-active replication, so you can serve both reads and writes locally from the Regions closest to your customers with microsecond read and single-digit millisecond write latency at any scale. It automatically replicates data asynchronously between AWS Regions with data typically propagated in less than one second.
  • Adhere to compliance and regulatory requirements where data needs to reside in a specific geography – There are compliance and regulatory requirements under which data needs to be within a geographic location. MemoryDB Multi-Region can help you meet these requirements as it allows customers to choose which region they want their data to reside.

Getting started with Amazon MemoryDB Multi-Region

Setting up MemoryDB Multi-Region is straightforward and can be accomplished through the AWS Management Console, AWS SDK, or AWS CLI.

Getting started with MemoryDB Multi-Region using the console

To set up your MemoryDB Multi-Region cluster using the console, complete the following steps:

On the MemoryDB console, choose Clusters in the navigation pane, choose Create cluster, select Multi-Region cluster for Cluster type, and Create new cluster for the Cluster creation method.

started with console

You can select the Node type and number of shards based on your workload requirement when you set up your Multi-Region cluster.

Create the Regional cluster within your Multi-Region cluster with the appropriate cluster settings.

You can add a second Regional cluster to your Multi-Region cluster by choosing Add AWS region after the Multi-Region cluster and the first Regional cluster are set up.

When the cluster creation workflow finishes successfully, you can observe that there are two Regional clusters within the Multi-Region cluster.

Cluster was builted

Here are the steps to get started using the AWS CLI

To begin, create a new MemoryDB Multi-Region cluster:

aws memorydb create-multi-region-cluster \
--multi-region-cluster-name-suffix testmrrlp \
--endpoint-url https://elasticache-qa.us-east-1.amazonaws.com \
--description "testdescription" \
--node-type db.r7g.xlarge \
--region us-east-1 \
--no-verify-ssl 

Next, create a Regional cluster in the Multi-Region cluster:

aws memorydb create-cluster \
--cluster-name testmrrlp-member1 \
--multi-region-cluster-name ldgnf-testmrrlp \
--node-type db.r7g.xlarge \
--num-replicas-per-shard 1 \
--snapshot-retention-limit 10 \
--endpoint-url <value> \
--acl-name open-access \
--region us-east-1 \
--no-verify-ssl

After verifying the successful creation of the first cluster, create the second cluster in a different Region:

aws memorydb create-cluster \
--cluster-name testmrrlp-member2 \
--multi-region-cluster-name ldgnf-testmrrlp \
--node-type db.r7g.xlarge \
--num-replicas-per-shard 1 \
--snapshot-retention-limit 10 \
--endpoint-url https://elmo-qa.fra.aws-border.com \
--acl-name open-access \
--region eu-central-1 \
--no-verify-ssl

Check the status of the Multi-Region cluster:

aws memorydb describe-multi-region-clusters \
--multi-region-cluster-name ldgnf-testmrrlp \
--region us-east-1 \
--show-member-cluster-details \
--endpoint-url https://elasticache-qa.us-east-1.amazonaws.com \
--no-verify-ssl 

Now available

Amazon MemoryDB Multi-Region is available for Valkey and in the following AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (N. California, Oregon), Asia Pacific (Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo), and Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland, London).

To learn more, visit the MemoryDB features page and documentation. For pricing, refer to Amazon MemoryDB pricing.

Betty

Introducing default data integrity protections for new objects in Amazon S3

Post Syndicated from Sébastien Stormacq original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-default-data-integrity-protections-for-new-objects-in-amazon-s3/

At Amazon Web Services (AWS), the vast majority of new capabilities are driven by your direct feedback. Two years ago, Jeff announced additional checksum algorithms and the optional client-side computation of checksums to make sure the objects stored on Amazon S3 are exactly what you sent. You told us you love this extra verification because it gives you confidence the object stored is the one you sent. You also told us you would prefer to have this extra verification enabled automatically, freeing you from developing additional code.

Starting today, we’re updating the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) default behavior when you upload objects. To build upon its existing durability posture, Amazon S3 now automatically verifies that your data is correctly transmitted over the network from your applications to your S3 bucket.

Amazon S3 is designed for 99.999999999% data durability (that’s 11 nines). Amazon S3 has always verified the integrity of object uploads by calculating checksums when objects reach our servers, before they are written to multiple storage devices. Once your data is stored in Amazon S3, it continually monitors data durability over time with periodic integrity checks of data at rest. Amazon S3 also actively monitors the redundancy of your data to help verify that your objects can tolerate the concurrent failure of multiple storage devices.

But data can still face integrity risks as it traverses the public internet before reaching our servers. Issues such as faulty hardware on networks we don’t manage or client software bugs could potentially corrupt or drop data before Amazon S3 has a chance to validate it. Previously, you could extend the integrity protection by providing your own precomputed checksums with your PutObject or UploadPart requests. However, this requires configuring tools and applications to generate and track checksums, which can be complex to implement consistently across all your client applications uploading objects to Amazon S3.

The new default behavior builds upon existing data integrity protections without requiring any changes to your applications. Additionally, the new checksums are stored in the object’s metadata, making them accessible for integrity verification at any time.

Automatic client-side integrity protection
Amazon S3 now extends data integrity protection all the way to client-side applications by default. The latest versions of our AWS SDKs automatically calculate a cyclic redundancy check (CRC)-based checksum for each upload and send it to Amazon S3. Amazon S3 independently calculates a checksum on the server side and validates it against the provided value before durably storing the object and its checksum in the object’s metadata.

When your client application doesn’t send a CRC checksum (maybe it uses an old version of our SDK or you haven’t updated your application custom code yet), Amazon S3 computes a CRC-based checksum anyway and stores it in the object metadata for future reference. You can compare at a later stage the stored CRC with a CRC computed on your side and verify the network transmission was correct.

This new capability provides you with an automatic checksum calculation and validation for new uploads from the latest versions of the AWS SDKs, the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), and the AWS Management Console. You can also verify the checksum stored in the object’s metadata at any time. The new default data integrity protections use the existing CRC32 and CRC32C algorithms or the new CRC64NVME algorithm. Amazon S3 also provides developers with consistent full-object checksums across single-part and multipart uploads.

When uploading files in multiple parts, the SDKs calculate checksums for each part. Amazon S3 uses these checksums to verify the integrity of each part through the UploadPart API. Additionally, S3 validates the entire file’s size and checksum when you call the CompleteMultipartUpload API.

The CreateMultiPartUpload API introduces a new HTTP header, x-amz-checksum-type, which lets you specify the type of checksum to use. You can choose either a full object checksum (calculated by combining the checksums of all individual parts) or a composite checksum.

The full object checksum is stored with the object metadata for future reference. This new protection works seamlessly with server-side encryption. The consistent behavior across uploads, multipart uploads, downloads, and encryption modes simplifies client-side integrity checks. The ability to use full-object checksums to validate integrity and store them for use later can help you streamline your applications.

Let’s see it in action
To start using this additional integrity protection, update to the latest version of the AWS SDK or AWS CLI. No code changes are required to enable the new integrity protections.

Case 1: Amazon S3 now attaches a checksum to objects on the server side when objects are uploaded without a checksum

I wrote a simple Python script to upload and download content to and from an S3 bucket. I enabled maximum logging verbosity to see the actual HTTP headers sent to and from Amazon S3.

import boto3
import logging

BUCKET_NAME="aws-news-blog-20241111"
CONTENT='Hello World!'
OBJECT_NAME='test.txt'

# Enable debug logging for boto3 and botocore to stdout (this is verbose !!!)
logging.basicConfig(level=logging.DEBUG)

# create a s3 client
client = boto3.client('s3')

# put an object
client.put_object(Bucket=BUCKET_NAME, Key=OBJECT_NAME, Body=CONTENT)

# get the object 
response = client.get_object(Bucket=BUCKET_NAME, Key=OBJECT_NAME)
print(response['Body'].read().decode('utf-8'))

In the first step of this demo, I use an old AWS SDK for Python that doesn’t compute the CRC checksum on the client side. Despite this, I can observe that Amazon S3 now responds with a checksum it computed upon receiving the object.

