Tag Archives: CloudWatch Events

Protecting your API using Amazon API Gateway and AWS WAF — Part 2

Post Syndicated from Chris Munns original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/protecting-your-api-using-amazon-api-gateway-and-aws-waf-part-2/

This post courtesy of Heitor Lessa, AWS Specialist Solutions Architect – Serverless

In Part 1 of this blog, we described how to protect your API provided by Amazon API Gateway using AWS WAF. In this blog, we show how to use API keys between an Amazon CloudFront distribution and API Gateway to secure access to your API in API Gateway in addition to your preferred authorization (AuthZ) mechanism already set up in API Gateway. For more information about AuthZ mechanisms in API Gateway, see Secure API Access with Amazon Cognito Federated Identities, Amazon Cognito User Pools, and Amazon API Gateway.

We also extend the AWS CloudFormation stack previously used to automate the creation of the following necessary resources of this solution:

The following are alternative solutions to using an API key, depending on your security requirements:

Using a randomly generated HTTP secret header in CloudFront and verifying by API Gateway request validation
Signing incoming requests with [email protected] and verifying with API Gateway Lambda authorizers

Requirements

To follow along, you need full permissions to create, update, and delete API Gateway, CloudFront, Lambda, and CloudWatch Events through AWS CloudFormation.

Extending the existing AWS CloudFormation stack

First, click here to download the full template. Then follow these steps to update the existing AWS CloudFormation stack:

  1. Go to the AWS Management Console and open the AWS CloudFormation console.
  2. Select the stack that you created in Part 1, right-click it, and select Update Stack.
  3. For option 2, choose Choose file and select the template that you downloaded.
  4. Fill in the required parameters as shown in the following image.

Here’s more information about these parameters:

  • API Gateway to send traffic to – We use the same API Gateway URL as in Part 1 except without the URL scheme (https://): cxm45444t9a.execute-api.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/prod
  • Rotating API Keys – We define Daily and use 2018-04-03 as the timestamp value to append to the API key name

Continue with the AWS CloudFormation console to complete the operation. It might take a couple of minutes to update the stack as CloudFront takes its time to propagate changes across all point of presences.

Enabling API Keys in the example Pet Store API

While the stack completes in the background, let’s enable the use of API Keys in the API that CloudFront will send traffic to.

  1. Go to the AWS Management Console and open the API Gateway console.
  2. Select the API that you created in Part 1 and choose Resources.
  3. Under /pets, choose GET and then choose Method Request.
  4. For API Key Required, choose the dropdown menu and choose true.
  5. To save this change, select the highlighted check mark as shown in the following image.

Next, we need to deploy these changes so that requests sent to /pets fail if an API key isn’t present.

  1. Choose Actions and select Deploy API.
  2. Choose the Deployment stage dropdown menu and select the stage you created in Part 1.
  3. Add a deployment description such as “Requires API Keys under /pets” and choose Deploy.

When the deployment succeeds, you’re redirected to the API Gateway Stage page. There you can use the Invoke URL to test if the following request fails due to not having an API key.

This failure is expected and proves that our deployed changes are working. Next, let’s try to access the same API but this time through our CloudFront distribution.

  1. From the AWS Management Console, open the AWS Cloudformation console.
  2. Select the stack that you created in Part 1 and choose Outputs at the bottom left.
  3. On the CFDistribution line, copy the URL. Before you paste in a new browser tab or window, append ‘/pets’ to it.

As opposed to our first attempt without an API key, we receive a JSON response from the PetStore API. This is because CloudFront is injecting an API key before it forwards the request to the PetStore API. The following image demonstrates both of these tests:

  1. Successful request when accessing the API through CloudFront
  2. Unsuccessful request when accessing the API directly through its Invoke URL

This works as a secret between CloudFront and API Gateway, which could be any agreed random secret that can be rotated like an API key. However, it’s important to know that the API key is a feature to track or meter API consumers’ usage. It’s not a secure authorization mechanism and therefore should be used only in conjunction with an API Gateway authorizer.

Rotating API keys

API keys are automatically rotated based on the schedule (e.g., daily or monthly) that you chose when updating the AWS CloudFormation stack. This requires no maintenance or intervention on your part. In this section, we explain how this process works under the hood and what you can do if you want to manually trigger an API key rotation.

The AWS CloudFormation template that we downloaded and used to update our stack does the following in addition to Part 1.

Introduce a Timestamp parameter that is appended to the API key name

Parameters:
  Timestamp:
    Type: String
    Description: Fill in this format <Year>-<Month>-<Day>
    Default: 2018-04-02

Create an API Gateway key, API Gateway usage plan, associate the new key with the API gateway given as a parameter, and configure the CloudFront distribution to send a custom header when forwarding traffic to API Gateway

CFDistribution:
  Type: AWS::CloudFront::Distribution
  Properties:
    DistributionConfig:
      Logging:
        IncludeCookies: 'false'
        Bucket: !Sub ${S3BucketAccessLogs}.s3.amazonaws.com
        Prefix: cloudfront-logs
      Enabled: 'true'
      Comment: API Gateway Regional Endpoint Blog post
      Origins:
        -
          Id: APIGWRegional
          DomainName: !Select [0, !Split ['/', !Ref ApiURL]]
          CustomOriginConfig:
            HTTPPort: 443
            OriginProtocolPolicy: https-only
          OriginCustomHeaders:
            - 
              HeaderName: x-api-key
              HeaderValue: !Ref ApiKey
              ...

ApiUsagePlan:
  Type: AWS::ApiGateway::UsagePlan
  Properties:
    Description: CloudFront usage only
    UsagePlanName: CloudFront_only
    ApiStages:
      - 
        ApiId: !Select [0, !Split ['.', !Ref ApiURL]]
        Stage: !Select [1, !Split ['/', !Ref ApiURL]]

ApiKey: 
  Type: "AWS::ApiGateway::ApiKey"
  Properties: 
    Name: !Sub "CloudFront-${Timestamp}"
    Description: !Sub "CloudFormation API Key ${Timestamp}"
    Enabled: true

ApiKeyUsagePlan:
  Type: "AWS::ApiGateway::UsagePlanKey"
  Properties:
    KeyId: !Ref ApiKey
    KeyType: API_KEY
    UsagePlanId: !Ref ApiUsagePlan

As shown in the ApiKey resource, we append the given Timestamp to Name as well as use it in the API Gateway usage plan key resource. This means that whenever the Timestamp parameter changes, AWS CloudFormation triggers a resource replacement and updates every resource that depends on that API key. In this case, that includes the AWS CloudFront configuration and API Gateway usage plan.

But what does the rotation schedule that you chose at the beginning of this blog mean in this example?

Create a scheduled activity to trigger a Lambda function on a given schedule

Parameters:
...
  ApiKeyRotationSchedule: 
    Description: Schedule to rotate API Keys e.g. Daily, Monthly, Bimonthly basis
    Type: String
    Default: Daily
    AllowedValues:
      - Daily
      - Fortnightly
      - Monthly
      - Bimonthly
      - Quarterly
    ConstraintDescription: Must be any of the available options

Mappings: 

  ScheduleMap: 
    CloudwatchEvents: 
      Daily: "rate(1 day)"
      Fortnightly: "rate(14 days)"
      Monthly: "rate(30 days)"
      Bimonthly: "rate(60 days)"
      Quarterly: "rate(90 days)"

Resources:
...
  RotateApiKeysScheduledJob: 
    Type: "AWS::Events::Rule"
    Properties: 
      Description: "ScheduledRule"
      ScheduleExpression: !FindInMap [ScheduleMap, CloudwatchEvents, !Ref ApiKeyRotationSchedule]
      State: "ENABLED"
      Targets: 
        - 
          Arn: !GetAtt RotateApiKeysFunction.Arn
          Id: "RotateApiKeys"

The resource RotateApiKeysScheduledJob shows that the schedule that you selected through a dropdown menu when updating the AWS CloudFormation stack is actually converted to a CloudWatch Events rule. This in turn triggers a Lambda function that is defined in the same template.

RotateApiKeysFunction:
      Type: "AWS::Lambda::Function"
      Properties:
        Handler: "index.lambda_handler"
        Role: !GetAtt RotateApiKeysFunctionRole.Arn
        Runtime: python3.6
        Environment:
          Variables:
            StackName: !Ref "AWS::StackName"
        Code:
          ZipFile: !Sub |
            import datetime
            import os

            import boto3
            from botocore.exceptions import ClientError

            session = boto3.Session()
            cfn = session.client('cloudformation')
            
            timestamp = datetime.date.today()            
            params = {
                'StackName': os.getenv('StackName'),
                'UsePreviousTemplate': True,
                'Capabilities': ["CAPABILITY_IAM"],
                'Parameters': [
                    {
                      'ParameterKey': 'ApiURL',
                      'UsePreviousValue': True
                    },
                    {
                      'ParameterKey': 'ApiKeyRotationSchedule',
                      'UsePreviousValue': True
                    },
                    {
                      'ParameterKey': 'Timestamp',
                      'ParameterValue': str(timestamp)
                    },
                ],                
            }

            def lambda_handler(event, context):
              """ Updates CloudFormation Stack with a new timestamp and returns CloudFormation response"""
              try:
                  response = cfn.update_stack(**params)
              except ClientError as err:
                  if "No updates are to be performed" in err.response['Error']['Message']:
                      return {"message": err.response['Error']['Message']}
                  else:
                      raise Exception("An error happened while updating the stack: {}".format(err))          
  
              return response

All this Lambda function does is trigger an AWS CloudFormation stack update via API (exactly what you did through the console but programmatically) and updates the Timestamp parameter. As a result, it rotates the API key and the CloudFront distribution configuration.

This gives you enough flexibility to change the API key rotation schedule at any time without maintaining or writing any code. You can also manually update the stack and rotate the keys by updating the AWS CloudFormation stack’s Timestamp parameter.

Next Steps

We hope you found the information in this blog helpful. You can use it to understand how to create a mechanism to allow traffic only from CloudFront to API Gateway and avoid bypassing the AWS WAF rules that Part 1 set up.

Keep the following important notes in mind about this solution:

  • It assumes that you already have a strong AuthZ mechanism, managed by API Gateway, to control access to your API.
  • The API Gateway usage plan and other resources created in this solution work only for APIs created in the same account (the ApiUrl parameter).
  • If you already use API keys for tracking API usage, consider using either of the following solutions as a replacement:
    • Use a random HTTP header value in CloudFront origin configuration and use an API Gateway request model validation to verify it instead of API keys alone.
    • Combine [email protected] and an API Gateway custom authorizer to sign and verify incoming requests using a shared secret known only to the two. This is a more advanced technique.

A serverless solution for invoking AWS Lambda at a sub-minute frequency

Post Syndicated from Emanuele Menga original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/a-serverless-solution-for-invoking-aws-lambda-at-a-sub-minute-frequency/

If you’ve used Amazon CloudWatch Events to schedule the invocation of a Lambda function at regular intervals, you may have noticed that the highest frequency possible is one invocation per minute. However, in some cases, you may need to invoke Lambda more often than that. In this blog post, I’ll cover invoking a Lambda function every 10 seconds, but with some simple math you can change to whatever interval you like.

To achieve this, I’ll show you how to leverage Step Functions and Amazon Kinesis Data Streams.

The Solution

For this example, I’ve created a Step Functions State Machine that invokes our Lambda function 6 times, 10 seconds apart. Such State Machine is then executed once per minute by a CloudWatch Events Rule. This state machine is then executed once per minute by an Amazon CloudWatch Events rule. Finally, the Kinesis Data Stream triggers our Lambda function for each record inserted. The result is our Lambda function being invoked every 10 seconds, indefinitely.

Below is a diagram illustrating how the various services work together.

Step 1: My sampleLambda function doesn’t actually do anything, it just simulates an execution for a few seconds. This is the (Python) code of my dummy function:

import time

import random


def lambda_handler(event, context):

rand = random.randint(1, 3)

print('Running for {} seconds'.format(rand))

time.sleep(rand)

return True

Step 2:

The next step is to create a second Lambda function, that I called Iterator, which has two duties:

  • It keeps track of the current number of iterations, since Step Function doesn’t natively have a state we can use for this purpose.
  • It asynchronously invokes our Lambda function at every loops.

This is the code of the Iterator, adapted from here.

 

import boto3

client = boto3.client('kinesis')

def lambda_handler(event, context):

index = event['iterator']['index'] + 1

response = client.put_record(

StreamName='LambdaSubMinute',

PartitionKey='1',

Data='',

)

return {

'index': index,

'continue': index < event['iterator']['count'],

'count': event['iterator']['count']

}

This function does three things:

  • Increments the counter.
  • Verifies if we reached a count of (in this example) 6.
  • Sends an empty record to the Kinesis Stream.

Now we can create the Step Functions State Machine; the definition is, again, adapted from here.

 

{

"Comment": "Invoke Lambda every 10 seconds",

"StartAt": "ConfigureCount",

"States": {

"ConfigureCount": {

"Type": "Pass",

"Result": {

"index": 0,

"count": 6

},

"ResultPath": "$.iterator",

"Next": "Iterator"

},

"Iterator": {

"Type": "Task",

"Resource": “arn:aws:lambda:REGION:ACCOUNT_ID:function:Iterator",

"ResultPath": "$.iterator",

"Next": "IsCountReached"

},

"IsCountReached": {

"Type": "Choice",

"Choices": [

{

"Variable": "$.iterator.continue",

"BooleanEquals": true,

"Next": "Wait"

}

],

"Default": "Done"

},

"Wait": {

"Type": "Wait",

"Seconds": 10,

"Next": "Iterator"

},

"Done": {

"Type": "Pass",

"End": true

}

}

}

This is how it works:

  1. The state machine starts and sets the index at 0 and the count at 6.
  2. Iterator function is invoked.
  3. If the iterator function reached the end of the loop, the IsCountReached state terminates the execution, otherwise the machine waits for 10 seconds.
  4. The machine loops back to the iterator.