S3 RESPONSE:
{
    ...
    "x-amz-checksum-crc64nvme": "AuUcyF784aU=",
    "x-amz-checksum-type": "FULL_OBJECT",
    ...
}

Case 2: Upload with manually pre-computed CRC64NVME checksum, a new checksum type

When I don’t have the option to use the latest version of the AWS SDK, or when I use my own code to upload objects to S3 buckets, I can compute the checksum and send it in the PutObject API request. Here is how I compute the checksum on my content before sending it to Amazon S3. To keep this code short, I use the checksums package available in the new AWS SDK for Python.

from awscrt import checksums
import base64

checksum = checksums.crc64nvme("Hello World!")
checksum_bytes = checksum.to_bytes(8, byteorder='big')  # CRC64 is 8 bytes
checksum_base64 = base64.b64encode(checksum_bytes)
print(checksum_base64)

And when I run it, I see the CRC64NVME checksum is the same as the one returned by Amazon S3 in the previous step.

$ python crc.py
b'AuUcyF784aU='

I can provide this checksum as part of the PutObject API call.

response = s3.put_object(
    Bucket=BUCKET_NAME,
    Key=OBJECT_NAME,
    Body=b'Hello World!',
    ChecksumAlgorithm='CRC64NVME', 
    ChecksumCRC64NVME=checksum_base64
)

Case 3: The new SDKs compute the checksum on the client-side

Now, I run the upload and download script again. This time, I use the latest version of the AWS SDK for Python. I observe that the SDK now sends the CRC headers in the request. The response also contains the checksum. I can easily compare the versions in the request and in the response to make sure the object received is the one I sent.

REQUEST:
{
    ...
    "x-amz-checksum-crc64nvme": "AuUcyF784aU=",
    "x-amz-checksum-type": "FULL_OBJECT",
    ... 
}

At any time, I can request the object checksum to verify the integrity of my local copy using the HeadObject or GetObject APIs.

 get_response = s3.get_object(
        Bucket=BUCKET_NAME,
        Key=OBJECT_NAME,
        ChecksumMode='ENABLED'
    )

The response object contains the checksum in the HTTPHeaders field.

{
...
    "x-amz-checksum-crc64nvme": "AuUcyF784aU=",
    "x-amz-checksum-type": "FULL_OBJECT",
...
}

Case 4: Multi-part uploads with new CRC-based whole-object checksum

When uploading large objects using the CreateMultipartUpload, UploadPart, and CompleteMultipartUpload APIs, the latest version of the SDK will automatically compute the checksums for you.

If you want to validate the integrity of your data by using a known content checksum, you can pre-compute the CRC-based whole-object checksum for multi-part uploads to simplify your client side tooling. When using full object checksums for multi-part uploads, you no longer have to keep track of part level checksums as you upload objects.


# precomputed CRC64NVME checksum for the full object
full_object_crc64_nvme_checksum = 'Naz0uXkYBPM='

# start multipart upload
create_response = s3.create_multipart_upload(
            Bucket=BUCKET_NAME,
            Key=OBJECT_NAME,
            ChecksumAlgorithm='CRC64NVME',
            ChecksumType='FULL_OBJECT'
        )
upload_id = create_response['UploadId']

# Upload parts
uploaded_parts = []

# part 1
data_part_1 = b'0' * (5 * 1024 * 1024) # minimum part size
upload_part_response_1 = s3.upload_part(
    Body=data_part_1,
    Bucket=BUCKET_NAME,
    Key=OBJECT_NAME,
    PartNumber=1,
    UploadId=upload_id,
    ChecksumAlgorithm='CRC64NVME'
)
uploaded_parts.append({'PartNumber': 1, 'ETag': upload_part_response_1['ETag']})

# part 2
data_part_2 = b'0' * (5 * 1024 * 1024)
upload_part_response_2 = s3.upload_part(
    Body=data_part_2,
    Bucket=BUCKET_NAME,
    Key=OBJECT_NAME,
    PartNumber=2,
    UploadId=upload_id,
    ChecksumAlgorithm='CRC64NVME'
)
uploaded_parts.append({'PartNumber': 2, 'ETag': upload_part_response_2['ETag']})

# Complete the multipart upload with the FULL_OBJECT CRC64NVME checksum to validate the integrity of your entire object. 
complete_response = s3.complete_multipart_upload(
            Bucket=BUCKET_NAME,
            Key=OBJECT_NAME,
            UploadId=upload_id,
            ChecksumCRC64NVME=full_object_crc64_nvme_checksum,
            ChecksumType='FULL_OBJECT',
            MultipartUpload={'Parts': uploaded_parts}
        )
print(complete_response)

Things to know
For your existing objects, the checksum will be added when you copy them. We updated the CopyObject API so you can choose the desired checksum algorithm for the destination object.

This new client-side checksum calculation is implemented in the latest version of the AWS SDKs. When you use an old SDK or custom code that doesn’t pre-compute checksums, Amazon S3 computes the checksum on all new objects it receives and stores it in the object’s metadata, even for multipart uploads.

Pricing and availability
This extended checksum computation and storage is available in all AWS Regions at no additional cost.

Update your AWS SDK and AWS CLI today to automatically benefit from this additional integrity protection for data in transit.

To learn more about data integrity protection on Amazon S3, visit Checking object integrity in the Amazon S3 User Guide.

— seb

AWS Database Migration Service now automates time-intensive schema conversion tasks using generative AI

Post Syndicated from Sébastien Stormacq original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-data-migration-service-improves-database-schema-conversion-with-generative-ai/

Starting today, AWS Database Migration Service Schema Conversion (AWS DMS SC) introduces a new capability to improve the database schema conversion experience by automatically converting up to 90 percent of schema objects from commercial databases to PostgreSQL migrations.

AWS DMS is a cloud service that makes it possible to migrate relational databases, data warehouses, NoSQL databases, and other types of data stores. You can use AWS DMS to migrate your data into the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud or between combinations of cloud and on-premises setups.

Today, more than 1 million databases have been migrated using AWS Database Migration Service. AWS DMS helps you migrate your data from one database system to another. And, when migrating between different database engines, AWS DMS SC helps to convert the source database schema and procedures to the target database system.

However, although AWS DMS SC automates many steps in these migrations, certain complex database code elements still require manual intervention, which can extend migration timelines and add cost. This is particularly the case with proprietary system functions or procedures, and data type conversions, which don’t always have direct equivalents in PostgreSQL.

The new generative AI capability in AWS DMS SC is designed to address these challenges by automating some of the most time-intensive schema conversion tasks. Using large language models (LLMs) hosted on Amazon Bedrock, the new capability expands the existing conversion capabilities. It converts code snippets in the source database that were otherwise not supported by traditional rule-based techniques, including complex procedures and functions.

Generative AI–assisted code conversion helps to reduce migration costs and accelerate project timelines. Because AWS DMS SC automates more of the schema conversion process, you can focus on higher value tasks such as refining and optimizing your applications post-migration rather than manually resolving conversion gaps. Our beta customers have already experienced success with these AI-powered features in AWS DMS SC, achieving cost savings and faster migrations.

Let’s find out how it works
To demonstrate the ease of using this new generative AI capability, I’ll walk through the schema conversion process in AWS DMS SC. AWS DMS SC simplifies database migration by automatically converting my source database’s structure, including tables, views, stored procedures, functions, and more, to a format compatible with my target database. Any objects that can’t be automatically converted are flagged for manual attention.

I start with a self-managed commercial database running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). I use the AWS Management Console to define the instance profile and the data providers. This is where I configure the replication instance network details, the database engine and its endpoint, the secret where the database password is securely stored, and more. I also create a migration project. These steps aren’t new, and you can refer to Accelerate your database migration journey using AWS DMS Schema Conversion in the AWS Database Blog to learn about the details.

After my project is created, I select it, and on the Schema conversion tab, I choose Launch schema conversion. It takes a couple of minutes to launch the conversion tool the first time.

DMS : Launch migration project

AWS DMS SC with generative AI is an opt-in capability. I first activate the option. On the Settings tab, I turn on Enable Generative AI feature for conversion.DMS : enable GenAI feature

Before diving into the details of the conversion, I would like to get an overall assessment of the migration complexity. I select the schema I want to migrate. Then I select Assess in the menu.

DMS : Assess schema

After a few minutes, a high-level Summary is available. The Action items tab has more details. I choose Export results and choose PDF to receive a report to share with my colleagues. The report is generated and available from an S3 bucket.

The summary screen shows the percentage of Database storage objects and Database code objects that can be converted by the rule-based method. That’s 100% and 57% in this example. Let’s see how the generative AI-based conversion will change that.

DMS : Assess schema summary

The PDF contains an executive summary, various statistics about the number of objects to be migrated, the feasibility of conversion with generative AI, and the complexity of the migration.

DMS : Assess schema PDF page 1 DMS : Assess schema PDF page 2

By reading the report, I learn there is no blocker detected to migrate the stored procedures. I select the stored procedure I want to migrate (PRC_AIML_DEMO6). Then, I select the Actions menu on the source database (the left one) and choose Convert.

After a minute or two, I can read the original procedure code in the left pane and the proposed migrated version on the right panel.

The summary screen has been updated. Now, it shows that 100 percent of the code can be converted automatically.

DNS : view proposed modifications

I can edit the code and make changes as required. When I’m comfortable with the proposed new version, I select the Actions menu on the target database side (the right one) and choose Apply changes.

DMS : Apply changes

With this new generative AI capability, AWS DMS SC can automatically convert up to 90 percent of schema objects from commercial databases to PostgreSQL.

To support your compliance requirements, this capability is initially turned off, and you can enable it as needed. If you choose to use the generative AI features in AWS DMS SC, it will flexibly decide between traditional rule-based methods and generative AI based on the complexity of the objects being converted. Customers with strict policies against generative AI can continue to rely solely on the rule-based approach, with any unconverted or partially converted objects requiring manual adjustments.

Availability and pricing
This new capability is available today in the following AWS Regions: US East (Ohio, N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Frankfurt).

AWS DMS Schema Conversion with generative AI provides you with a faster migration pathway and helps you accelerate your transition to AWS.

To get started, visit the AWS DMS Schema Conversion documentation and learn how this generative AI capability can simplify your next database migration.

— seb

Simplify governance with declarative policies

Post Syndicated from Esra Kayabali original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/simplify-governance-with-declarative-policies/

Today, I am happy to announce declarative policies, a new capability that helps you declare and enforce desired configuration for a given AWS Service at scale across your organization.

It is common for customers to create standards within their organizations for how cloud resources should be configured. For example, they might require blocking public access for Amazon EBS snapshots. They want these standards to be defined once centrally and enforced across all their accounts, including those that join the organization in the future. Additionally, whenever a cloud operator attempts to configure a resource in a way that does not meet the standard, they want that operator to receive a useful, actionable error message that explains how to remediate the configuration.

Declarative policies address these challenges by helping you to define and enforce desired configuration for AWS services with a few clicks or commands. You can select the configuration you want such as “block public access for VPCs” and AWS will automatically ensure that the desired state is enforced across your multi-account environment (or parts of it) once you attach the policy. This approach reduces the complexity of achieving the desired configuration. Once the configuration is set, it is maintained, even as new features or new APIs are added. Additionally, with declarative policies, administrators have visibility into the current state of service attributes across their environment, and – unlike access control policies, which cannot leak information to those without permissions – end users see custom error messages configured by their organization’s administrators, redirecting them to internal resources or support channels.

“ABSA Group operates in a heavily regulated environment and as we adopt more services, we use SCP policy exclusions to restrict actions and Config rules to detect violations. However, we must create an exception for every new API or feature. With declarative policies, we can simply set VPC Block Public Access to true and have peace of mind that no users, service-linked roles, or future APIs can facilitate public access in our AWS Organizations.” explains Vojtech Mencl, Lead Product Engineer at ABSA, a multinational banking and financial services conglomerate based in Johannesburg, South Africa.

“With custom error messages, we can easily redirect end users to an internal portal for more information on why their action failed. This drastically reduces the operational complexity for governance and accelerates our migration to AWS.” says Matt Draper, Principal Engineer at ABSA.

At this launch, declarative policies supports Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) services. Available service attributes include enforcing IMDSv2, allowing troubleshooting though serial console, allowed Amazon Machine Image (AMI) settings, and blocking public access for Amazon EBS snapshots, Amazon EC2 AMI, and VPC. When new accounts are added to an organization, they will inherit the declarative policy applied at the organization, organizational unit (OU) or account level.

You can create declarative policies through the AWS Organizations console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), AWS CloudFormation, or through AWS Control Tower. Policies can be applied at the organization, OU, or account level. When attached, declarative policies prevent non-compliant actions regardless of whether they were invoked using an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role you created or by an AWS service using a service-linked role.

Getting started with declarative policies
To demonstrate declarative policies, I will walk you through an example. Let’s say that as the security administrator for a large enterprise with hundreds of AWS accounts, I’m responsible for maintaining our organization’s strict security posture. At our company, we have several critical security requirements: we maintain tight control over internet access across all our networks, we only allow AMIs from specific trusted providers, and we need to ensure that no VPC resources are accidentally exposed to the public internet. With declarative policies, I can implement these requirements efficiently. Let me show you how I set this up in my environment.

I go to the AWS Organizations console and choose Policies in the navigation pane. I choose Declarative policies for EC2 under the Supported policy types.

I choose Enable declarative policies for EC2 to enable the feature.

After declarative policies is enabled, I can define and enforce desired configurations for EC2 across all of the accounts in my AWS Organizations.

Before I create declarative policies, as the organization’s administrator, I want to understand the current status of my AWS environment using the account status report, which is a feature of declarative policies. The report offers both a summary view and a detailed CSV file, covering all accounts and AWS Regions within a selected organizational scope. It helps me assess readiness before attaching a policy.

On the next page, I choose Generate status report. I choose an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket under Report S3 URI and choose accounts and OUs to include in the report scope.

Note that the S3 bucket requires the following policy attached to it in order to store the status report:

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Sid": "DeclarativePoliciesReportBucket",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Principal": {
                "Service": [
                    "report.declarative-policies-ec2.amazonaws.com"
                ]
            },
            "Action": [
                "s3:PutObject"
            ],
            "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::<bucketName>/*",
            "Condition": {
                "StringEquals": {
                    "aws:SourceArn": "arn:<partition>:declarative-policies-ec2:<region>:<accountId>:*"
                }
            }
        }
    ]
}

I choose Submit.

When complete, the report is stored in the Amazon S3 bucket I specified. On the View account status report page, I can choose between multiple reports from Reports dropdown to observe what is the current status of various attributes.

I check the Amazon S3 bucket I provided to store a CSV file, which provides the detailed readiness report. I observe what my current state is across my organization unit across different regions.

After I assess the account status, I continue to create a policy. I choose Create policy on the Declarative policies for EC2 page.

On the next page, I enter a Policy name and optionally a Policy description.

In this demo, I use Visual Editor to show how to add service attributes. These attributes include Serial Console Access, Instance Metadata Defaults, Image Block Public Access, Snapshot Block Public Access, VPC Block Public Access, and Allowed Image Settings. I can use JSON Editor to add them manually or to observe the policies I added using Visual Editor. First, I choose VPC Block Public Access to control internet access for resources in my VPC from internet gateways. I choose Block ingress under Internet gateway state. When enabled, this immediately prevents public access without mutating resources and can be rolled back.

As a second attribute, I choose Allowed Image Settings to control the allowed images criteria for AMIs. This is useful because I can ensure all instance launches use a golden AMI that an account or set of accounts generates in my organization, or one provided by a vendor like Amazon or Ubuntu. I choose Enabled under Allowed Image Settings. I choose amazon under Provider. Declarative policies provides transparency with customizable error messages to help reduce end-user frustration. You can optionally add a Custom error message to be displayed when organization members are unable to perform a restricted action. To complete the process of generating the policy, I choose Create policy.

Now, I need to attach the policy to my organization or specific OUs. I choose Attach policy under Actions.

I choose my organization or specific OUs and choose Attach policy.

When an account joins an organization or an OU, the declarative policy attached to it takes immediate effect and all subsequent non-compliant actions will fail (except for VPC Block Public Access, which will immediately curtail public access). Existing resources in the account will not be deleted.

Now available
Declarative policies streamlines governance for AWS customers by reducing policy maintenance overhead, providing consistent enforcement across accounts, and offering transparency to administrators and end users.

Declarative policies are now available in AWS commercial, China and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.

To learn more about declarative policies and start enforcing them in your organization, visit the declarative policies documentation.

— Esra

AWS Verified Access now supports secure access to resources over non-HTTP(S) protocols (in preview)

Post Syndicated from Sébastien Stormacq original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-verified-access-now-supports-secure-access-to-resources-over-non-https-protocols/

AWS Verified Access provides secure access to your corporate applications and resources without a virtual private network (VPN). We launched Verified Access in preview at re:Invent 2 years ago as a way to provide secure, VPN-less access to corporate applications, enabling organizations to manage network access based on identity and device security instead of IP addresses, which increases control and security over application access.

Today, Verified Access is launching a preview of its secure, VPN-less access capabilities to non-HTTP(S) applications and resources, enabling zero trust access to corporate resources over protocols such as Secure Shell (SSH) and Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP).