Step 3: Create an Amazon CloudWatch Events rule scheduled to trigger every minute and add the state machine as its target. I’ve actually prepared an Amazon CloudFormation template that creates the whole stack and starts the Lambda invocations, you can find it here.

Performance

Let’s have a look at a sample series of invocations and analyse how precise the timing is. In the following chart I reported the delay (in excess of the expected 10-second-wait) of 30 consecutive invocations of my dummy function, when the Iterator is configured with a memory size of 1024MB.

Invocations Delay

Notice the delay increases by a few hundred milliseconds at every invocation. The good news is it accrues only within the same loop, 6 times; after that, a new CloudWatch Events kicks in and it resets.

This delay  is due to the work that AWS Step Function does outside of the Wait state, the main component of which is the Iterator function itself, that runs synchronously in the state machine and therefore adds up its duration to the 10-second-wait.

As we can easily imagine, the memory size of the Iterator Lambda function does make a difference. Here are the Average and Maximum duration of the function with 256MB, 512MB, 1GB and 2GB of memory.

Average Duration

Maximum Duration


Given those results, I’d say that a memory of 1024MB is a good compromise between costs and performance.

Caveats

As mentioned, in our Amazon CloudWatch Events documentation, in rare cases a rule can be triggered twice, causing two parallel executions of the state machine. If that is a concern, we can add a task state at the beginning of the state machine that checks if any other executions are currently running. If the outcome is positive, then a choice state can immediately terminate the flow. Since the state machine is invoked every 60 seconds and runs for about 50, it is safe to assume that executions should all be sequential and any parallel executions should be treated as duplicates. The task state that checks for current running executions can be a Lambda function similar to the following:

 

import boto3

client = boto3.client('stepfunctions')

def lambda_handler(event, context):

response = client.list_executions(

stateMachineArn='arn:aws:states:REGION:ACCOUNTID:stateMachine:LambdaSubMinute',

statusFilter='RUNNING'

)

return {

'alreadyRunning': len(response['executions']) > 0

}

About the Author

Emanuele Menga, Cloud Support Engineer

 

Rotate Amazon RDS database credentials automatically with AWS Secrets Manager

Post Syndicated from Apurv Awasthi original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/rotate-amazon-rds-database-credentials-automatically-with-aws-secrets-manager/

Recently, we launched AWS Secrets Manager, a service that makes it easier to rotate, manage, and retrieve database credentials, API keys, and other secrets throughout their lifecycle. You can configure Secrets Manager to rotate secrets automatically, which can help you meet your security and compliance needs. Secrets Manager offers built-in integrations for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Amazon Aurora on Amazon RDS, and can rotate credentials for these databases natively. You can control access to your secrets by using fine-grained AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies. To retrieve secrets, employees replace plaintext secrets with a call to Secrets Manager APIs, eliminating the need to hard-code secrets in source code or update configuration files and redeploy code when secrets are rotated.

In this post, I introduce the key features of Secrets Manager. I then show you how to store a database credential for a MySQL database hosted on Amazon RDS and how your applications can access this secret. Finally, I show you how to configure Secrets Manager to rotate this secret automatically.

Key features of Secrets Manager

These features include the ability to:

  • Rotate secrets safely. You can configure Secrets Manager to rotate secrets automatically without disrupting your applications. Secrets Manager offers built-in integrations for rotating credentials for Amazon RDS databases for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Amazon Aurora. You can extend Secrets Manager to meet your custom rotation requirements by creating an AWS Lambda function to rotate other types of secrets. For example, you can create an AWS Lambda function to rotate OAuth tokens used in a mobile application. Users and applications retrieve the secret from Secrets Manager, eliminating the need to email secrets to developers or update and redeploy applications after AWS Secrets Manager rotates a secret.
  • Secure and manage secrets centrally. You can store, view, and manage all your secrets. By default, Secrets Manager encrypts these secrets with encryption keys that you own and control. Using fine-grained IAM policies, you can control access to secrets. For example, you can require developers to provide a second factor of authentication when they attempt to retrieve a production database credential. You can also tag secrets to help you discover, organize, and control access to secrets used throughout your organization.
  • Monitor and audit easily. Secrets Manager integrates with AWS logging and monitoring services to enable you to meet your security and compliance requirements. For example, you can audit AWS CloudTrail logs to see when Secrets Manager rotated a secret or configure AWS CloudWatch Events to alert you when an administrator deletes a secret.
  • Pay as you go. Pay for the secrets you store in Secrets Manager and for the use of these secrets; there are no long-term contracts or licensing fees.

Get started with Secrets Manager

Now that you’re familiar with the key features, I’ll show you how to store the credential for a MySQL database hosted on Amazon RDS. To demonstrate how to retrieve and use the secret, I use a python application running on Amazon EC2 that requires this database credential to access the MySQL instance. Finally, I show how to configure Secrets Manager to rotate this database credential automatically. Let’s get started.

Phase 1: Store a secret in Secrets Manager

  1. Open the Secrets Manager console and select Store a new secret.
     
    Secrets Manager console interface
     
  2. I select Credentials for RDS database because I’m storing credentials for a MySQL database hosted on Amazon RDS. For this example, I store the credentials for the database superuser. I start by securing the superuser because it’s the most powerful database credential and has full access over the database.
     
    Store a new secret interface with Credentials for RDS database selected
     

    Note: For this example, you need permissions to store secrets in Secrets Manager. To grant these permissions, you can use the AWSSecretsManagerReadWriteAccess managed policy. Read the AWS Secrets Manager Documentation for more information about the minimum IAM permissions required to store a secret.

  3. Next, I review the encryption setting and choose to use the default encryption settings. Secrets Manager will encrypt this secret using the Secrets Manager DefaultEncryptionKeyDefaultEncryptionKey in this account. Alternatively, I can choose to encrypt using a customer master key (CMK) that I have stored in AWS KMS.
     
    Select the encryption key interface
     
  4. Next, I view the list of Amazon RDS instances in my account and select the database this credential accesses. For this example, I select the DB instance mysql-rds-database, and then I select Next.
     
    Select the RDS database interface
     
  5. In this step, I specify values for Secret Name and Description. For this example, I use Applications/MyApp/MySQL-RDS-Database as the name and enter a description of this secret, and then select Next.
     
    Secret Name and description interface
     
  6. For the next step, I keep the default setting Disable automatic rotation because my secret is used by my application running on Amazon EC2. I’ll enable rotation after I’ve updated my application (see Phase 2 below) to use Secrets Manager APIs to retrieve secrets. I then select Next.

    Note: If you’re storing a secret that you’re not using in your application, select Enable automatic rotation. See our AWS Secrets Manager getting started guide on rotation for details.

     
    Configure automatic rotation interface
     

  7. Review the information on the next screen and, if everything looks correct, select Store. We’ve now successfully stored a secret in Secrets Manager.
  8. Next, I select See sample code.
     
    The See sample code button
     
  9. Take note of the code samples provided. I will use this code to update my application to retrieve the secret using Secrets Manager APIs.
     
    Python sample code
     

Phase 2: Update an application to retrieve secret from Secrets Manager

Now that I have stored the secret in Secrets Manager, I update my application to retrieve the database credential from Secrets Manager instead of hard coding this information in a configuration file or source code. For this example, I show how to configure a python application to retrieve this secret from Secrets Manager.

  1. I connect to my Amazon EC2 instance via Secure Shell (SSH).
  2. Previously, I configured my application to retrieve the database user name and password from the configuration file. Below is the source code for my application.
    import MySQLdb
    import config

    def no_secrets_manager_sample()

    # Get the user name, password, and database connection information from a config file.
    database = config.database
    user_name = config.user_name
    password = config.password

    # Use the user name, password, and database connection information to connect to the database
    db = MySQLdb.connect(database.endpoint, user_name, password, database.db_name, database.port)

  3. I use the sample code from Phase 1 above and update my application to retrieve the user name and password from Secrets Manager. This code sets up the client and retrieves and decrypts the secret Applications/MyApp/MySQL-RDS-Database. I’ve added comments to the code to make the code easier to understand.
    # Use the code snippet provided by Secrets Manager.
    import boto3
    from botocore.exceptions import ClientError

    def get_secret():
    #Define the secret you want to retrieve
    secret_name = "Applications/MyApp/MySQL-RDS-Database"
    #Define the Secrets mManager end-point your code should use.
    endpoint_url = "https://secretsmanager.us-east-1.amazonaws.com"
    region_name = "us-east-1"

    #Setup the client
    session = boto3.session.Session()
    client = session.client(
    service_name='secretsmanager',
    region_name=region_name,
    endpoint_url=endpoint_url
    )

    #Use the client to retrieve the secret
    try:
    get_secret_value_response = client.get_secret_value(
    SecretId=secret_name
    )
    #Error handling to make it easier for your code to tolerate faults
    except ClientError as e:
    if e.response['Error']['Code'] == 'ResourceNotFoundException':
    print("The requested secret " + secret_name + " was not found")
    elif e.response['Error']['Code'] == 'InvalidRequestException':
    print("The request was invalid due to:", e)
    elif e.response['Error']['Code'] == 'InvalidParameterException':
    print("The request had invalid params:", e)
    else:
    # Decrypted secret using the associated KMS CMK
    # Depending on whether the secret was a string or binary, one of these fields will be populated
    if 'SecretString' in get_secret_value_response:
    secret = get_secret_value_response['SecretString']
    else:
    binary_secret_data = get_secret_value_response['SecretBinary']

    # Your code goes here.

  4. Applications require permissions to access Secrets Manager. My application runs on Amazon EC2 and uses an IAM role to obtain access to AWS services. I will attach the following policy to my IAM role. This policy uses the GetSecretValue action to grant my application permissions to read secret from Secrets Manager. This policy also uses the resource element to limit my application to read only the Applications/MyApp/MySQL-RDS-Database secret from Secrets Manager. You can visit the AWS Secrets Manager Documentation to understand the minimum IAM permissions required to retrieve a secret.
    {
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": {
    "Sid": "RetrieveDbCredentialFromSecretsManager",
    "Effect": "Allow",
    "Action": "secretsmanager:GetSecretValue",
    "Resource": "arn:aws:secretsmanager:::secret:Applications/MyApp/MySQL-RDS-Database"
    }
    }

Phase 3: Enable Rotation for Your Secret

Rotating secrets periodically is a security best practice because it reduces the risk of misuse of secrets. Secrets Manager makes it easy to follow this security best practice and offers built-in integrations for rotating credentials for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Amazon Aurora databases hosted on Amazon RDS. When you enable rotation, Secrets Manager creates a Lambda function and attaches an IAM role to this function to execute rotations on a schedule you define.

Note: Configuring rotation is a privileged action that requires several IAM permissions and you should only grant this access to trusted individuals. To grant these permissions, you can use the AWS IAMFullAccess managed policy.

Next, I show you how to configure Secrets Manager to rotate the secret Applications/MyApp/MySQL-RDS-Database automatically.

  1. From the Secrets Manager console, I go to the list of secrets and choose the secret I created in the first step Applications/MyApp/MySQL-RDS-Database.
     
    List of secrets in the Secrets Manager console
     
  2. I scroll to Rotation configuration, and then select Edit rotation.
     
    Rotation configuration interface
     
  3. To enable rotation, I select Enable automatic rotation. I then choose how frequently I want Secrets Manager to rotate this secret. For this example, I set the rotation interval to 60 days.
     
    Edit rotation configuration interface
     
  4. Next, Secrets Manager requires permissions to rotate this secret on your behalf. Because I’m storing the superuser database credential, Secrets Manager can use this credential to perform rotations. Therefore, I select Use the secret that I provided in step 1, and then select Next.
     
    Select which secret to use in the Edit rotation configuration interface
     
  5. The banner on the next screen confirms that I have successfully configured rotation and the first rotation is in progress, which enables you to verify that rotation is functioning as expected. Secrets Manager will rotate this credential automatically every 60 days.
     
    Confirmation banner message
     

Summary

I introduced AWS Secrets Manager, explained the key benefits, and showed you how to help meet your compliance requirements by configuring AWS Secrets Manager to rotate database credentials automatically on your behalf. Secrets Manager helps you protect access to your applications, services, and IT resources without the upfront investment and on-going maintenance costs of operating your own secrets management infrastructure. To get started, visit the Secrets Manager console. To learn more, visit Secrets Manager documentation.

If you have comments about this post, submit them in the Comments section below. If you have questions about anything in this post, start a new thread on the Secrets Manager forum.

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Serverless Dynamic Web Pages in AWS: Provisioned with CloudFormation

Post Syndicated from AWS Admin original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/serverless-dynamic-web-pages-in-aws-provisioned-with-cloudformation/

***This blog is authored by Mike Okner of Monsanto, an AWS customer. It originally appeared on the Monsanto company blog. Minor edits were made to the original post.***

Recently, I was looking to create a status page app to monitor a few important internal services. I wanted this app to be as lightweight, reliable, and hassle-free as possible, so using a “serverless” architecture that doesn’t require any patching or other maintenance was quite appealing.

I also don’t deploy anything in a production AWS environment outside of some sort of template (usually CloudFormation) as a rule. I don’t want to have to come back to something I created ad hoc in the console after 6 months and try to recall exactly how I architected all of the resources. I’ll inevitably forget something and create more problems before solving the original one. So building the status page in a template was a requirement.