Organizations increasingly require secure, remote access to internal resources such as databases, remote desktops, and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. Traditional VPN solutions, although effective for network access, often grant broad privileges and don’t support granular access controls, which can expose infrastructure with sensitive data. Although some organizations use bastion hosts to mediate access, this approach can create complexity and policy inconsistencies across HTTP(S) and non-HTTP(S) applications. With the rise of zero trust architectures, these gaps highlight the need for a secure access solution that extends consistent access policies across all applications and resources.

Verified Access addresses these needs by providing zero trust access controls for your corporate applications and resources. By supporting protocols such as SSH, RDP, or Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) or Open Database Connectivity (ODBC), Verified Access simplifies your security operations. Now, you can establish uniform, context-aware access policies across your corporate applications and resources. Verified Access evaluates each access request in real time, making sure access is granted only to users who meet specific identity and device security requirements. Additionally, it eliminates the need for separate VPNs or bastion hosts, streamlining operations and reducing the risk of over-privileged access.

One of my favorite capabilities is onboarding a group of resources by specifying their IP Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) and ports, rather than onboarding one resource at a time. Verified Access automatically creates DNS records for each active resource within the specified CIDR range. This eliminates the need for manual DNS configuration and users can therefore connect to new resources instantly.

Using Verified Access for non-HTTPS access
Configuring Verified Access for non-HTTPS access isn’t very different from what exists today. You can read the blog post I wrote for the launch of the preview 2 years ago or the Get started with Verified Access tutorial to learn how to get started.

Verified Access proposes two new types of endpoint targets: a target for one single resource and a target for multiple resources.

With the network interface, load balancer, or RDS endpoint target you can provide access to an individual resource such as an Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instance or an arbitrary TCP application fronted by a Network Load Balancer or an elastic network interface. This type of target endpoint is defined by a combination of a target type (such as a load balancer or a network interface) and a range of TCP ports. Verified Access will provide a DNS name for each endpoint upon its creation. A Verified Access DNS name is assigned for each target. This is the name end users will use to securely access the resource.

With network CIDR endpoint target, the resources are defined using an IP CIDR and port range. Through this type of endpoint target, you can easily provision secure access to ephemeral resources such as EC2 instances over protocols such as SSH and RDP. This is done without having to perform any actions such as creating or deleting endpoint targets each time a resource is added or removed. As long as these resources are assigned an IP address from the defined CIDR, Verified Access provides a unique public DNS record for each active IP detected in the defined CIDR.

Here is a diagram of the setup for this demo.

AWS Verified Access Demo Setup

Part 1: As a Verified Access administrator

As a Verified Access administrator, I create the Verified Access instance, trust provider, access group, endpoint, and access policies, allowing access by the end user to the SSH server.

For this demo, I configure a Verified Access network CIDR endpoint target. I select TCP as Protocol and Network CIDR as Endpoint type. I make sure the CIDR range is within the one of the VPC where my target resources are. I select the TCP Port ranges and the Subnets within the VPC.

AVA : Create endpoint

This is a good moment to stretch your legs and refill your cup of coffee, it takes a few minutes to create the endpoint.

Once, the status is ✅ Active, I launch an EC2 instance in a private Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). I enable SSH and configure the instance’s security group to only access requests coming from the VPC. A few minutes later, I can see the instance IP has been detected and assigned a DNS name to connect to from the Verified Access client application.

I also have the option during the configuration to delegate my own DNS subdomain, such as secure.mycompany.com, and Verified Access will assign DNS names for the resources within that subdomain.

AVA : DNS names

Create an access policy

At this stage, there is no policy defined on the Verified Access endpoint. It will deny every request by default.

On the Verified Access groups page, I select the Policy tab. Then I select the Modify Verified Access endpoint policy button to create an access policy.

Verified Access - group policy tab

I enter a policy allowing anybody who is authenticated and has an email address ending with @amazon.com. This is the email address I used for the user defined in AWS IAM Identity Center. Note that the name after context is the name I entered as Policy reference name when I created the Verified Access trust provider. The documentation page has the details of the policy syntax, the attributes, and the operators I can use.

permit(principal, action, resource)
when {
    context.awsnewsblog.user.email.address like "*@amazon.com"
};

Verified Access - group define policy

After a few minutes, Verified Access updates the policy and becomes Active again.

Distribute the configuration to clients

The last task as a Verified Access administrator is to extract the JSON configuration file of the client applications.

I retrieve the client application configuration file with the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI). As a system administrator, I’ll distribute this configuration to each client machine.

aws ec2 export-verified-access-instance-client-configuration \
     --verified-access-instance-id "vai-0dbf2c4c011083069"

{
    "Version": "1.0",
    "VerifiedAccessInstanceId": "vai-0dbf2c4c011083069",
    "Region": "us-east-1",
    "DeviceTrustProviders": [],
    "UserTrustProvider": {
        "Type": "iam-identity-center",
        "Scopes": "verified_access_test:application:connect",
        "Issuer": "https://identitycenter.amazonaws.com/ssoins-xxxx",
        "PkceEnabled": true
    },
    "OpenVpnConfigurations": [
        {
            "Config": "Y2...bWU=",
            "Routes": [
                {
                    "Cidr": "2600:1f10:4a02:8700::/57"
                }
            ]
        }
    ]
}

Now that I have a resource to connect to and the Verified Access infrastructure in place, let me show you the end user experience to access a network endpoint.

Part 2: As an end user

As the end user, I receive a link to download and install the Verified Access Connectivity Client application. We support Windows and macOS clients at the time of this writing.

I install the configuration file I received from my administrator. I use ClientConfig1.json as the file name and I copy the file to C:\ProgramData\AWSPylon on Windows or /Library/Application Support/com.aws.pylon.client on macOS.

This is the same configuration file for all users, and the system administrator might push the file to all client machines using an endpoint management tool.

I start the Connectivity Client application. I choose Sign in to start the authentication sequence.

AVA Client : Sign inThe authentication opens my web browser on the authentication page of my identity provider. The exact screen and login sequence varies from one provider to the other. After I’m authenticated, the Connectivity Client creates the secure tunnel to access my resource, an EC2 instance for this demo.

AVA Client : Connecting AVA Client : Connected

Once the status is Connected, I can securely connect to the resource, using the DNS name provided by Verified Access. In a terminal application, I type the ssh command to start the connection.

For this demo, I configured a delegated DNS domain secure.mycompany.com for Verified Access. The DNS address I received for the EC2 instance is 10-0-1-199.awsnews.secure.mycompany.com.

$ ssh -i mykey.pem [email protected]

   ,     #_
   ~\_  ####_        Amazon Linux 2023
  ~~  \_#####\
  ~~     \###|
  ~~       \#/ ___   https://aws.amazon.com/linux/amazon-linux-2023
   ~~       V~' '->
    ~~~         /
      ~~._.   _/
         _/ _/
       _/m/'
Last login: Sat Nov 17 20:17:46 2024 from 1.2.3.4

$

Availability and pricing
Verified Access is available as a public preview in 18 AWS Regions: US East (Ohio, N. Virginia), US West (N. California, Oregon), Asia Pacific (Jakarta, Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland, London, Milan, Stockholm), Israel (Tel Aviv), and South America (São Paulo).

You’re charged for each hour that your non-HTTP(S) Verified Access endpoint remains active and per connection. The first 100 connections per month on each Verified Access endpoint are free. For more information, refer to AWS Verified Access Pricing.

With Verified Access for HTTP(S) and non-HTTP(S) applications you can unify the access controls to your private applications and systems and apply zero trust policies uniformly to all applications, and SSH, RDP, and HTTP(S) resources. It reduces the complexity of your network infrastructure and helps you to implement zero-trust access to your applications and resources. Finally, it adapts to your growing infrastructure, automating DNS setup and supporting large-scale deployments without resource-specific registration.

Go, try Verified Access today, and share your feedback with the team!

— seb

Announcing AWS Transfer Family web apps for fully managed Amazon S3 file transfers

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/announcing-aws-transfer-family-web-apps-for-fully-managed-amazon-s3-file-transfers/

Today I would like to introduce you to AWS Transfer Family web apps, the newest AWS Transfer Family resource. You can create a fully managed, no-code web app that allows authenticated users to list, upload, download, copy, and delete files in specific Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets. Non-developer, line-of-business users inside and outside of your organization can easily exchange file data without the need for desktop clients, scripts, faded instructions on sticky notes, or local IT help.

As the web apps administrator, you get full control over authentication, access, and permissions, and can customize the web app with a page title and a favicon. Here is the web app that I created while writing this blog post:

I can click files to download them, click folders to open them, and click columns to sort. The vertical ellipses menu provides additional options:

Each web app supports uploading and downloading of files up to 160 GiB in size, and uses multipart uploads for large files. Files are transferred across HTTPS connections protected by TLS, with automatic retries and a CRC32 end-to-end integrity check.

All about Transfer Family web apps
I will show you how to create your own web app in just a minute. But first, let’s take a look at some of the essential features and benefits…

Security – Transfer Family web apps use AWS IAM Identity Center, allowing you to use your existing SAML or OIDC identity provider or the built-in Identity Store. Either way, you can use S3 Access Grants to exercise full, fine-grained control over the users and groups that are allowed to see, download, delete, and upload files and to create directories. Your organization can also benefit from AWS Transfer Family’s compliance with SOC, PCI DSS, FedRAMP, HIPAA, and other programs.

Customization – You can customize each Transfer Family web app with a page title and a favicon. You can also put a Amazon CloudFront distribution in front of the web app and host it at a custom domain name, with HTTPS access and a public certificate.

AWS Ecosystem – Transfer Family web apps are hosted on AWS and as such are scalable and highly available. All files are stored in designated S3 buckets, with eleven nines (99.999999999%) of durability. You can take advantage of S3 features including S3 Versioning, S3 server access logging, S3 Event Notifications, and more. You can also use Amazon EventBridge to orchestrate complex post-upload workflows.

Creating a Transfer Family web app
Let’s go through the steps to create a Transfer Family web app. Each web app exists in a specific AWS Region, so I open the AWS Transfer Family console, choose the desired Region (us-east-2 for this post), and select Web apps on the left:

Then I click Create web app to proceed:

I connect to my IAM Identity Center if necessary, then create or choose an IAM service role (details) that allows the Transfer Family web app to access S3 and S3 Access Grants:

I add a Name tag and set the maximum number of concurrent web app users, then click Next:

Now I design my web app, setting the page title and the logo (both optional) before clicking Next:

On the next page I review my settings and click Create to move ahead:

And my web app is created and almost ready to use (I still need to set up permissions and users):

I will use the Access endpoint in the CORS policy that I will soon create for the bucket associated with the web app, so I copy and save it.

Setting Permissions and Users
I create an IAM custom trust policy that provides the necessary read and write permissions to the S3 bucket(s) that will be accessible through my web app (details). This policy will be referenced in an S3 Access Grant that I will create in a minute:

Moving right along, I create the initial set of users and groups in IAM Identity Center (I can add more later):

Next, I create an S3 bucket in the same region as the web app and create an S3 Access Grant. Each S3 Access Grant allows a particular IAM Identity Center identity (a user or a group) to access a specific scope (a bucket or a prefixed part of a bucket) for reading and/or writing:

I also need to attach a CORS policy (details) to the bucket so that the web app is allowed to access it from the browser:

The final step is to associate the users with the new web app. I return to the AWS Transfer Family Web apps page, find my app, and click Assign users and groups:

I can add new users to my directory or pick existing ones:

I’ll add myself to start:

Once assigned, I can share the Access endpoint (as seen above) with the user and they (me, in this case) can log in to the web app:

The Web app endpoint and the Access endpoint are the same by default. If you set up a CloudFront distribution for your web app, the Access endpoint will reflect the URL of the endpoint.

I have shown you the express path through the setup process. As you probably noticed, there are lots of options to control read and write access at the individual and group level. Be sure to explore and fully understand all of these options before you set up your production web app!

Things to Know
Here are a couple of things to know about S3 Transfer Family web apps:

Regions – Web apps can be created in nine AWS Regions; check out the web app documentation for a current list.

Pricing – Pricing is per web app/hour.

API and CLI – You can create and manage web apps programmatically by using create-web-app, describe-web-app, and other AWS Transfer Family actions.

Storage Browser for S3 – Transfer Family web apps are built using Storage Browser for Amazon S3 and offer the same end-user functionality in a fully managed offering.

Getting Started – You can get started with Transfer Family web apps in the Transfer Family console.

Jeff;

Introducing Amazon OpenSearch Service and Amazon Security Lake integration to simplify security analytics

Post Syndicated from Channy Yun (윤석찬) original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-amazon-opensearch-service-zero-etl-integration-for-amazon-security-lake/

Today, we’re announcing the general availability of Amazon OpenSearch Service zero-ETL integration with Amazon Security Lake. This integration enables organizations to efficiently search, analyze, and gain actionable insights from their security data, streamlining complex data engineering requirements and unlocking the full potential of security data. It’s a new way to in-place query and analyze logs in Security Lake that minimizes the need to duplicate data and reduces the operational overhead of managing custom data pipelines. You can directly query your Security Lake data, saving the costs of moving data.

With OpenSearch Service zero-ETL integration with Security Lake, you can use the rich analytics capabilities of OpenSearch Dashboards to query and visualize your data in Security Lake. You can also analyze multiple data sources within a single tool and a single schema, the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF) schema to help with threat-hunting and investigation scenarios.

For time-sensitive investigations and monitoring, you can optionally boost query performance by enabling additional accelerations such as indexed views and dashboards in Amazon OpenSearch Service when you need fast and frequent access to a subset of your data. These capabilities provide complete visibility into all your data stored in Security Lake, regardless of the log volume, to support security investigations, better understanding of your security posture, and gain security-relevant insights.

Getting started with direct queries with Amazon Security Lake
You can get started in a few steps. First, you need to enable Security Lake by creating a Security Lake subscriber. Then, you enable a data connection in Amazon OpenSearch Service. This will automatically create an OpenSearch Serverless collection to store your direct query results and indices.

1. Enable Security Lake and setup permissions for a data lake

To enable Security Lake in the AWS Management Console, specify the data sources that you want to collect such as Amazon Route 53 DNS queries, AWS CloudTrail logs, Amazon VPC Flow logs, and AWS Security Hub findings and your AWS Regions. I chose several Regions and set the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) storage class and roll-up Regions to consolidate data.

Security Lake offers a 15-day trial at no cost so you can deploy it across your organization with the desired data sources and estimate the costs specific to your organization.

Once the enablement is complete, all collected data is ingested into an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket in your account.

To access Security Lake data from an account other than the Security Lake delegated admin account, you should create an AWS Lake Formation subscriber to access and query data from AWS Glue tables associated with Security Lake. Enter the AWS account and external ID that’s authorized to access Security Lake and select the data sources to be accessed. Lake Formation provides cross-account permissions for security analysts to access data in the lake.

After you create the query subscriber, you can go to the account where you plan to deploy your OpenSearch resources and accept the AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM) share that is shared by the Security Lake delegated admin account. The subscriber account will show the share status as pending until it’s manually accepted.

To learn more, visit Enabling Security Lake using the console and Create query subscriber procedures in the Amazon Security Lake User Guide.

2. Create a data connection with OpenSearch Service

You can create a zero-ETL integration in a few steps. In the OpenSearch Service console of the subscriber’s account, choose Connected data source in the Data connections section of the left navigation pane. You can then choose Security Lake as a data source type.

In the next step, you can set up the IAM permissions for accessing the Security Lake data source using the zero-ETL integration. It will also automatically create an OpenSearch Serverless collection and an OpenSearch application.

After the connection is created, you can select one of the pre-built OpenSearch dashboards that periodically query your data in Security Lake to create visualizations. You can create a dashboard using templates for VPC Flow Logs, WAF logs, and CloudTrail data sources in Security Lake.

The following is an example of a pre-built dashboard for VPC Flow logs.

To learn more about data connection, visit Data connections and permissions in the Amazon OpenSearch Service Developer Guide.

3. Query Security Lake data in the OpenSearch Dashboard

To directly query your Security Lake data in OpenSearch Dashboards, go to the Discover page.

In the Discover page, you can use the data picker workflow to locate on a specific Security Lake table to query. There is one table for each Security Lake log source.

After making a selection, you can choose the query language that you want to use, either PPL (Piped Processing Language) or SQL (Structured Query Language), and then write and run your query. The following is a PPL sample result:

You can also choose to search and run a pre-built query template to start your query. There are more than 200 SQL and PPL queries that cover all AWS log sources that are available in Security Lake. You can use the search box to find queries that you’re interested in. For example, search for “VPC Flow” to see all queries related to VPC Flow logs. There’s a description explaining each query and when you might want to use it.

If you want to perform multiple queries on the same data set, for example to support security investigations, you can create an on-demand indexed view for the results of your direct query. After the results are ingested into an OpenSearch index, you can perform low-latency subsequent queries and analysis using analytics features in OpenSearch.