The Design
I settled on a design using two Lambda functions, both written in Python 3.6.

The first Lambda function makes requests out to a list of important services and writes their current status to a DynamoDB table. This function is executed once per minute via CloudWatch Event Rule.

The second Lambda function reads each service’s status & uptime information from DynamoDB and renders a Jinja template. This function is behind an API Gateway that has been configured to return text/html instead of its default application/json Content-Type.

The CloudFormation Template
AWS provides a Serverless Application Model template transformer to streamline the templating of Lambda + API Gateway designs, but it assumes (like everything else about the API Gateway) that you’re actually serving an API that returns JSON content. So, unfortunately, it won’t work for this use-case because we want to return HTML content. Instead, we’ll have to enumerate every resource like usual.

The Skeleton
We’ll be using YAML for the template in this example. I find it easier to read than JSON, but you can easily convert between the two with a converter if you disagree.

---
AWSTemplateFormatVersion: '2010-09-09'
Description: Serverless status page app
Resources:
  # [...Resources]

The Status-Checker Lambda Resource
This one is triggered on a schedule by CloudWatch, and looks like:

# Status Checker Lambda
CheckerLambda:
  Type: AWS::Lambda::Function
  Properties:
    Code: ./lambda.zip
    Environment:
      Variables:
        TABLE_NAME: !Ref DynamoTable
    Handler: checker.handler
    Role:
      Fn::GetAtt:
      - CheckerLambdaRole
      - Arn
    Runtime: python3.6
    Timeout: 45
CheckerLambdaRole:
  Type: AWS::IAM::Role
  Properties:
    ManagedPolicyArns:
    - arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/AmazonDynamoDBFullAccess
    - arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/service-role/AWSLambdaBasicExecutionRole
    AssumeRolePolicyDocument:
      Version: '2012-10-17'
      Statement:
      - Action:
        - sts:AssumeRole
        Effect: Allow
        Principal:
          Service:
          - lambda.amazonaws.com
CheckerLambdaTimer:
  Type: AWS::Events::Rule
  Properties:
    ScheduleExpression: rate(1 minute)
    Targets:
    - Id: CheckerLambdaTimerLambdaTarget
      Arn:
        Fn::GetAtt:
        - CheckerLambda
        - Arn
CheckerLambdaTimerPermission:
  Type: AWS::Lambda::Permission
  Properties:
    Action: lambda:invokeFunction
    FunctionName: !Ref CheckerLambda
    SourceArn:
      Fn::GetAtt:
      - CheckerLambdaTimer
      - Arn
    Principal: events.amazonaws.com

Let’s break that down a bit.

The CheckerLambda is the actual Lambda function. The Code section is a local path to a ZIP file containing the code and its dependencies. I’m using CloudFormation’s packaging feature to automatically push the deployable to S3.

The CheckerLambdaRole is the IAM role the Lambda will assume which grants it access to DynamoDB in addition to the usual Lambda logging permissions.

The CheckerLambdaTimer is the CloudWatch Events Rule that triggers the checker to run once per minute.

The CheckerLambdaTimerPermission grants CloudWatch the ability to invoke the checker Lambda function on its interval.

The Web Page Gateway
The API Gateway handles incoming requests for the web page, invokes the Lambda, and then returns the Lambda’s results as HTML content. Its template looks like:

# API Gateway for Web Page Lambda
PageGateway:
  Type: AWS::ApiGateway::RestApi
  Properties:
    Name: Service Checker Gateway
PageResource:
  Type: AWS::ApiGateway::Resource
  Properties:
    RestApiId: !Ref PageGateway
    ParentId:
      Fn::GetAtt:
      - PageGateway
      - RootResourceId
    PathPart: page
PageGatewayMethod:
  Type: AWS::ApiGateway::Method
  Properties:
    AuthorizationType: NONE
    HttpMethod: GET
    Integration:
      Type: AWS
      IntegrationHttpMethod: POST
      Uri:
        Fn::Sub: arn:aws:apigateway:${AWS::Region}:lambda:path/2015-03-31/functions/${WebRenderLambda.Arn}/invocations
      RequestTemplates:
        application/json: |
          {
              "method": "$context.httpMethod",
              "body" : $input.json('$'),
              "headers": {
                  #foreach($param in $input.params().header.keySet())
                  "$param": "$util.escapeJavaScript($input.params().header.get($param))"
                  #if($foreach.hasNext),#end
                  #end
              }
          }
      IntegrationResponses:
      - StatusCode: 200
        ResponseParameters:
          method.response.header.Content-Type: "'text/html'"
        ResponseTemplates:
          text/html: "$input.path('$')"
    ResourceId: !Ref PageResource
    RestApiId: !Ref PageGateway
    MethodResponses:
    - StatusCode: 200
      ResponseParameters:
        method.response.header.Content-Type: true
PageGatewayProdStage:
  Type: AWS::ApiGateway::Stage
  Properties:
    DeploymentId: !Ref PageGatewayDeployment
    RestApiId: !Ref PageGateway
    StageName: Prod
PageGatewayDeployment:
  Type: AWS::ApiGateway::Deployment
  DependsOn: PageGatewayMethod
  Properties:
    RestApiId: !Ref PageGateway
    Description: PageGateway deployment
    StageName: Stage

There’s a lot going on here, but the real meat is in the PageGatewayMethod section. There are a couple properties that deviate from the default which is why we couldn’t use the SAM transformer.

First, we’re passing request headers through to the Lambda in theRequestTemplates section. I’m doing this so I can validate incoming auth headers. The API Gateway can do some types of auth, but I found it easier to check auth myself in the Lambda function since the Gateway is designed to handle API calls and not browser requests.

Next, note that in the IntegrationResponses section we’re defining the Content-Type header to be ‘text/html’ (with single-quotes) and defining the ResponseTemplate to be $input.path(‘$’). This is what makes the request render as a HTML page in your browser instead of just raw text.

Due to the StageName and PathPart values in the other sections, your actual page will be accessible at https://someId.execute-api.region.amazonaws.com/Prod/page. I have the page behind an existing reverse-proxy and give it a saner URL for end-users. The reverse proxy also attaches the auth header I mentioned above. If that header isn’t present, the Lambda will render an error page instead so the proxy can’t be bypassed.

The Web Page Rendering Lambda
This Lambda is invoked by calls to the API Gateway and looks like:

# Web Page Lambda
WebRenderLambda:
  Type: AWS::Lambda::Function
  Properties:
    Code: ./lambda.zip
    Environment:
      Variables:
        TABLE_NAME: !Ref DynamoTable
    Handler: web.handler
    Role:
      Fn::GetAtt:
      - WebRenderLambdaRole
      - Arn
    Runtime: python3.6
    Timeout: 30
WebRenderLambdaRole:
  Type: AWS::IAM::Role
  Properties:
    ManagedPolicyArns:
    - arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/AmazonDynamoDBReadOnlyAccess
    - arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/service-role/AWSLambdaBasicExecutionRole
    AssumeRolePolicyDocument:
      Version: '2012-10-17'
      Statement:
      - Action:
        - sts:AssumeRole
        Effect: Allow
        Principal:
          Service:
          - lambda.amazonaws.com
WebRenderLambdaGatewayPermission:
  Type: AWS::Lambda::Permission
  Properties:
    FunctionName: !Ref WebRenderLambda
    Action: lambda:invokeFunction
    Principal: apigateway.amazonaws.com
    SourceArn:
      Fn::Sub:
      - arn:aws:execute-api:${AWS::Region}:${AWS::AccountId}:${__ApiId__}/*/*/*
      - __ApiId__: !Ref PageGateway

The WebRenderLambda and WebRenderLambdaRole should look familiar.

The WebRenderLambdaGatewayPermission is similar to the Status Checker’s CloudWatch permission, only this time it allows the API Gateway to invoke this Lambda.

The DynamoDB Table
This one is straightforward.

# DynamoDB table
DynamoTable:
  Type: AWS::DynamoDB::Table
  Properties:
    AttributeDefinitions:
    - AttributeName: name
      AttributeType: S
    ProvisionedThroughput:
      WriteCapacityUnits: 1
      ReadCapacityUnits: 1
    TableName: status-page-checker-results
    KeySchema:
    - KeyType: HASH
      AttributeName: name

The Deployment
We’ve made it this far defining every resource in a template that we can check in to version control, so we might as well script the deployment as well rather than manually manage the CloudFormation Stack via the AWS web console.

Since I’m using the packaging feature, I first run:

$ aws cloudformation package \
    --template-file template.yaml \
    --s3-bucket <some-bucket-name> \
    --output-template-file template-packaged.yaml
Uploading to 34cd6e82c5e8205f9b35e71afd9e1548 1922559 / 1922559.0 (100.00%) Successfully packaged artifacts and wrote output template to file template-packaged.yaml.

Then to deploy the template (whether new or modified), I run:

$ aws cloudformation deploy \
    --region '<aws-region>' \
    --template-file template-packaged.yaml \
    --stack-name '<some-name>' \
    --capabilities CAPABILITY_IAM
Waiting for changeset to be created.. Waiting for stack create/update to complete Successfully created/updated stack - <some-name>

And that’s it! You’ve just created a dynamic web page that will never require you to SSH anywhere, patch a server, recover from a disaster after Amazon terminates your unhealthy EC2, or any other number of pitfalls that are now the problem of some ops person at AWS. And you can reproduce deployments and make changes with confidence because everything is defined in the template and can be tracked in version control.

Taking Advantage of Amazon EC2 Spot Instance Interruption Notices

Post Syndicated from Chad Schmutzer original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/taking-advantage-of-amazon-ec2-spot-instance-interruption-notices/

Amazon EC2 Spot Instances are spare compute capacity in the AWS Cloud available to you at steep discounts compared to On-Demand prices. The only difference between On-Demand Instances and Spot Instances is that Spot Instances can be interrupted by Amazon EC2 with two minutes of notification when EC2 needs the capacity back.

Customers have been taking advantage of Spot Instance interruption notices available via the instance metadata service since January 2015 to orchestrate their workloads seamlessly around any potential interruptions. Examples include saving the state of a job, detaching from a load balancer, or draining containers. Needless to say, the two-minute Spot Instance interruption notice is a powerful tool when using Spot Instances.

In January 2018, the Spot Instance interruption notice also became available as an event in Amazon CloudWatch Events. This allows targets such as AWS Lambda functions or Amazon SNS topics to process Spot Instance interruption notices by creating a CloudWatch Events rule to monitor for the notice.

In this post, I walk through an example use case for taking advantage of Spot Instance interruption notices in CloudWatch Events to automatically deregister Spot Instances from an Elastic Load Balancing Application Load Balancer.

Architecture

In this reference architecture, you use an AWS CloudFormation template to deploy the following:

After the AWS CloudFormation stack deployment is complete, you then create an Amazon EC2 Spot Fleet request diversified across both Availability Zones and use a couple of recent Spot Fleet features: Elastic Load Balancing integration and Tagging Spot Fleet Instances.

When any of the Spot Instances receives an interruption notice, Spot Fleet sends the event to CloudWatch Events. The CloudWatch Events rule then notifies both targets, the Lambda function and SNS topic. The Lambda function detaches the Spot Instance from the Application Load Balancer target group, taking advantage of nearly a full two minutes of connection draining before the instance is interrupted. The SNS topic also receives a message, and is provided as an example for the reader to use as an exercise.

EC2 Spot Instance Interruption Notices Reference Architecture Diagram

EC2 Spot Instance Interruption Notices Reference Architecture Diagram

Walkthrough

To complete this walkthrough, have the AWS CLI installed and configured, as well as the ability to launch CloudFormation stacks.

Launch the stack

Go ahead and launch the CloudFormation stack. You can check it out from GitHub, or grab the template directly. In this post, I use the stack name “spot-spin-cwe“, but feel free to use any name you like. Just remember to change it in the instructions.

$ git clone https://github.com/awslabs/ec2-spot-labs.git

$ aws cloudformation create-stack --stack-name spot-spin-cwe \
  --template-body file://ec2-spot-labs/ec2-spot-interruption-notice-cloudwatch-events/ec2-spot-interruption-notice-cloudwatch-events.yaml \
  --capabilities CAPABILITY_IAM

You should receive a StackId value in return, confirming the stack is launching.

{
  "StackId": "arn:aws:cloudformation:us-east-1:123456789012:stack/spot-spin-cwe/083e7ad0-0ade-11e8-9e36-500c219ab02a"
}

Review the details

Here are the details of the architecture being launched by the stack.

IAM permissions

Give permissions to a few components in the architecture:

  • The Lambda function
  • The CloudWatch Events rule
  • The Spot Fleet

The Lambda function needs basic Lambda function execution permissions so that it can write logs to CloudWatch Logs. You can use the AWS managed policy for this. It also needs to describe EC2 tags as well as deregister targets within Elastic Load Balancing. You can create a custom policy for these.

lambdaFunctionRole:
    Properties:
      AssumeRolePolicyDocument:
        Statement:
        - Action:
          - sts:AssumeRole
          Effect: Allow
          Principal:
            Service:
            - lambda.amazonaws.com
        Version: 2012-10-17
      ManagedPolicyArns:
      - arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/service-role/AWSLambdaBasicExecutionRole
      Path: /
      Policies:
      - PolicyDocument:
          Statement:
          - Action: elasticloadbalancing:DeregisterTargets
            Effect: Allow
            Resource: '*'
          - Action: ec2:DescribeTags
            Effect: Allow
            Resource: '*'
          Version: '2012-10-17'
        PolicyName:
          Fn::Join:
          - '-'
          - - Ref: AWS::StackName
            - lambdaFunctionRole
    Type: AWS::IAM::Role

Allow CloudWatch Events to call the Lambda function and publish to the SNS topic.

lambdaFunctionPermission:
    Properties:
      Action: lambda:InvokeFunction
      FunctionName:
        Fn::GetAtt:
        - lambdaFunction
        - Arn
      Principal: events.amazonaws.com
      SourceArn:
        Fn::GetAtt:
        - eventRule
        - Arn
    Type: AWS::Lambda::Permission
snsTopicPolicy:
    DependsOn:
    - snsTopic
    Properties:
      PolicyDocument:
        Id:
          Fn::GetAtt:
          - snsTopic
          - TopicName
        Statement:
        - Action: sns:Publish
          Effect: Allow
          Principal:
            Service:
            - events.amazonaws.com
          Resource:
            Ref: snsTopic
        Version: '2012-10-17'
      Topics:
      - Ref: snsTopic
    Type: AWS::SNS::TopicPolicy

Finally, Spot Fleet needs permissions to request Spot Instances, tag, and register targets in Elastic Load Balancing. You can tap into an AWS managed policy for this.

spotFleetRole:
    Properties:
      AssumeRolePolicyDocument:
        Statement:
        - Action:
          - sts:AssumeRole
          Effect: Allow
          Principal:
            Service:
            - spotfleet.amazonaws.com
        Version: 2012-10-17
      ManagedPolicyArns:
      - arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/service-role/AmazonEC2SpotFleetTaggingRole
      Path: /
    Type: AWS::IAM::Role

Elastic Load Balancing timeout delay

Because you are taking advantage of the two-minute Spot Instance notice, you can tune the Elastic Load Balancing target group deregistration timeout delay to match. When a target is deregistered from the target group, it is put into connection draining mode for the length of the timeout delay:  120 seconds to equal the two-minute notice.

loadBalancerTargetGroup:
    DependsOn:
    - vpc
    Properties:
      HealthCheckIntervalSeconds: 5
      HealthCheckPath: /
      HealthCheckTimeoutSeconds: 2
      Port: 80
      Protocol: HTTP
      TargetGroupAttributes:
      - Key: deregistration_delay.timeout_seconds
        Value: 120
      UnhealthyThresholdCount: 2
      VpcId:
        Ref: vpc
    Type: AWS::ElasticLoadBalancingV2::TargetGroup

CloudWatch Events rule

To capture the Spot Instance interruption notice being published to CloudWatch Events, create a rule with two targets: the Lambda function and the SNS topic.

eventRule:
    DependsOn:
    - snsTopic
    Properties:
      Description: Events rule for Spot Instance Interruption Notices
      EventPattern:
        detail-type:
        - EC2 Spot Instance Interruption Warning
        source:
        - aws.ec2
      State: ENABLED
      Targets:
      - Arn:
          Ref: snsTopic
        Id:
          Fn::GetAtt:
          - snsTopic
          - TopicName
      - Arn:
          Fn::GetAtt:
          - lambdaFunction
          - Arn
        Id:
          Ref: lambdaFunction
    Type: AWS::Events::Rule

Lambda function

The Lambda function does the heavy lifting for you. The details of the CloudWatch event are published to the Lambda function, which then uses boto3 to make a couple of AWS API calls. The first call is to describe the EC2 tags for the Spot Instance, filtering on a key of “TargetGroupArn”. If this tag is found, the instance is then deregistered from the target group ARN stored as the value of the tag.

import boto3
def handler(event, context):
  instanceId = event['detail']['instance-id']
  instanceAction = event['detail']['instance-action']
  try:
    ec2client = boto3.client('ec2')
    describeTags = ec2client.describe_tags(Filters=[{'Name': 'resource-id','Values':[instanceId],'Name':'key','Values':['loadBalancerTargetGroup']}])
  except:
    print("No action being taken. Unable to describe tags for instance id:", instanceId)
    return
  try:
    elbv2client = boto3.client('elbv2')
    deregisterTargets = elbv2client.deregister_targets(TargetGroupArn=describeTags['Tags'][0]['Value'],Targets=[{'Id':instanceId}])
  except:
    print("No action being taken. Unable to deregister targets for instance id:", instanceId)
    return
  print("Detaching instance from target:")
  print(instanceId, describeTags['Tags'][0]['Value'], deregisterTargets, sep=",")
  return

SNS topic

Finally, you’ve created an SNS topic as an example target. For example, you could subscribe an email address to the SNS topic in order to receive email notifications when a Spot Instance interruption notice is received.

snsTopic:
    Properties:
      DisplayName: SNS Topic for EC2 Spot Instance Interruption Notices
    Type: AWS::SNS::Topic

Create a Spot Fleet request

To proceed to creating your Spot Fleet request, use some of the resources that the CloudFormation stack created, to populate the Spot Fleet request launch configuration. You can find the values in the outputs values of the CloudFormation stack:

$ aws cloudformation describe-stacks --stack-name spot-spin-cwe

Using the output values of the CloudFormation stack, update the following values in the Spot Fleet request configuration:

  • %spotFleetRole%
  • %publicSubnet1%
  • %publicSubnet2%
  • %loadBalancerTargetGroup% (in two places)

Be sure to also replace %amiId% with the latest Amazon Linux AMI for your region and %keyName% with your environment.

{
  "AllocationStrategy": "diversified",
  "IamFleetRole": "%spotFleetRole%",
  "LaunchSpecifications": [
    {
      "ImageId": "%amiId%",
      "InstanceType": "c4.large",
      "Monitoring": {
        "Enabled": true
      },
      "KeyName": "%keyName%",
      "SubnetId": "%publicSubnet1%,%publicSubnet2%",
      "UserData": "IyEvYmluL2Jhc2gKeXVtIC15IHVwZGF0ZQp5dW0gLXkgaW5zdGFsbCBodHRwZApjaGtjb25maWcgaHR0cGQgb24KaW5zdGFuY2VpZD0kKGN1cmwgaHR0cDovLzE2OS4yNTQuMTY5LjI1NC9sYXRlc3QvbWV0YS1kYXRhL2luc3RhbmNlLWlkKQplY2hvICJoZWxsbyBmcm9tICRpbnN0YW5jZWlkIiA+IC92YXIvd3d3L2h0bWwvaW5kZXguaHRtbApzZXJ2aWNlIGh0dHBkIHN0YXJ0Cg==",
      "TagSpecifications": [
        {
          "ResourceType": "instance",
          "Tags": [
            {
              "Key": "loadBalancerTargetGroup",
              "Value": "%loadBalancerTargetGroup%"
            }
          ]
        }
      ]
    }
  ],
  "TargetCapacity": 2,
  "TerminateInstancesWithExpiration": true,
  "Type": "maintain",
  "ReplaceUnhealthyInstances": true,
  "InstanceInterruptionBehavior": "terminate",
  "LoadBalancersConfig": {
    "TargetGroupsConfig": {
      "TargetGroups": [
        {
          "Arn": "%loadBalancerTargetGroup%"
        }
      ]
    }
  }
}

Save the configuration and place the Spot Fleet request:

$ aws ec2 request-spot-fleet --spot-fleet-request-config file://sfr.json

You should receive a SpotFleetRequestId in return, confirming the request:

{
    "SpotFleetRequestId": "sfr-3cec4927-9d86-4cc5-a4f0-faa996c841b7"
}

You can confirm that the Spot Fleet request was fulfilled by checking that ActivityStatus is “fulfilled”, or by checking that FulfilledCapacity is greater than or equal to TargetCapacity, while describing the request:

$ aws ec2 describe-spot-fleet-requests --spot-fleet-request-id sfr-3cec4927-9d86-4cc5-a4f0-faa996c841b7
{
    "SpotFleetRequestConfigs": [
        {
            "ActivityStatus": "fulfilled",
            "CreateTime": "2018-02-08T01:23:16.029Z",
            "SpotFleetRequestConfig": {
                "AllocationStrategy": "diversified",
                "ExcessCapacityTerminationPolicy": "Default",
                "FulfilledCapacity": 2.0,
                …
                "TargetCapacity": 2,
                …
        }
    ]
}

Next, you can confirm that the Spot Instances have been registered with the Elastic Load Balancing target group and are in a healthy state:

$ aws elbv2 describe-target-health --target-group-arn arn:aws:elasticloadbalancing:us-east-1:123456789012:targetgroup/spot-loadB-1DZUVWL720VS6/26456d12cddbf23a
{
    "TargetHealthDescriptions": [
        {
            "Target": {
                "Id": "i-056c95d9dd6fde892",
                "Port": 80
            },
            "HealthCheckPort": "80",
            "TargetHealth": {
                "State": "healthy"
            }
        },
        {
            "Target": {
                "Id": "i-06c4c47228fd999b8",
                "Port": 80
            },
            "HealthCheckPort": "80",
            "TargetHealth": {
                "State": "healthy"
            }
        }
    ]
}

Test

In order to test, you can take advantage of the fact that any interruption action that Spot Fleet takes on a Spot Instance results in a Spot Instance interruption notice being provided. Therefore, you can simply decrease the target size of your Spot Fleet from 2 to 1. The instance that is interrupted receives the interruption notice:

$ aws ec2 modify-spot-fleet-request --spot-fleet-request-id sfr-3cec4927-9d86-4cc5-a4f0-faa996c841b7 --target-capacity 1
{
    "Return": true
}

As soon as the interruption notice is published to CloudWatch Events, the Lambda function triggers and detaches the instance from the target group, effectively putting the instance in a draining state.

$ aws elbv2 describe-target-health --target-group-arn arn:aws:elasticloadbalancing:us-east-1:123456789012:targetgroup/spot-loadB-1DZUVWL720VS6/26456d12cddbf23a
{
    "TargetHealthDescriptions": [
        {
            "Target": {
                "Id": "i-0c3dcd78efb9b7e53",
                "Port": 80
            },
            "HealthCheckPort": "80",
            "TargetHealth": {
                "State": "draining",
                "Reason": "Target.DeregistrationInProgress",
                "Description": "Target deregistration is in progress"
            }
        },
        {
            "Target": {
                "Id": "i-088c91a66078b4299",
                "Port": 80
            },
            "HealthCheckPort": "80",
            "TargetHealth": {
                "State": "healthy"
            }
        }
    ]
}

Conclusion

In conclusion, Amazon EC2 Spot Instance interruption notices are an extremely powerful tool when taking advantage of Amazon EC2 Spot Instances in your workloads, for tasks such as saving state, draining connections, and much more. I’d love to hear how you are using them in your own environment!

Chad Schmutzer - Solutions Architect

Chad Schmutzer
Solutions Architect

 Chad Schmutzer is a Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services based in Pasadena, CA. As an extension of the Amazon EC2 Spot Instances team, Chad helps customers significantly reduce the cost of running their applications, growing their compute capacity and throughput without increasing budget, and enabling new types of cloud computing applications.

 

Invoking AWS Lambda from Amazon MQ

Post Syndicated from Tara Van Unen original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/invoking-aws-lambda-from-amazon-mq/

Contributed by Josh Kahn, AWS Solutions Architect

Message brokers can be used to solve a number of needs in enterprise architectures, including managing workload queues and broadcasting messages to a number of subscribers. Amazon MQ is a managed message broker service for Apache ActiveMQ that makes it easy to set up and operate message brokers in the cloud.

In this post, I discuss one approach to invoking AWS Lambda from queues and topics managed by Amazon MQ brokers. This and other similar patterns can be useful in integrating legacy systems with serverless architectures. You could also integrate systems already migrated to the cloud that use common APIs such as JMS.

For example, imagine that you work for a company that produces training videos and which recently migrated its video management system to AWS. The on-premises system used to publish a message to an ActiveMQ broker when a video was ready for processing by an on-premises transcoder. However, on AWS, your company uses Amazon Elastic Transcoder. Instead of modifying the management system, Lambda polls the broker for new messages and starts a new Elastic Transcoder job. This approach avoids changes to the existing application while refactoring the workload to leverage cloud-native components.

This solution uses Amazon CloudWatch Events to trigger a Lambda function that polls the Amazon MQ broker for messages. Instead of starting an Elastic Transcoder job, the sample writes the received message to an Amazon DynamoDB table with a time stamp indicating the time received.

Getting started

To start, navigate to the Amazon MQ console. Next, launch a new Amazon MQ instance, selecting Single-instance Broker and supplying a broker name, user name, and password. Be sure to document the user name and password for later.

For the purposes of this sample, choose the default options in the Advanced settings section. Your new broker is deployed to the default VPC in the selected AWS Region with the default security group. For this post, you update the security group to allow access for your sample Lambda function. In a production scenario, I recommend deploying both the Lambda function and your Amazon MQ broker in your own VPC.

After several minutes, your instance changes status from “Creation Pending” to “Available.” You can then visit the Details page of your broker to retrieve connection information, including a link to the ActiveMQ web console where you can monitor the status of your broker, publish test messages, and so on. In this example, use the Stomp protocol to connect to your broker. Be sure to capture the broker host name, for example:

<BROKER_ID>.mq.us-east-1.amazonaws.com

You should also modify the Security Group for the broker by clicking on its Security Group ID. Click the Edit button and then click Add Rule to allow inbound traffic on port 8162 for your IP address.

Deploying and scheduling the Lambda function

To simplify the deployment of this example, I’ve provided an AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) template that deploys the sample function and DynamoDB table, and schedules the function to be invoked every five minutes. Detailed instructions can be found with sample code on GitHub in the amazonmq-invoke-aws-lambda repository, with sample code. I discuss a few key aspects in this post.