To create an indexed view, choose Create indexed view and select a specified query, an index name, and a time range. After the view is created, the query results will be ingested and available to query as part of the newly created index under available indexed views.

To learn more, visit Searching data in the Amazon OpenSearch Service Developer Guide.

Now available
Amazon OpenSearch Service zero-ETL integration with Amazon Security Lake is now available in the US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), Europe (London), Europe (Paris), South America (São Paulo), and Canada (Central) AWS Regions.

OpenSearch Service separately charges for only the compute needed (as OpenSearch Compute Units) to query your external data in addition to maintaining indexes in OpenSearch Service. For more information, see Amazon OpenSearch Service Pricing.

Give it a try and send feedback to the AWS re:Post for Amazon OpenSearch Service or through your usual AWS Support contacts.

Channy

Use your on-premises infrastructure in Amazon EKS clusters with Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes

Post Syndicated from Channy Yun (윤석찬) original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/use-your-on-premises-infrastructure-in-amazon-eks-clusters-with-amazon-eks-hybrid-nodes/

Today, we’re announcing the general availability of Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) Hybrid Nodes, a new feature that you can use to attach your on-premises and edge infrastructure as nodes to EKS clusters in the cloud.

With Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes, you can unify Kubernetes management across cloud and on-premises environments and take advantage of the scale and availability of Amazon EKS in all the places your applications need to run. You can use your existing on-premises hardware, while offloading the responsibility for managing Kubernetes control planes to EKS and conserving on-premises capacity for your workloads. Using Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes, you can adopt consistent operational practices and tooling across your cloud and on-premises environments.

Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes expands our support for hybrid Kubernetes deployments, adding to Amazon EKS on AWS Outposts and Amazon EKS Anywhere, which we introduced previously. You can compare how Kubernetes and hardware components are managed with each of the EKS hybrid deployment options.

Component EKS on Outposts EKS Hybrid Nodes EKS Anywhere
Hardware Managed by AWS Managed by customer
Kubernetes control plane Hosted and managed by AWS Hosted and managed by customer
Kubernetes nodes Amazon EC2 Customer-managed physical or virtual machines

When you use Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes to attach your on-premises and edge infrastructure to EKS clusters, you can use other Amazon EKS features and integrations, including Amazon EKS add-ons, Pod Identities, cluster access entries, cluster insights, and extended Kubernetes version support. Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes inherently integrates with AWS services including AWS Systems Manager, AWS IAM Roles Anywhere, Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus, Amazon CloudWatch, and Amazon GuardDuty for centralized monitoring, logging, and identity management.

Get started with Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes
Here are steps to use Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes. First, create an EKS cluster and specify your on-premises node and pod subnets. After setting up network connectivity and AWS Identity and Access Management (AWS IAM) permissions for your on-premises environment, run the Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes CLI (nodeadm) on each host that will join the cluster. When hybrid nodes join your cluster, required networking components, such as kube-proxy and CoreDNS, are automatically installed. Before your hybrid nodes become ready to serve applications, you must install a compatible Container Network Interface (CNI) driver. The Cilium and Calico CNI drivers are supported for use with Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes.

1. Prerequisites

You must have certain prerequisites in place before your on-premises infrastructure can join your EKS cluster as hybrid nodes, including the following:

  • Hybrid network connectivity from your on-premises environment to and from AWS using with AWS Site-to-Site VPN, AWS Direct Connect, or another virtual private network (VPN) solution
  • A virtual private cloud (VPC) with routes in its routing table for your on-premises node and, optionally, pod networks, with your virtual private gateway (VGW) or transit gateway (TGW) as the target
  • Infrastructure in the form of physical or virtual machines
  • Operating system that is compatible with hybrid nodes
  • Either AWS IAM Roles Anywhere or AWS Systems Manager set up to authenticate your hybrid nodes with the control plane
  • An EKS cluster IAM role and an EKS Hybrid Nodes IAM role

You can use Amazon Linux 2023, Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 24.04, or Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8 and 9 as the node operating system for your hybrid nodes. AWS supports the hybrid nodes integration with these operating systems but doesn’t provide support for the operating systems themselves. You’re responsible for operating system provisioning and management.

To learn more, visit Prerequisites for EKS Hybrid Nodes in the Amazon EKS User Guide.

2. Create EKS cluster and enable hybrid nodes

Go to the Amazon EKS console and start to create your EKS cluster. In the Step 2 Specify networking screen, turn on Specify the CIDR blocks for your on-premises environments that you will use for hybrid nodes in the Configure remote networks to enable hybrid nodes option.

The Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDRs) of remote nodes and pods need to be RFC-1918 IPv4 IPv4 addresses, and they can’t overlap with the VPC CIDR or the EKS cluster Kubernetes service CIDR. Additionally, the remote node CIDR and the remote pod CIDR can’t overlap. Specifying a pod CIDR block is required if you will run webhooks on your nodes or if your CNI doesn’t use NAT for pod addresses as pod traffic leaves your nodes.

You can also create an EKS cluster using AWS Comand Line Interface (AWS CLI), eksctl, and AWS CloudFormation. To enable your cluster for Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes, use the remote-network-config flag to specify your remote node and, optionally, your remote pod CIDR blocks.

$ aws eks create-cluster --name channy-hybrid-cluster --region=us-east-1 \
    --role-arn arn:aws:iam::012345678910:role/eks-cluster-role \
    --resources-vpc-config subnetIds=subnet-1234a11a,subnet-5678b11b \
    --remote-network-config \
{"remoteNodeNetworks":[{"cidrs":["10.80.0.0/16"]}],"remotePodNetworks":[{"cidrs":["10.85.0.0/16"]}]}}

Your cluster must be configured with API or API_AND_CONFIG_MAP cluster access authentication modes. Create an Amazon EKS access entry for your EKS Hybrid Nodes IAM role to enable nodes to join the cluster.

$ aws eks create-access-entry \
  --cluster-name my-hybrid-cluster \
  --principal-arn arn:aws:iam::012345678910:role/eksHybridNodesRole \ 
  --type HYBRID_LINUX

Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes use temporary IAM credentials provisioned by AWS Systems Manager hybrid activations or AWS IAM Roles Anywhere to authenticate with the EKS cluster. Before connecting your on-premises nodes, you must either create an AWS Systems Manager hybrid activation or add certificates and keys to your nodes for use with AWS IAM Roles Anywhere. To learn more, visit Prepare credentials for EKS Hybrid Nodes in the Amazon EKS User Guide.

3. Connect your hybrid nodes to the EKS cluster

You’re now ready to connect Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes to your EKS cluster. You can use the Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes CLI (nodeadm) to simplify the installation, configuration, and registration of your hosts as hybrid nodes. nodeadm automatically installs the required AWS Systems Manager or IAM Roles Anywhere components when you run the nodeadm install command.

You can run the nodeadm install process on each running host, or you can run nodeadm install as part of your operating system build pipelines to produce an image with the components needed to join your host to an EKS cluster.

$ nodeadm install 1.31 --credential-provider <ssm, iam-ra>
{"level":"info","ts":...,"caller":"...","msg":"Loading configuration","configSource":"file://nodeConfig.yaml"}
{"level":"info","ts":...,"caller":"...","msg":"Validating configuration"}
{"level":"info","ts":...,"caller":"...","msg":"Validating Kubernetes version","kubernetes version":"1.30"}
{"level":"info","ts":...,"caller":"...","msg":"Using Kubernetes version","kubernetes version":"1.30.0"}
{"level":"info","ts":...,"caller":"...","msg":"Installing SSM agent installer..."}
{"level":"info","ts":...,"caller":"...","msg":"Installing kubelet..."}
{"level":"info","ts":...,"caller":"...","msg":"Installing kubectl..."}
{"level":"info","ts":...,"caller":"...","msg":"Installing cni-plugins..."}
{"level":"info","ts":...,"caller":"...","msg":"Installing image credential provider..."}
{"level":"info","ts":...,"caller":"...","msg":"Installing IAM authenticator..."}
{"level":"info","ts":...,"caller":"...","msg":"Finishing up install..."}

Create a nodeConfig.yaml file on each host that contains the information required to connect to your EKS cluster. Here is an example nodeConfig.yaml that uses AWS Systems Manager hybrid activations.

apiVersion: node.eks.aws/v1alpha1
kind: NodeConfig
metadata:
  name: hybrid-node
spec:
  cluster:
    name: my-cluster
    region: us-east-1
  hybrid:
    roleArn: arn:aws:iam:012345678910:role/eksHybridNodesRole
    ssm:
      activationCode: <activation-code>
      activationId: <activation-id>

Now, run nodeadm on each host.