First, SAM makes it easy to deploy and schedule invocation of our function:

SubscriberFunction:
	Type: AWS::Serverless::Function
	Properties:
		CodeUri: subscriber/
		Handler: index.handler
		Runtime: nodejs6.10
		Role: !GetAtt SubscriberFunctionRole.Arn
		Timeout: 15
		Environment:
			Variables:
				HOST: !Ref AmazonMQHost
				LOGIN: !Ref AmazonMQLogin
				PASSWORD: !Ref AmazonMQPassword
				QUEUE_NAME: !Ref AmazonMQQueueName
				WORKER_FUNCTIOn: !Ref WorkerFunction
		Events:
			Timer:
				Type: Schedule
				Properties:
					Schedule: rate(5 minutes)

WorkerFunction:
Type: AWS::Serverless::Function
	Properties:
		CodeUri: worker/
		Handler: index.handler
		Runtime: nodejs6.10
Role: !GetAtt WorkerFunctionRole.Arn
		Environment:
			Variables:
				TABLE_NAME: !Ref MessagesTable

In the code, you include the URI, user name, and password for your newly created Amazon MQ broker. These allow the function to poll the broker for new messages on the sample queue.

The sample Lambda function is written in Node.js, but clients exist for a number of programming languages.

stomp.connect(options, (error, client) => {
	if (error) { /* do something */ }

	let headers = {
		destination: ‘/queue/SAMPLE_QUEUE’,
		ack: ‘auto’
	}

	client.subscribe(headers, (error, message) => {
		if (error) { /* do something */ }

		message.readString(‘utf-8’, (error, body) => {
			if (error) { /* do something */ }

			let params = {
				FunctionName: MyWorkerFunction,
				Payload: JSON.stringify({
					message: body,
					timestamp: Date.now()
				})
			}

			let lambda = new AWS.Lambda()
			lambda.invoke(params, (error, data) => {
				if (error) { /* do something */ }
			})
		}
})
})

Sending a sample message

For the purpose of this example, use the Amazon MQ console to send a test message. Navigate to the details page for your broker.

About midway down the page, choose ActiveMQ Web Console. Next, choose Manage ActiveMQ Broker to launch the admin console. When you are prompted for a user name and password, use the credentials created earlier.

At the top of the page, choose Send. From here, you can send a sample message from the broker to subscribers. For this example, this is how you generate traffic to test the end-to-end system. Be sure to set the Destination value to “SAMPLE_QUEUE.” The message body can contain any text. Choose Send.

You now have a Lambda function polling for messages on the broker. To verify that your function is working, you can confirm in the DynamoDB console that the message was successfully received and processed by the sample Lambda function.

First, choose Tables on the left and select the table name “amazonmq-messages” in the middle section. With the table detail in view, choose Items. If the function was successful, you’ll find a new entry similar to the following:

If there is no message in DynamoDB, check again in a few minutes or review the CloudWatch Logs group for Lambda functions that contain debug messages.

Alternative approaches

Beyond the approach described here, you may consider other approaches as well. For example, you could use an intermediary system such as Apache Flume to pass messages from the broker to Lambda or deploy Apache Camel to trigger Lambda via a POST to API Gateway. There are trade-offs to each of these approaches. My goal in using CloudWatch Events was to introduce an easily repeatable pattern familiar to many Lambda developers.

Summary

I hope that you have found this example of how to integrate AWS Lambda with Amazon MQ useful. If you have expertise or legacy systems that leverage APIs such as JMS, you may find this useful as you incorporate serverless concepts in your enterprise architectures.

To learn more, see the Amazon MQ website and Developer Guide. You can try Amazon MQ for free with the AWS Free Tier, which includes up to 750 hours of a single-instance mq.t2.micro broker and up to 1 GB of storage per month for one year.

Automatic Deployment to New Amazon EC2 On-Demand and Spot Instances Using AWS CodeDeploy, Amazon CloudWatch Events, and AWS Lambda

Post Syndicated from Tapodipta Ghosh original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/automatic-deployment-to-new-amazon-ec2-on-demand-and-spot-instances-using-aws-codedeploy-amazon-cloudwatch-events-and-aws-lambda/

AWS CodeDeploy is a service that automates application deployments to your compute infrastructure, including fleets of Amazon EC2 instances. AWS CodeDeploy can automatically deploy the latest app version to any new EC2 instance launched due to a scaling event. However, if your servers are not part of the Auto Scaling group, it might be a challenge to automate the code deployment for new EC2 launches. This is especially true if you are running your workload on an EC2 Spot Fleet. In this post, I’ll show you how to use AWS CodeDeploy, an Amazon CloudWatch Events rule, EC2 tags, and AWS Lambda to automate your deployments so that all EC2 instances run the same version of your application.

Solution overview:

An Amazon CloudWatch rule is triggered when a new Amazon EC2 instance is launched. The rule invokes an AWS Lambda function that extracts three tags:

· Name
· CodeDeployDeploymentGroup
· CodeDeployApplication

The Lambda function then uses the instance tags to add the EC2 instance to the deployment group. After the instance has been added, Lambda queries AWS CodeDeploy to retrieve the last successful deployment in that deployment group and synchronizes the EC2 instance with the latest code. The following diagram shows the sequence:

 

Note: For an EC2 Spot Fleet, the tags that you create for your Spot instance are not added automatically by the Spot service to fulfill the request. The Lambda function adds these tags after the Spot instance is launched.

 

Example:

Let’s take an example of an AWS CodeDeploy application cd-single-deploy-app, and its deployment group, cd-single-deploy-app-group, which has two instances in it. These instances are not part of an Auto Scaling group.

For information about the steps in deploying an application to an instance, see this tutorial in the AWS CodeDeploy User Guide.

In the AWS CodeDeploy console, you’ll find the deployment ID, d-CSBCXR2GP. We will use this ID later in the testing phase. Our workflow ensures that when a new EC2 instance is launched, it joins the deployment group automatically and the latest version of the application is deployed to it.

You can configure the Lambda function, associated IAM role and policy, and the CloudWatch Events rule by running this CloudFormation template included in the code repository.

https://github.com/awslabs/aws-codedeploy-new-instance-sync-lambda

The CloudFormation template does the following:

Step 1: Create an IAM role named Auto-Deploy-EC2-Codedeploy and attach the following policies:

•	arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/AWSLambdaExecute 
•	arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/AmazonEC2ReadOnlyAccess 
•	arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/service-role/AmazonEC2SpotFleetTaggingRole

Use the following JSON document to create another policy named CodeDeploy and attach it to the IAM role.

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Action": [
                "codedeploy:Get*",
                "codedeploy:UpdateDeploymentGroup",
                "codedeploy:List*",
                "codedeploy:CreateDeployment"
            ],
            "Resource": [
                "*"
            ],
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Sid": "StartContinuousAssessmentLambdaPolicyStmt"
        }
    ]
}

Make sure the CodeDeploy role has PassRole permission  to the service role defined in the CodeDeploy deployment group.

Step 2: Follow these steps to create a Lambda function:

https://github.com/awslabs/aws-codedeploy-new-instance-sync-lambda/blob/master/README.md

Step 3: In Amazon CloudWatch Events, set up a rule for running instances and configure the Lambda function as a target.

Step 4: In the AWS Lambda console, choose your Lambda function. On the Triggers tab, check that the trigger is enabled.

You can now test to ensure if a new EC2 instance is launched, it gets synchronized automatically with the latest code

Test:

A new EC2 instance is launched from the EC2 console, the AWS CloudFormation template, or the EC2 APIs with CodeDeployApplication, CodeDeployDeploymentGroup, and Name tag.

 

Go to CloudWatch Logs console to check the Lambda execution logs.

Here is an analysis of sample log:

·  You should see the EC2 instance ID

{[
"arn:aws:EC2:us-east-1:XXXXXXXXXXXX:instance/i-00203362b337dd743"]
}

·  You should see the deployment ID of the last successful deployment. It should match the one you noted earlier

DepId is d-CSBCXR2GP

·    Finally, you should see the deployment ID of the new deployment created by CodeDeploy

"{u'deploymentId': u'd-W6E1TFFGP', 'ResponseMetadata': {'RetryAttempts': 0, '	HTTPStatusCode': 200, 'RequestId': '73046797-bb22-11e7-ad7b-25693e030410', 'HTTPHeaders': {'x-amzn-requestid': '73046797-bb22-11e7-ad7b-25693e030410', 'content-length': '30', 'content-type': 'application/x-amz-json-1.1'}}}
"

Now, go to CodeDeploy console to confirm that the new deployment was successful.

In this screenshot, you can see that the new EC2 instance was synched with latest code.

Summary:

In this post, I’ve demonstrated how to use AWS CodeDeploy, AWS Lambda, an Amazon CloudWatch Events rule, and EC2 tags to automate deployments to disparate EC2 instances. If you are running your workload on Spot instances or have a fleet of On-Demand EC2 instances as part of your application, you can use the steps in this blog post to solve the automation around the deployment for new instances.

Using Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon SNS to Notify when AWS X-Ray Detects Elevated Levels of Latency, Errors, and Faults in Your Application

Post Syndicated from Bharath Kumar original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/using-amazon-cloudwatch-and-amazon-sns-to-notify-when-aws-x-ray-detects-elevated-levels-of-latency-errors-and-faults-in-your-application/

AWS X-Ray helps developers analyze and debug production applications built using microservices or serverless architectures and quantify customer impact. With X-Ray, you can understand how your application and its underlying services are performing and identify and troubleshoot the root cause of performance issues and errors. You can use these insights to identify issues and opportunities for optimization.

In this blog post, I will show you how you can use Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon SNS to get notified when X-Ray detects high latency, errors, and faults in your application. Specifically, I will show you how to use this sample app to get notified through an email or SMS message when your end users observe high latencies or server-side errors when they use your application. You can customize the alarms and events by updating the sample app code.

Sample App Overview

The sample app uses the X-Ray GetServiceGraph API to get the following information:

  • Aggregated response time.
  • Requests that failed with 4xx status code (errors).
  • 429 status code (throttle).
  • 5xx status code (faults).
Sample app architecture

Overview of sample app architecture

Getting started

The sample app uses AWS CloudFormation to deploy the required resources.
To install the sample app:

  1. Run git clone to get the sample app.
  2. Update the JSON file in the Setup folder with threshold limits and notification details.
  3. Run the install.py script to install the sample app.

For more information about the installation steps, see the readme file on GitHub.

You can update the app configuration to include your phone number or email to get notified when your application in X-Ray breaches the latency, error, and fault limits you set in the configuration. If you prefer to not provide your phone number and email, then you can use the CloudWatch alarm deployed by the sample app to monitor your application in X-Ray.

The sample app deploys resources with the sample app namespace you provided during setup. This enables you to have multiple sample apps in the same region.

CloudWatch rules

The sample app uses two CloudWatch rules:

  1. SCHEDULEDLAMBDAFOR-sample_app_name to trigger at regular intervals the AWS Lambda function that queries the GetServiceGraph API.
  2. XRAYALERTSFOR-sample_app_name to look for published CloudWatch events that match the pattern defined in this rule.
CloudWatch Rules for sample app

CloudWatch rules created for the sample app

CloudWatch alarms

If you did not provide your phone number or email in the JSON file, the sample app uses a CloudWatch alarm named XRayCloudWatchAlarm-sample_app_name in combination with the CloudWatch event that you can use for monitoring.

CloudWatch Alarm for sample app

CloudWatch alarm created for the sample app

Amazon SNS messages

The sample app creates two SNS topics:

  • sample_app_name-cloudwatcheventsnstopic to send out an SMS message when the CloudWatch event matches a pattern published from the Lambda function.
  • sample_app_name-cloudwatchalarmsnstopic to send out an email message when the CloudWatch alarm goes into an ALARM state.
Amazon SNS for sample app

Amazon SNS created for the sample app

Getting notifications

The CloudWatch event looks for the following matching pattern:

{
  "detail-type": [
    "XCW Notification for Alerts"
  ],
  "source": [
    "<sample_app_name>-xcw.alerts"
  ]
}

The event then invokes an SNS topic that sends out an SMS message.

SMS in sample app

SMS that is sent when CloudWatch Event invokes Amazon SNS topic

The CloudWatch alarm looks for the TriggeredRules metric that is published whenever the CloudWatch event matches the event pattern. It goes into the ALARM state whenever TriggeredRules > 0 for the specified evaluation period and invokes an SNS topic that sends an email message.

Email sent in sample app

Email that is sent when CloudWatch Alarm goes to ALARM state

Stopping notifications

If you provided your phone number or email address, but would like to stop getting notified, change the SUBSCRIBE_TO_EMAIL_SMS environment variable in the Lambda function to No. Then, go to the Amazon SNS console and delete the subscriptions. You can still monitor your application for elevated levels of latency, errors, and faults by using the CloudWatch console.

Lambda environment variable in sample app

Change environment variable in Lambda

 

Delete subscription in SNS for sample app

Delete subscriptions to stop getting notified

Uninstalling the sample app

To uninstall the sample app, run the uninstall.py script in the Setup folder.

Extending the sample app

The sample app notifes you when when X-Ray detects high latency, errors, and faults in your application. You can extend it to provide more value for your use cases (for example, to perform an action on a resource when the state of a CloudWatch alarm changes).

To summarize, after this set up you will be able to get notified through Amazon SNS when X-Ray detects high latency, errors and faults in your application.

I hope you found this information about setting up alarms and alerts for your application in AWS X-Ray helpful. Feel free to leave questions or other feedback in the comments. Feel free to learn more about AWS X-Ray, Amazon SNS and Amazon CloudWatch

About the Author

Bharath Kumar is a Sr.Product Manager with AWS X-Ray. He has developed and launched mobile games, web applications on microservices and serverless architecture.

How to Set Up Continuous Golden AMI Vulnerability Assessments with Amazon Inspector

Post Syndicated from Kanchan Waikar original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-to-set-up-continuous-golden-ami-vulnerability-assessments-with-amazon-inspector/

As companies mature in their cloud journey, they implement layered security capabilities and practices in their cloud architectures. One such practice is to continually assess golden Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) for security vulnerabilities. AMIs provide the information required to launch an Amazon EC2 instance, which is a virtual server in the AWS Cloud. A golden AMI is an AMI that contains the latest security patches, software, configuration, and software agents that you need to install for logging, security maintenance, and performance monitoring. You can build and deploy golden AMIs in your environment, but the AMIs quickly become dated as new vulnerabilities are discovered.

A security best practice is to perform routine vulnerability assessments of your golden AMIs to identify if newly found vulnerabilities apply to them. If you identify a vulnerability, you can update your golden AMIs with the appropriate security patches, test the AMIs, and deploy the patched AMIs in your environment. In this blog post, I demonstrate how to use Amazon Inspector to set up such continuous vulnerability assessments to scan your golden AMIs routinely.

Solution overview

Amazon Inspector performs security assessments of Amazon EC2 instances by using AWS managed rules packages such as the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) package. The solution in this post creates EC2 instances from golden AMIs and then runs an Amazon Inspector security assessment on the created instances. When the assessment results are available, the solution consolidates the findings and advises you about next steps. Furthermore, the solution schedules an Amazon CloudWatch Events rule to run the golden AMI vulnerability assessments on a regular basis.

The following solution diagram illustrates how this solution works.

Solution diagram showing how this post's solution works

Here’s how this solution works, as illustrated in the preceding diagram:

  1. A scheduled CloudWatch Events event triggers the StartContinuousAssessment AWS Lambda function, which starts the security assessment of your golden AMIs.
  2. The StartContinuousAssessment Lambda function performs the following actions:
    1. It reads a JSON parameter stored in the AWS Systems Manager (Systems Manager) Parameter Store. This JSON parameter contains the following metadata for each golden AMI:
      1. InstanceType – A valid instance-type for launching an EC2 instance of the golden AMI.
      2. Ami-Id – The ID of the golden AMI.
      3. UserData – An operating system–compatible user-data script for installing the Amazon Inspector agent.

Later in this blog post, I provide instructions for creating this JSON parameter.

    1. For each AMI specified in the JSON parameter, the Lambda function creates an EC2 instance. When each instance starts, it installs the Amazon Inspector agent by using the user-data script provided in the JSON. The Lambda function then copies each golden AMI’s tags (you will assign custom metadata in the form of tags to each golden AMI when you set up the solution) to the corresponding EC2 instance. The function also adds a tag with the key of continuous-assessment-instance and value as true. This tag identifies EC2 instances that require regular security assessments. The Lambda function copies the AMI’s tags to the instance (and later, to the security findings found for the instance) to help you identify the golden AMIs for each security finding. After you analyze security findings, you can patch your golden AMIs.
    2. The first time the StartContinuousAssessment function runs, it creates:
      1. An Amazon Inspector assessment target: The target identifies EC2 instances to assess by using the continuous-assessment-instance tag.
      2. An Amazon Inspector assessment template: The template contains a reference to the Amazon Inspector assessment target created in the preceding step and the following AWS managed rules packages to evaluate:

    For subsequent assessments, the StartContinuousAssessment function reuses the target and the template created during the first run of StartContinuousAssessment function.

    Note: Amazon Inspector can start an assessment only after it finds at least one running Amazon Inspector agent. To allow EC2 instances to boot and the Amazon inspector agent to start, the Lambda function waits four minutes. Because the assessment runs for approximately one hour and boot time for EC2 instances typically takes a few minutes, all Amazon Inspector agents start before the assessment ends.

      1. The Lambda function then runs the assessment. The Amazon Inspector agents collect behavior and configuration data, and pass it to Amazon Inspector. Amazon Inspector analyzes the data and generates Amazon Inspector findings, which are possible security findings you may need to address.
      2. After the Lambda function completes the assessment, Amazon Inspector publishes an assessment-completion notification message to an Amazon SNS topic called ContinuousAssessmentCompleteTopic. SNS uses topics, which are communication channels for sending messages and subscribing to notifications.
      3. The notification message published to SNS triggers the AnalyzeInspectorFindings Lambda function, which performs the following actions:
        1. Associates the tags of each EC2 instance with security findings found for that EC2 instance. This enables you to identify the security findings using the app-name tag you specified for your golden AMIs. You can use the information provided in the findings to patch your golden AMIs.
        2. Terminates all instances associated with the continuous-assessment-instance=true tag.
        3. Aggregates the number of findings found for each EC2 instance by severity and then publishes a consolidated result to an SNS topic called ContinuousAssessmentResultsTopic.

How to deploy the solution

To deploy this solution, you must set it up in the AWS Region where you build your golden AMIs. If that AWS Region does not support Amazon Inspector, at the end of your continuous integration pipeline, you can copy your AMIs to an AWS Region where Amazon Inspector assessments are supported. To learn more about continuous integration pipelines, see What is Continuous Integration?

To deploy continuous golden AMI vulnerability assessments in your AWS account, follow these steps:

  1. Tag your golden AMIs – Tagging your golden AMIs lets you search assessment result findings based on tags after Amazon Inspector completes an assessment.
  2. Store your golden AMI metadata in the Systems Manager Parameter Store – Prepare and store the golden AMI metadata in the Systems Manager Parameter Store. The StartContinuousAssessment Lambda function reads golden AMI metadata and starts assessing for vulnerabilities.
  3. Run the supplied AWS CloudFormation template and subscribe to an SNS topic to receive assessment results – Set up the infrastructure required to run vulnerability assessments and subscribe to an SNS topic to receive assessment results via email.
  4. Test golden AMI vulnerability assessments – Ensure you have successfully set up the required resources to run vulnerability assessments.
  5. Set up a CloudWatch Events rule for triggering continuous golden AMI vulnerability assessments – Schedule the execution of vulnerability assessments on a regular basis.

1.  Tag your golden AMIs

You can search assessment findings based on golden AMI tags after Amazon Inspector completes an assessment.

To tag a golden AMI by using the AWS Management Console:

  1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console and then navigate to the EC2 console.
  2. In the navigation pane, choose AMIs.
  3. Choose your AMI from the list, and then choose Actions > Add/Edit Tags.
  4. Choose Create Tag. In the Key column, type app-name. In the Value column, type your application name. Following the same steps, create the app-version and app-environment tags. Choose Save.

Now that you have tagged your golden AMIs, you need to create golden AMI metadata, which will be read by the StartContinuousAssessment function to initiate vulnerability assessments. You will store the golden AMI metadata in the Systems Manager Parameter Store.

2.  Store your golden AMI metadata in the Systems Manager Parameter Store

This solution reads golden AMI metadata from a parameter stored in the Systems Manager Parameter Store. The metadata must be in JSON format and must contain the following information for each golden AMI:

  • Ami-Id
  • InstanceType
  • UserData

Step A: Find the AMI ID of your golden AMI.

An AMI ID uniquely identifies an AMI in an AWS Region and is a required parameter for launching an EC2 instance from a golden AMI. To find the AMI ID of your golden AMI:

  1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console and navigate to the EC2 console.
  2. In the navigation pane, choose AMIs.
  3. Choose your AMI from the list and then note the corresponding value in the AMI ID column.

Step B: Find a compatible InstanceType for your golden AMI.

Each AMI has a list of compatible InstanceTypes. The InstanceType is a required parameter for launching an EC2 instance from a golden AMI. To find a compatible InstanceType for your golden AMI:

  1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console and navigate to the EC2 console.
  2. Choose Launch Instance. On the Choose an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) page, choose My AMIs.
  3. Type the AMI ID that you noted in Step A in the Search my AMIs box, and then choose Enter.
  4. The search result will contain your golden AMI. To choose it, choose Select.
  5. Locate any available Instance Type and then note the corresponding value in the Type column.
  6. Choose Cancel.

Note: Amazon Inspector will launch the chosen InstanceType every time the vulnerability assessment runs.

Step C: Create the user-data script to install and start the Amazon Inspector agent.

The user-data script automates the installation of software packages when an EC2 instance launches for the first time. In this step, you create an operating system specific, JSON-compatible user-data script that installs and starts the Amazon Inspector agent.

  1. Identify the command that installs the Amazon Inspector agent

Based on Installing Amazon Inspector Agents, the following shell command installs the Amazon Inspector agent on an Amazon Linux-based EC2 instance.

wget https://d1wk0tztpsntt1.cloudfront.net/linux/latest/install
bash install

To find this command for other operating systems, see Installing Amazon Inspector Agents.

  1. Identify the command that starts the Amazon Inspector agent

The following shell command starts the Amazon Inspector agent on an Amazon Linux-based EC2 instance.

sudo /etc/init.d/awsagent start

To find this command for other operating systems, see Amazon Inspector Agents.

  1. Create a script by concatenating the commands from the preceding two steps

The following is a sample concatenated script for the Amazon Linux operating system that installs and starts an Amazon Inspector agent.

wget https://d1wk0tztpsntt1.cloudfront.net/linux/latest/install
bash install
sudo /etc/init.d/awsagent start
  1. Make the script user-data compatible

Based on Running Commands on Your Linux Instance at Launch, you make a Linux shell script user-data compatible by prefixing it with a #!/bin/bash. In this step, you add the #!/bin/bash prefix to the script from the preceding step. The following is the user-data compatible version of the script from the preceding step. 

#!/bin/bash
wget https://d1wk0tztpsntt1.cloudfront.net/linux/latest/install
bash install
sudo /etc/init.d/awsagent start

To make your script user-data compatible for Windows, see Running Commands on Your Windows Instance at Launch.

The user-data script provided in the JSON metadata must be JSON-compatible, which you will do next.

  1. Make the user-data script JSON compatible

To make the user-data script JSON compatible, you must replace all new-line characters with a \r\n\r\n sequence. The following is the JSON-compatible user-data script that you specify for your Amazon Linux-based golden AMI in Step D.

JSON-compatible-user-data-for-Amazon-Linux-AMI

#!/bin/bash \r\n\r\nwget https://d1wk0tztpsntt1.cloudfront.net/linux/latest/install \r\n\r\nbash install \r\n\r\nsudo /etc/init.d/awsagent start

Repeat Steps A, B, and C to find the Ami Id, InstanceType, and UserData for each of your golden AMIs. When you have this metadata, you can create the JSON document of metadata for all your golden AMIs. The StartContinuousAssessment Lambda function reads this JSON to start golden AMI vulnerability assessments.

Step D: Create a JSON document of metadata of all your golden AMIs.

Use the following template to create a JSON document:

[	
    { 
        "instanceType": "instance-type-of-first-AMI", 
        "ami-id": "AMI-ID-of-first-AMI", 
        "userData": "JSON-compatible-user-data-of-first-AMI"
     },
    { 
        "instanceType": "instance-type-of-second-AMI",
        "ami-id": "AMI-ID-of-second-AMI",
        "userData": "JSON-compatible-user-data-of-second-AMI" 
    }
]

Replace all placeholder values with values corresponding to your first golden AMI. If your golden AMI is Amazon Linux-based, you can specify the userData as the JSON-compatible-user-data-for-Amazon-Linux-AMI from Step C.5. Next, replace the placeholder values for your second golden AMI. You can add more entries to your JSON document, if you have more than two golden AMIs.

Note: The total number of characters in the JSON document must be fewer than or equal to 4,096 characters, and the number of golden AMIs must be fewer than 500. You must verify whether your account has permissions to run one on-demand EC2 instance for each of your golden AMIs. For information about how to verify service limits, see Amazon EC2 Service Limits.

Now that you have created the JSON document of your golden AMIs, you will store the JSON document in a Systems Manager parameter. The StartContinuousAssessment Lambda function will read the metadata from this parameter.

Step E: Store the JSON in a Systems Manager parameter.

To store the JSON in a Systems Manager parameter:

  1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console and navigate to the EC2 console.
  2. Expand Systems Manager Shared Resources in the navigation pane, and then choose Parameter Store.
  3. Choose Create Parameter.
  4. For Name, type ContinuousAssessmentInput.
  5. In the Description field, type Continuous golden AMI vulnerability assessment process metadata.
  6. For Type, choose String.
  7. Paste the JSON that you created in Step D in the Value field.
  8. Choose Create Parameter. After the system creates the parameter, choose Close.

To set up the remaining components required to run assessments, you will run a CloudFormation template and perform the configuration explained in the next section.

3.  Run the CloudFormation template and subscribe to an SNS topic to receive assessment results

Next, create a CloudFormation stack using the provided CloudFormation template. Before you start, download the CloudFormation template to your computer.

To create a stack:

  1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console and choose CloudFormation in the Services menu.
  2. Click Create Stack.
  3. On the Select Template page, choose Upload a template to Amazon S3.
  4. Choose Choose File and then choose the CloudFormation template you just downloaded. Choose Next.
  5. On the Specify Details page, specify the Stack Name as AmazonInspectorAssessment. Choose Next.
  6. On the Options page, choose Next.
  7. On the Review page, choose the check box next to the following message: “I acknowledge that AWS CloudFormation might create IAM resources.”
  8. Choose Create. The CloudFormation template creates SNS topics, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles, and Lambda functions.
  9. On the Stacks page, choose AmazonInspectorAssessment.
  10. In the Detail pane, choose Outputs to view the output of your stack.

After CloudFormation successfully creates a stack, the Outputs tab displays following results:

  • StartContinuousAssessmentLambdaFunction – The Value box displays the name of the StartContinuousAssessment function. You will run this function to trigger the entire workflow.
  • ContinuousAssessmentResultsTopic – The Value box displays the ContinuousAssessmentResultsTopic topic’s Amazon Resource Name (ARN), which you will use later.