$ nodeadm init -c file:/// nodeConfig.yaml

If the preceding command is completed successfully, your hybrid node has joined your EKS cluster. You can verify this in the Amazon EKS console or with the kubectl get nodes command. Before your hybrid nodes have status as Ready, you must install a compatible CNI. To learn more, visit Install CNI for EKS Hybrid Nodes in the Amazon EKS User Guide.

4. View and manage connected your hybrid nodes in EKS console

Now that the nodes are ready, you can view your hybrid nodes and the resources running on them in the EKS console.

You’re responsible for managing your hybrid nodes and updating the software they run. You can update to the latest version of the Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes CLI to pull in the latest fixes and updates and upgrade Kubernetes versions. To learn more, visit Upgrade EKS Hybrid Nodes in the Amazon EKS User Guide.

Now available
Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes is now available in all AWS Regions except the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions and the China Regions.

There are no upfront commitments or minimum fees, and you pay for the hourly usage of your EKS cluster and EKS Hybrid Nodes as you use them. EKS clusters with your hybrid nodes have the same per cluster per hour cost as EKS clusters with nodes running in AWS Cloud for both standard and extended support. Additionally, EKS clusters with your hybrid nodes incur an hourly fee per hybrid node vCPU. To learn more, visit the Amazon EKS pricing page.

Give EKS Hybrid Nodes a try in the Amazon EKS console. To learn more, visit the EKS Hybrid Nodes documentation and send feedback to AWS re:Post for EKS or through your usual AWS Support contacts.

Channy

Streamline Kubernetes cluster management with new Amazon EKS Auto Mode

Post Syndicated from Channy Yun (윤석찬) original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/streamline-kubernetes-cluster-management-with-new-amazon-eks-auto-mode/

Today, we’re announcing the general availability of Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) Auto Mode, a new capability to streamline Kubernetes cluster management for compute, storage, and networking, from provisioning to on-going maintenance with a single click. You can achieve higher agility, performance, and cost-efficiency by eliminating the operational overhead of managing the cluster infrastructure required to run production-grade Kubernetes applications at scale on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Customers choose Amazon EKS because they can use the open standards and portability of Kubernetes with the security, scalability, and availability of AWS cloud. While Kubernetes gives advanced customers deep controls over application operations, other customers find managing the components required for production-grade Kubernetes applications to be complex and labor-intensive.

With the EKS Auto Mode, you can automate cluster management without deep Kubernetes expertise, because it selects optimal compute instances, dynamically scales resources, continuously optimizes costs, manages core add-ons, patches operating systems, and integrates with AWS security services. AWS expands its operational responsibility in EKS Auto Mode compared to customer-managed infrastructure in your EKS clusters. In addition to the EKS control plane, AWS will configure, manage, and secure the AWS infrastructure in EKS clusters that your applications need to run.

You can now get started quickly, improve performance, and reduce overhead, enabling you to focus on building applications that drive innovation instead of on cluster management tasks. EKS Auto Mode also reduces the work required to acquire and run cost-efficient GPU-accelerated instances so that your generative AI workloads have the capacity they need when they need it.

Get started with Amazon EKS Auto Mode
To get started, go to the Amazon EKS console and start to create your EKS cluster. You’ll have two options, Quick configuration (with EKS Auto Mode) and Custom configuration.

After you choose quick configuration, enter your cluster name and Kubernetes version, IAM roles, VPC subnets. You can view configuration default values in EKS Auto Mode whether you can edit after the cluster is created.

EKS Auto Mode enables the following Kubernetes capabilities in your EKS cluster:

  • Compute auto scaling and management
  • Application load balancing management
  • Pod and service networking and network policies
  • Cluster DNS and GPU support
  • Block storage volume support

When you choose Create, your EKS cluster with Auto Mode will be deployed in minutes with a single click.

If you choose the custom configuration option, you can customize other aspects of your cluster. You can use EKS Auto Mode in this option too.

You can also create an EKS Auto Mode cluster using AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), eksctl, and AWS CloudFormation. Run the following eksctl command to create a new EKS Auto Mode cluster with:

$ eksctl create cluster --name=<cluster-name> --enable-auto-mode

To learn more, visit Create cluster with EKS Auto Mode in the Amazon EKS User Guide.

If you want to enable EKS Auto Mode for an existing EKS cluster, choose Manage in the EKS Auto Mode section of the Overview tab in the EKS cluster detail page.

Select the box next to Use EKS Auto Mode to enable the EKS Auto Mode. You can unselect the EKS Auto Mode that will be configured in the cluster. The default is to create both a system and a default node pool and a node class.

You can also migrate from Karpenter, EKS Managed Node Groups, and EKS Fargate to EKS Auto Mode. To learn more, visit Enable EKS Auto Mode on existing EKS clusters in the Amazon EKS User Guide.

To meet your workload requirements, you can configure specific aspects of your EKS Auto Mode clusters. While EKS Auto Mode manages most infrastructure components automatically, you can customize node networking settings, node compute resources, storage class settings, and application load balancing behaviors while maintaining the benefits of automated infrastructure management. To learn more, visit Change EKS Auto cluster settings in the Amazon EKS User Guide.

Now, you can deploy different types of workloads to Amazon EKS clusters running in EKS Auto Mode. We provide key workload patterns including sample applications, load-balanced web applications, stateful workloads using persistent storage, and workloads with specific node placement requirements. Each example includes complete manifests and step-by-step deployment instructions that you can use as templates for your own applications. To learn more, visit Run workloads in EKS Auto Mode clusters in the Amazon EKS User Guide.

Now available
Amazon EKS Auto Mode is now available in all commercial AWS Regions except China Regions where Amazon EKS is available. You can enable EKS Auto Mode in any EKS cluster running Kubernetes 1.29 and above with no upfront fees or commitments—you pay for the management of the compute resources provisioned, in addition to your regular EC2 costs. To learn more, visit Amazon EKS pricing page.

Please register for the online webinar: Simplifying Kubernetes operations with Amazon EKS Auto Mode on December 12, 2024 to learn more about how EKS Auto Mode can accelerate your time to deploy workloads to production and reduce the operational overheads of Kubernetes. To learn more, visit Automate cluster infrastructure with EKS Auto Mode in the Amazon EKS User Guide.

Give EKS Auto Mode a try in the Amazon EKS console and send feedback to AWS re:Post for EKS or through your usual AWS Support contacts.

Channy

Introducing storage optimized Amazon EC2 I8g instances powered by AWS Graviton4 processors and 3rd gen AWS Nitro SSDs

Post Syndicated from Channy Yun (윤석찬) original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-storage-optimized-amazon-ec2-i8g-instances-powered-by-aws-graviton4-processors-and-3rd-gen-aws-nitro-ssds/

Today, we’re announcing the general availability of Amazon EC2 I8g instances, a new storage optimized instance type to provide the highest real-time storage performance among storage-optimized EC2 instances with the third generation of AWS Nitro SSDs and AWS Graviton4 processors.

AWS Graviton4 is the most powerful and energy efficient processor we have ever designed for a broad range of workloads running on EC2 instances using a 64-bit ARM instruction set architecture. AWS Nitro System SSDs are custom built by AWS and offer high I/O performance, low latency, minimal latency variability, and security with always-on encryption.

EC2 I8g instances are the first instance type to use third-generation AWS Nitro SSDs. These instances offer up to 22.5 TB local NVME SSD storage with up to 65 percent better real-time storage performance per TB and 60 percent lower latency variability compared to the previous generation I4g instances. Based on the AWS Graviton4 processors, I8g instances deliver up to 60 percent better compute performance and two times larger caches compared to I4g.

I8g instances offer up to 96 vCPUs, 768 GiB of memory, and 22.5 TB of storage to deliver more compute and storage choices compared with I4g instances.

Instance name vCPUs Memory (Gib) Storage (GB) Network bandwidth (Gbps) EBS bandwidth (Gbps)
I8g.large 2 16 468 up to 10 up to 10 Gbps
I8g.xlarge 4 32 937 up to 10 up to 10 Gbps
I8g.2xlarge 8 64 1,875 up to 12 up to 10 Gbps
I8g.4xlarge 16 128 3,750 up to 25 up to 10 Gbps
I8g.8xlarge 32 256 7,500
(2 x 3,750)
up to 25 10 Gbps
I8g.12xlarge 48 384 11,520
(3 x 3,750)
up to 28.125 15 Gbps
I8g.16xlarge 64 512 15,000
(4 x 3,750)
up to 37.5 20 Gbps
I8g.24xlarge 96 768 22,500
(6 x 3,750)
up to 56.25 20 Gbps
I8g.metal-24×1 96 768 22,500
(6 x 3,750)
up to 56.25 30 Gbps

You can use I8g instances for I/O intensive workloads that require low latency access to data such as transactional databases (MySQL and PostgreSQL), real-time databases, NoSQL databases, (Aerospike, Apache Druid, MongoDB) and real-time analytics such as Apache Spark.