To receive consolidated vulnerability assessment results in email, you must subscribe to ContinuousAssessmentResultsTopic.

To subscribe to ContinuousAssessmentResultsTopic:

  1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console and navigate to the SNS console.
  2. Choose Create subscription. In the Topic ARN field, paste the ARN of ContinuousAssessmentResultsTopic that you noted in the previous section.
  3. In the Protocol drop-down, choose Email.
  4. In the Endpoint box, type the email address where you will receive notifications.
  5. Choose Create subscription.
  6. Navigate to your email application and open the message from AWS Notifications. Click the link to confirm your subscription to the SNS topic.

4.  Test golden AMI vulnerability assessments

Before you schedule vulnerability assessments, you should test the process by running the StartContinuousAssessment function. In this test, you trigger a security assessment and monitor it. You then receive an email after the assessment has completed, which shows that vulnerability assessments have been successfully set up.

To start golden AMI vulnerability assessments:

  1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console and choose Lambda in the Services menu.
  2. Choose Functions. In the Functions pane, choose the StartContinuousAssessment function.
  3. Choose the Select a test event drop-down, and choose Configure test events.
  4. On the Configure test event page, choose Create new test event and specify the event name as test.
  5. Paste the following JSON in the editor box. 
    {
"AMIsParamName": "ContinuousAssessmentInput"
}

  6. Choose Create. Choose Test.

The StartContinuousAssessment function runs for approximately five minutes and then displays the following message.
Message showing the function has run successfully

Next, open Amazon Inspector and monitor the progress of the assessment:

  1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console and navigate to the Amazon Inspector console.
  2. On Dashboard under Recent Assessment Runs, you will see an entry with the status, Collecting Data. This status indicates that Amazon Inspector agents are collecting data from instances running your golden AMIs. The agents collect data for an hour and then Amazon Inspector analyzes the collected data.

After Amazon Inspector completes the assessment, the status in the console changes to Analysis complete. Amazon Inspector then publishes an SNS message that triggers the AnalyzeInspectionReports Lambda function. When AnalyzeInspectionReports publishes results, you will receive an email containing consolidated assessment results. You also will be able to see the findings.

To see the findings in Amazon Inspector’s Findings section:

  1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console and navigate to the Amazon Inspector console.
  2. In the navigation pane, choose Assessment Runs. In the table on the Amazon Inspector – Assessment Runs page, choose the findings of the latest assessment run.
  3. Choose the settings (Gear icon) icon and choose the appropriate tags to see the details of findings, as shown in the following screenshot. The findings also contain information about how you can address each underlying vulnerability.
    Screenshot showing details of findings

Having verified that you have successfully set up all components of golden AMI vulnerability assessments, you now will schedule the vulnerability assessments to run on a regular basis to give you continual insight into the health of instances created from your golden AMIs.

5.  Set up a CloudWatch Events rule for triggering continuous golden AMI vulnerability assessments

The last step is to create a CloudWatch Events rule to schedule the execution of the vulnerability assessments on a daily or weekly basis.

To set up a CloudWatch Events rule:

  1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console and navigate to the CloudWatch console.
  2. In the navigation pane, choose Rules > Create rule.
  3. On the Event Source page, choose Schedule. Choose Fixed rate of and specify the interval (for example, 1 day).
  4. For Targets, choose Add target and then choose Lambda function.
  5. For Function, choose the StartContinuousAssessment function.
  6. Choose Configure Input.
  7. Choose Constant (JSON text).
  8. In the box, paste the following JSON code. 
    {
     "AMIsParamName": "ContinuousAssessmentInput"
}

  9. Choose Configure details.
  10. For Rule definition, type ContinuousGoldenAMIAssessmentTrigger for the name, and type as the description, This rule triggers the continuous golden AMI vulnerability assessment process.
  11. Choose Create rule.

The vulnerability assessments are executed on the first occurrence of the schedule you chose while setting up the CloudWatch Events rule. After the vulnerability assessment is executed, you will receive an email to indicate that your continuous golden AMI vulnerability assessments are set up.

Summary

To get visibility into the security of your EC2 instances created from your golden AMIs, it is important that you perform security assessments of your golden AMIs on a regular basis. In this blog post, I have demonstrated how to set up vulnerability assessments, and the results of these continuous golden AMI vulnerability assessments can help you keep your environment up to date with security patches. To learn how to patch your golden AMIs, see Streamline AMI Maintenance and Patching Using Amazon EC2 Systems Manager.

If you have comments about this blog post, submit them in the “Comments” section below. If you have questions about implementing the solution in this post, start a new thread on the Amazon Inspector forum or contact AWS Support.

– Kanchan and David

Now Open AWS EU (Paris) Region

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-open-aws-eu-paris-region/

Today we are launching our 18th AWS Region, our fourth in Europe. Located in the Paris area, AWS customers can use this Region to better serve customers in and around France.

The Details
The new EU (Paris) Region provides a broad suite of AWS services including Amazon API Gateway, Amazon Aurora, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon CloudWatch, CloudWatch Events, Amazon CloudWatch Logs, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), EC2 Container Registry, Amazon ECS, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon EMR, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon Elasticsearch Service, Amazon Glacier, Amazon Kinesis Streams, Polly, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), Amazon Route 53, Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon Simple Workflow Service (SWF), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, Auto Scaling, AWS Certificate Manager (ACM), AWS CloudFormation, AWS CloudTrail, AWS CodeDeploy, AWS Config, AWS Database Migration Service, AWS Direct Connect, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), AWS Key Management Service (KMS), AWS Lambda, AWS Marketplace, AWS OpsWorks Stacks, AWS Personal Health Dashboard, AWS Server Migration Service, AWS Service Catalog, AWS Shield Standard, AWS Snowball, AWS Snowball Edge, AWS Snowmobile, AWS Storage Gateway, AWS Support (including AWS Trusted Advisor), Elastic Load Balancing, and VM Import.

The Paris Region supports all sizes of C5, M5, R4, T2, D2, I3, and X1 instances.

There are also four edge locations for Amazon Route 53 and Amazon CloudFront: three in Paris and one in Marseille, all with AWS WAF and AWS Shield. Check out the AWS Global Infrastructure page to learn more about current and future AWS Regions.

The Paris Region will benefit from three AWS Direct Connect locations. Telehouse Voltaire is available today. AWS Direct Connect will also become available at Equinix Paris in early 2018, followed by Interxion Paris.

All AWS infrastructure regions around the world are designed, built, and regularly audited to meet the most rigorous compliance standards and to provide high levels of security for all AWS customers. These include ISO 27001, ISO 27017, ISO 27018, SOC 1 (Formerly SAS 70), SOC 2 and SOC 3 Security & Availability, PCI DSS Level 1, and many more. This means customers benefit from all the best practices of AWS policies, architecture, and operational processes built to satisfy the needs of even the most security sensitive customers.

AWS is certified under the EU-US Privacy Shield, and the AWS Data Processing Addendum (DPA) is GDPR-ready and available now to all AWS customers to help them prepare for May 25, 2018 when the GDPR becomes enforceable. The current AWS DPA, as well as the AWS GDPR DPA, allows customers to transfer personal data to countries outside the European Economic Area (EEA) in compliance with European Union (EU) data protection laws. AWS also adheres to the Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers in Europe (CISPE) Code of Conduct. The CISPE Code of Conduct helps customers ensure that AWS is using appropriate data protection standards to protect their data, consistent with the GDPR. In addition, AWS offers a wide range of services and features to help customers meet the requirements of the GDPR, including services for access controls, monitoring, logging, and encryption.

From Our Customers
Many AWS customers are preparing to use this new Region. Here’s a small sample:

Societe Generale, one of the largest banks in France and the world, has accelerated their digital transformation while working with AWS. They developed SG Research, an application that makes reports from Societe Generale’s analysts available to corporate customers in order to improve the decision-making process for investments. The new AWS Region will reduce latency between applications running in the cloud and in their French data centers.

SNCF is the national railway company of France. Their mobile app, powered by AWS, delivers real-time traffic information to 14 million riders. Extreme weather, traffic events, holidays, and engineering works can cause usage to peak at hundreds of thousands of users per second. They are planning to use machine learning and big data to add predictive features to the app.

Radio France, the French public radio broadcaster, offers seven national networks, and uses AWS to accelerate its innovation and stay competitive.

Les Restos du Coeur, a French charity that provides assistance to the needy, delivering food packages and participating in their social and economic integration back into French society. Les Restos du Coeur is using AWS for its CRM system to track the assistance given to each of their beneficiaries and the impact this is having on their lives.

AlloResto by JustEat (a leader in the French FoodTech industry), is using AWS to to scale during traffic peaks and to accelerate their innovation process.

AWS Consulting and Technology Partners
We are already working with a wide variety of consulting, technology, managed service, and Direct Connect partners in France. Here’s a partial list:

AWS Premier Consulting Partners – Accenture, Capgemini, Claranet, CloudReach, DXC, and Edifixio.

AWS Consulting Partners – ABC Systemes, Atos International SAS, CoreExpert, Cycloid, Devoteam, LINKBYNET, Oxalide, Ozones, Scaleo Information Systems, and Sopra Steria.

AWS Technology Partners – Axway, Commerce Guys, MicroStrategy, Sage, Software AG, Splunk, Tibco, and Zerolight.

AWS in France
We have been investing in Europe, with a focus on France, for the last 11 years. We have also been developing documentation and training programs to help our customers to improve their skills and to accelerate their journey to the AWS Cloud.

As part of our commitment to AWS customers in France, we plan to train more than 25,000 people in the coming years, helping them develop highly sought after cloud skills. They will have access to AWS training resources in France via AWS Academy, AWSome days, AWS Educate, and webinars, all delivered in French by AWS Technical Trainers and AWS Certified Trainers.

Use it Today
The EU (Paris) Region is open for business now and you can start using it today!

— Jeff;

 

How to Manage Amazon GuardDuty Security Findings Across Multiple Accounts

Post Syndicated from Tom Stickle original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-to-manage-amazon-guardduty-security-findings-across-multiple-accounts/

Introduced at AWS re:Invent 2017, Amazon GuardDuty is a managed threat detection service that continuously monitors for malicious or unauthorized behavior to help you protect your AWS accounts and workloads. In an AWS Blog post, Jeff Barr shows you how to enable GuardDuty to monitor your AWS resources continuously. That blog post shows how to get started with a single GuardDuty account and provides an overview of the features of the service. Your security team, though, will probably want to use GuardDuty to monitor a group of AWS accounts continuously.

In this post, I demonstrate how to use GuardDuty to monitor a group of AWS accounts and have their findings routed to another AWS account—the master account—that is owned by a security team. The method I demonstrate in this post is especially useful if your security team is responsible for monitoring a group of AWS accounts over which it does not have direct access—known as member accounts. In this solution, I simplify the work needed to enable GuardDuty in member accounts and configure findings by simplifying the process, which I do by enabling GuardDuty in the master account and inviting member accounts.

Enable GuardDuty in a master account and invite member accounts

To get started, you must enable GuardDuty in the master account, which will receive GuardDuty findings. The master account should be managed by your security team, and it will display the findings from all member accounts. The master account can be reverted later by removing any member accounts you add to it. Adding member accounts is a two-way handshake mechanism to ensure that administrators from both the master and member accounts formally agree to establish the relationship.

To enable GuardDuty in the master account and add member accounts:

  1. Navigate to the GuardDuty console.
  2. In the navigation pane, choose Accounts.
    Screenshot of the Accounts choice in the navigation pane
  1. To designate this account as the GuardDuty master account, start adding member accounts:
    • You can add individual accounts by choosing Add Account, or you can add a list of accounts by choosing Upload List (.csv).
  1. Now, add the account ID and email address of the member account, and choose Add. (If you are uploading a list of accounts, choose Browse, choose the .csv file with the member accounts [one email address and account ID per line], and choose Add accounts.)
    Screenshot of adding an account

For security reasons, AWS checks to make sure each account ID is valid and that you’ve entered each member account’s email address that was used to create the account. If a member account’s account ID and email address do not match, GuardDuty does not send an invitation.
Screenshot showing the Status of Invite

  1. After you add all the member accounts you want to add, you will see them listed in the Member accounts table with a Status of Invite. You don’t have to individually invite each account—you can choose a group of accounts and when you choose to invite one account in the group, all accounts are invited.
  2. When you choose Invite for each member account:
    1. AWS checks to make sure the account ID is valid and the email address provided is the email address of the member account.
    2. AWS sends an email to the member account email address with a link to the GuardDuty console, where the member account owner can accept the invitation. You can add a customized message from your security team. Account owners who receive the invitation must sign in to their AWS account to accept the invitation. The service also sends an invitation through the AWS Personal Health Dashboard in case the member email address is not monitored. This invitation appears in the member account under the AWS Personal Health Dashboard alert bell on the AWS Management Console.
    3. A pending-invitation indicator is shown on the GuardDuty console of the member account, as shown in the following screenshot.
      Screenshot showing the pending-invitation indicator

When the invitation is sent by email, it is sent to the account owner of the GuardDuty member account.
Screenshot of the invitation sent by email

The account owner can click the link in the email invitation or the AWS Personal Health Dashboard message, or the account owner can sign in to their account and navigate to the GuardDuty console. In all cases, the member account displays the pending invitation in the member account’s GuardDuty console with instructions for accepting the invitation. The GuardDuty console walks the account owner through accepting the invitation, including enabling GuardDuty if it is not already enabled.