Additionally, I8g instances are built on the AWS Nitro System, which offloads CPU virtualization, storage, and networking functions to dedicated hardware and software to enhance the performance and security of your workloads. The Graviton4 processors offer you enhanced security by fully encrypting all high-speed physical hardware interfaces.

Things to know
Here are some things that you should know about EC2 I8g instances:

  • Operating system – EC2 I8g instances support Amazon Linux 2023, Amazon Linux 2, CentOS Stream 8 or newer, Ubuntu 18.04 or newer, SUSE 15 SP2 or newer, Debian 11 or newer, Red Hat Enterprise 8.2 or newer, CentOS 8.2 or newer, FreeBSD 13 or newer, Rocky Linux 8.4 or newer, Alma Linux 8.4 or newer, and Alpine Linux 3.12.7 or newer.
  • Networking – You can use I8g instances in storage intensive workloads that typically have burst network usage patterns. All I8g instance sizes have burst network bandwidth and can burst more than 60 minutes, depending on the instance sizes, to support the majority of the workloads requiring instance storage data hydration, backup, and snapshot over the network.
  • Migration – If you’re using I4g instances now, you will have straightforward experience migrating storage intensive workloads to I8g instances because these instances offer similar memory and storage ratios to existing I4g instances.

Now available
Amazon EC2 I8g instances are now available in the US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon) AWS Regions through On-Demand instances, Savings Plans, Spot Instances, Dedicated Instances, or Dedicated Hosts.

Give EC2 I8g instances a try in the Amazon EC2 console. To learn more, visit the EC2 I8g instances page and send feedback to AWS re:Post for EC2 or through your usual AWS Support contacts.

Channy

Now available: Storage optimized Amazon EC2 I7ie instances

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-available-storage-optimized-amazon-ec2-i7ie-instances/

The new storage optimized Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) I7ie instances feature up to 120 TB of low latency NVMe storage and 5th generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.2 GHz. Fueled by 3rd Generation AWS Nitro SSDs, these instances deliver the highest storage density available in the cloud today. When compared to the previous generation of storage optimized instances, they provide:

  • Up to 65% better real-time storage performance per TB
  • Up to 50% lower I/O latency with up to 65% lower latency variability
  • Up to 40% better compute performance
  • Up to twice as many vCPUs and twice as much memory
  • 20% better price-performance

The instances are designed to support I/O intensive workloads that need a high degree of random IOPS: NoSQL databases, distributed file systems, search engines, data warehouses, and analytics.

I7ie instances are available in nine sizes with up to 192 vCPUs and 1.5 TiB of memory:

Instance Name vCPUs
Memory
NVMe Storage
(Nitro SSD)
EBS Bandwidth
Network Bandwidth
I7ie.large 2 16 GiB 1.25 TB
(1 x 1.25 TB)
Up to 10 Gbps Up to 25 Gbps
I7ie.xlarge 4 32 GiB 2.5 TB
(1 x 2.5 TB)
Up to 10 Gbps Up to 25 Gbps
I7ie.2xlarge 8 64 GiB 5 TB
(2 x 2.5 TB)
Up to 10 Gbps Up to 25 Gbps
I7ie.3xlarge 12 96 GiB 7.5 TB
(3 x 2.5 TB)
Up to 10 Gbps Up to 25 Gbps
I7ie.6xlarge 24 192 GiB 15 TB
(2 x 7.5 TB)
Up to 10 Gbps Up to 25 Gbps
I7ie.12xlarge 48 384 GiB 30 TB
(4 x 7.5 TB)
15 Gbps Up to 25 Gbps
I7ie.18xlarge 72 576 GiB 45 TB
(6 x 7.5 TB)
22.5 Gbps Up to 75 Gbps
I7ie.24xlarge 96 768 GiB 60 TB
(8 x 7.5 TB)
30 Gbps Up to 100 Gbps
I7ie.48xlarge 192 1,536 GiB 120 TB
(16 x 7.5 TB)
60 Gbps 100 Gbps

A larger L3 cache, increased memory bandwidth, and other improvements deliver increased processing power. The VP2INTERSECT instruction (part of AVX-512) accelerates Machine Learning and graph processing workloads; the Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) increase deep learning training and inferencing performance.

On the network side, the instances feature over 3x the EBS bandwidth of the previous generation of storage optimized instances. This accelerates just about every I/O-intensive use case, and is especially helpful when hydrating an in-memory database or caching server. All instances sizes support the Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) and can be launched in cluster placement groups; the 48xlarge instance size also supports the Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA).

Things to Know
Here are a couple of things that you should know about these new instances:

Regions – We are launching in the US East (Ohio, N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Europe (Frankfurt, London) AWS Regions today, with plans to expand to others in the future.

Purchase Options – I7ie instances are available in On-Demand, Spot, Savings Plan, Dedicated Instance, and Dedicated Host form.

Jeff;

New Amazon CloudWatch Database Insights: Comprehensive database observability from fleets to instances

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-amazon-cloudwatch-database-insights-comprehensive-database-observability-from-fleets-to-instances/

Observing your Amazon Aurora databases is now a whole lot easier. Instead of spending time setting up telemetry, building dashboards, and configuring alarms, you just open Amazon CloudWatch Database Insights and take a look. With no further setup, you can monitor the health of all of your Amazon Aurora MySQL and PostgreSQL instances in the selected Region:

Each of the sections contains a wealth of detail and I’ll get to that in a moment (this may be the ultimate “but wait, there’s more” post). From this view, I can open the filter control on the left and filter the set of instances in a couple of different ways. For example, I can filter for all of the instances running Amazon Aurora MySQL, and see that I have 66 such instances, with 3 raising alarms:

I can save the filter as a Fleet (note that Fleets are defined by specific properties and tags of the database instances and as such are inherently dynamic):

And then I can see the overall health of the fleet with a click. The entire page updates to reflect the fleet; I focus on the summary:

Behind the scenes, Database Insights looks for CloudWatch alarms that include a DBInstanceIdentifier dimension, and uses these alarms to establish a correlation between database instances and alarms. This, along with other built-in heuristics and correlation steps, allows Database Insights to deliver helpful, well-organized information that will help you to better understand the overall health of your fleet and to dive deep in order to find bottlenecks and other issues.

Clicking on an instance (represented by a hexagon) reveals details; I click on the instance name (demo-mysql-reader0) to learn more:

In the per-instance view I can also see a myriad of details:

Each of the tabs at the bottom provides additional insights into what’s happening inside the database instance. For example, selecting DB Load Analysis / Top SQL / SQL Metrics shows me which SQL statements are imposing the heaviest load, along with 29 additional metrics (not shown):

From past experience, I know that finding and understanding slow queries is a tedious yet important task. with Database Insights I can see patterns that are common to the slow queries, as well as the actual queries:

With help from AWS X-Ray, Application Signals, and the AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry SDK, I can see the services and operations that originate the queries to the database instance:

The red X indicates that this operation is failing the associated Service Level Objective (SLO), an application performance monitoring aspect of Application Signals. An SLO defines the reliability of a service against customer expectations, and can be set up by selecting the service and clicking Create SLO. There are a couple of steps and some very helpful options, but at the core a SLO is measured as a percentage of successful requests over an extended period of time:

If the database instance is configured to send logs to CloudWatch Logs, I can see and search the logs, filtered by the selected time period, and within a particular log group:

There’s still a lot more to explore at the fleet level. For example, I can see the ten calling services which drive the highest DB load (again, this is powered by AWS X-Ray, Application Signals, and the AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry SDK):

And I can see the top 10 instances with respect to any of eight different metrics:

I could go on all day, but I will leave the rest for you to explore. As I never tire of saying, this feature is available now and you can start using it today.

Things to Know
Here are a couple of things to know about Database Insights:

Supported Databases – You can use Database Insights with Amazon Aurora MySQL and Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL database instances.

Pricing – There is a per-hour, per-database instance charge based on the average number of vCPUs used (for provisioned instances) or Aurora Capacity Units (for Serverless v2 databases) monitored, with separate charges for ingestion and storage of database logs. See the CloudWatch Pricing page for more information.

Regions – This feature is available in all commercial AWS Regions.

Jeff;