If you prefer to work in the AWS CLI, you can enable GuardDuty and accept the invitation. To do this, call CreateDetector to enable GuardDuty, and then call AcceptInvitation, which serves the same purpose as accepting the invitation in the GuardDuty console.

  1. After the member account owner accepts the invitation, the Status in the master account is changed to Monitored. The status helps you track the status of each AWS account that you invite.
    Screenshot showing the Status change to Monitored

You have enabled GuardDuty on the member account, and all findings will be forwarded to the master account. You can now monitor the findings about GuardDuty member accounts from the GuardDuty console in the master account.

The member account owner can see GuardDuty findings by default and can control all aspects of the experience in the member account with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) permissions. Users with the appropriate permissions can end the multi-account relationship at any time by toggling the Accept button on the Accounts page. Note that ending the relationship changes the Status of the account to Resigned and also triggers a security finding on the side of the master account so that the security team knows the member account is no longer linked to the master account.

Working with GuardDuty findings

Most security teams have ticketing systems, chat operations, security information event management (SIEM) systems, or other security automation systems to which they would like to push GuardDuty findings. For this purpose, GuardDuty sends all findings as JSON-based messages through Amazon CloudWatch Events, a scalable service to which you can subscribe and to which AWS services can stream system events. To access these events, navigate to the CloudWatch Events console and create a rule that subscribes to the GuardDuty-related findings. You then can assign a target such as Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose that can place the findings in a number of services such as Amazon S3. The following screenshot is of the CloudWatch Events console, where I have a rule that pulls all events from GuardDuty and pushes them to a preconfigured AWS Lambda function.

Screenshot of a CloudWatch Events rule

The following example is a subset of GuardDuty findings that includes relevant context and information about the nature of a threat that was detected. In this example, the instanceId, i-00bb62b69b7004a4c, is performing Secure Shell (SSH) brute-force attacks against IP address 172.16.0.28. From a Lambda function, you can access any of the following fields such as the title of the finding and its description, and send those directly to your ticketing system.

Example GuardDuty findings

You can use other AWS services to build custom analytics and visualizations of your security findings. For example, you can connect Kinesis Data Firehose to CloudWatch Events and write events to an S3 bucket in a standard format, which can be encrypted with AWS Key Management Service and then compressed. You also can use Amazon QuickSight to build ad hoc dashboards by using AWS Glue and Amazon Athena. Similarly, you can place the data from Kinesis Data Firehose in Amazon Elasticsearch Service, with which you can use tools such as Kibana to build your own visualizations and dashboards.

Like most other AWS services, GuardDuty is a regional service. This means that when you enable GuardDuty in an AWS Region, all findings are generated and delivered in that region. If you are regulated by a compliance regime, this is often an important requirement to ensure that security findings remain in a specific jurisdiction. Because customers have let us know they would prefer to be able to enable GuardDuty globally and have all findings aggregated in one place, we intend to give the choice of regional or global isolation as we evolve this new service.

Summary

In this blog post, I have demonstrated how to use GuardDuty to monitor a group of GuardDuty member accounts and aggregate security findings in a central master GuardDuty account. You can use this solution whether or not you have direct control over the member accounts.

If you have comments about this blog post, submit them in the “Comments” section below. If you have questions about using GuardDuty, start a thread in the GuardDuty forum or contact AWS Support.

-Tom

Now Open – AWS China (Ningxia) Region

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-open-aws-china-ningxia-region/

Today we launched our 17th Region globally, and the second in China. The AWS China (Ningxia) Region, operated by Ningxia Western Cloud Data Technology Co. Ltd. (NWCD), is generally available now and provides customers another option to run applications and store data on AWS in China.

The Details
At launch, the new China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD, supports Auto Scaling, AWS Config, AWS CloudFormation, AWS CloudTrail, Amazon CloudWatch, CloudWatch Events, Amazon CloudWatch Logs, AWS CodeDeploy, AWS Direct Connect, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon EC2 Systems Manager, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon Elasticsearch Service, Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon EMR, Amazon Glacier, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), Amazon Kinesis Streams, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), AWS Support API, AWS Trusted Advisor, Amazon Simple Workflow Service (SWF), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, and VM Import. Visit the AWS China Products page for additional information on these services.

The Region supports all sizes of C4, D2, M4, T2, R4, I3, and X1 instances.

Check out the AWS Global Infrastructure page to learn more about current and future AWS Regions.

Operating Partner
To comply with China’s legal and regulatory requirements, AWS has formed a strategic technology collaboration with NWCD to operate and provide services from the AWS China (Ningxia) Region. Founded in 2015, NWCD is a licensed datacenter and cloud services provider, based in Ningxia, China. NWCD joins Sinnet, the operator of the AWS China China (Beijing) Region, as an AWS operating partner in China. Through these relationships, AWS provides its industry-leading technology, guidance, and expertise to NWCD and Sinnet, while NWCD and Sinnet operate and provide AWS cloud services to local customers. While the cloud services offered in both AWS China Regions are the same as those available in other AWS Regions, the AWS China Regions are different in that they are isolated from all other AWS Regions and operated by AWS’s Chinese partners separately from all other AWS Regions. Customers using the AWS China Regions enter into customer agreements with Sinnet and NWCD, rather than with AWS.

Use it Today
The AWS China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD, is open for business, and you can start using it now! Starting today, Chinese developers, startups, and enterprises, as well as government, education, and non-profit organizations, can leverage AWS to run their applications and store their data in the new AWS China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD. Customers already using the AWS China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet, can select the AWS China (Ningxia) Region directly from the AWS Management Console, while new customers can request an account at www.amazonaws.cn to begin using both AWS China Regions.

— Jeff;

 

 

Implementing Dynamic ETL Pipelines Using AWS Step Functions

Post Syndicated from Tara Van Unen original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/implementing-dynamic-etl-pipelines-using-aws-step-functions/

This post contributed by:
Wangechi Dole, AWS Solutions Architect
Milan Krasnansky, ING, Digital Solutions Developer, SGK
Rian Mookencherry, Director – Product Innovation, SGK

Data processing and transformation is a common use case you see in our customer case studies and success stories. Often, customers deal with complex data from a variety of sources that needs to be transformed and customized through a series of steps to make it useful to different systems and stakeholders. This can be difficult due to the ever-increasing volume, velocity, and variety of data. Today, data management challenges cannot be solved with traditional databases.

Workflow automation helps you build solutions that are repeatable, scalable, and reliable. You can use AWS Step Functions for this. A great example is how SGK used Step Functions to automate the ETL processes for their client. With Step Functions, SGK has been able to automate changes within the data management system, substantially reducing the time required for data processing.

In this post, SGK shares the details of how they used Step Functions to build a robust data processing system based on highly configurable business transformation rules for ETL processes.

SGK: Building dynamic ETL pipelines

SGK is a subsidiary of Matthews International Corporation, a diversified organization focusing on brand solutions and industrial technologies. SGK’s Global Content Creation Studio network creates compelling content and solutions that connect brands and products to consumers through multiple assets including photography, video, and copywriting.

We were recently contracted to build a sophisticated and scalable data management system for one of our clients. We chose to build the solution on AWS to leverage advanced, managed services that help to improve the speed and agility of development.

The data management system served two main functions:

  1. Ingesting a large amount of complex data to facilitate both reporting and product funding decisions for the client’s global marketing and supply chain organizations.
  2. Processing the data through normalization and applying complex algorithms and data transformations. The system goal was to provide information in the relevant context—such as strategic marketing, supply chain, product planning, etc. —to the end consumer through automated data feeds or updates to existing ETL systems.

We were faced with several challenges:

  • Output data that needed to be refreshed at least twice a day to provide fresh datasets to both local and global markets. That constant data refresh posed several challenges, especially around data management and replication across multiple databases.
  • The complexity of reporting business rules that needed to be updated on a constant basis.
  • Data that could not be processed as contiguous blocks of typical time-series data. The measurement of the data was done across seasons (that is, combination of dates), which often resulted with up to three overlapping seasons at any given time.
  • Input data that came from 10+ different data sources. Each data source ranged from 1–20K rows with as many as 85 columns per input source.

These challenges meant that our small Dev team heavily invested time in frequent configuration changes to the system and data integrity verification to make sure that everything was operating properly. Maintaining this system proved to be a daunting task and that’s when we turned to Step Functions—along with other AWS services—to automate our ETL processes.

Solution overview

Our solution included the following AWS services:

  • AWS Step Functions: Before Step Functions was available, we were using multiple Lambda functions for this use case and running into memory limit issues. With Step Functions, we can execute steps in parallel simultaneously, in a cost-efficient manner, without running into memory limitations.
  • AWS Lambda: The Step Functions state machine uses Lambda functions to implement the Task states. Our Lambda functions are implemented in Java 8.
  • Amazon DynamoDB provides us with an easy and flexible way to manage business rules. We specify our rules as Keys. These are key-value pairs stored in a DynamoDB table.
  • Amazon RDS: Our ETL pipelines consume source data from our RDS MySQL database.
  • Amazon Redshift: We use Amazon Redshift for reporting purposes because it integrates with our BI tools. Currently we are using Tableau for reporting which integrates well with Amazon Redshift.
  • Amazon S3: We store our raw input files and intermediate results in S3 buckets.
  • Amazon CloudWatch Events: Our users expect results at a specific time. We use CloudWatch Events to trigger Step Functions on an automated schedule.

Solution architecture

This solution uses a declarative approach to defining business transformation rules that are applied by the underlying Step Functions state machine as data moves from RDS to Amazon Redshift. An S3 bucket is used to store intermediate results. A CloudWatch Event rule triggers the Step Functions state machine on a schedule. The following diagram illustrates our architecture:

Here are more details for the above diagram:

  1. A rule in CloudWatch Events triggers the state machine execution on an automated schedule.
  2. The state machine invokes the first Lambda function.
  3. The Lambda function deletes all existing records in Amazon Redshift. Depending on the dataset, the Lambda function can create a new table in Amazon Redshift to hold the data.
  4. The same Lambda function then retrieves Keys from a DynamoDB table. Keys represent specific marketing campaigns or seasons and map to specific records in RDS.
  5. The state machine executes the second Lambda function using the Keys from DynamoDB.
  6. The second Lambda function retrieves the referenced dataset from RDS. The records retrieved represent the entire dataset needed for a specific marketing campaign.
  7. The second Lambda function executes in parallel for each Key retrieved from DynamoDB and stores the output in CSV format temporarily in S3.
  8. Finally, the Lambda function uploads the data into Amazon Redshift.

To understand the above data processing workflow, take a closer look at the Step Functions state machine for this example.

We walk you through the state machine in more detail in the following sections.

Walkthrough

To get started, you need to:

  • Create a schedule in CloudWatch Events
  • Specify conditions for RDS data extracts
  • Create Amazon Redshift input files
  • Load data into Amazon Redshift

Step 1: Create a schedule in CloudWatch Events
Create rules in CloudWatch Events to trigger the Step Functions state machine on an automated schedule. The following is an example cron expression to automate your schedule:

In this example, the cron expression invokes the Step Functions state machine at 3:00am and 2:00pm (UTC) every day.

Step 2: Specify conditions for RDS data extracts
We use DynamoDB to store Keys that determine which rows of data to extract from our RDS MySQL database. An example Key is MCS2017, which stands for, Marketing Campaign Spring 2017. Each campaign has a specific start and end date and the corresponding dataset is stored in RDS MySQL. A record in RDS contains about 600 columns, and each Key can represent up to 20K records.

A given day can have multiple campaigns with different start and end dates running simultaneously. In the following example DynamoDB item, three campaigns are specified for the given date.

The state machine example shown above uses Keys 31, 32, and 33 in the first ChoiceState and Keys 21 and 22 in the second ChoiceState. These keys represent marketing campaigns for a given day. For example, on Monday, there are only two campaigns requested. The ChoiceState with Keys 21 and 22 is executed. If three campaigns are requested on Tuesday, for example, then ChoiceState with Keys 31, 32, and 33 is executed. MCS2017 can be represented by Key 21 and Key 33 on Monday and Tuesday, respectively. This approach gives us the flexibility to add or remove campaigns dynamically.

Step 3: Create Amazon Redshift input files
When the state machine begins execution, the first Lambda function is invoked as the resource for FirstState, represented in the Step Functions state machine as follows:

"Comment": ” AWS Amazon States Language.", 
  "StartAt": "FirstState",
 
"States": { 
  "FirstState": {
   
"Type": "Task",
   
"Resource": "arn:aws:lambda:xx-xxxx-x:XXXXXXXXXXXX:function:Start",
    "Next": "ChoiceState" 
  }

As described in the solution architecture, the purpose of this Lambda function is to delete existing data in Amazon Redshift and retrieve keys from DynamoDB. In our use case, we found that deleting existing records was more efficient and less time-consuming than finding the delta and updating existing records. On average, an Amazon Redshift table can contain about 36 million cells, which translates to roughly 65K records. The following is the code snippet for the first Lambda function in Java 8:

public class LambdaFunctionHandler implements RequestHandler<Map<String,Object>,Map<String,String>> {
    Map<String,String> keys= new HashMap<>();
    public Map<String, String> handleRequest(Map<String, Object> input, Context context){
       Properties config = getConfig(); 
       // 1. Cleaning Redshift Database
       new RedshiftDataService(config).cleaningTable(); 
       // 2. Reading data from Dynamodb
       List<String> keyList = new DynamoDBDataService(config).getCurrentKeys();
       for(int i = 0; i < keyList.size(); i++) {
           keys.put(”key" + (i+1), keyList.get(i)); 
       }
       keys.put(”key" + T,String.valueOf(keyList.size()));
       // 3. Returning the key values and the key count from the “for” loop
       return (keys);
}

The following JSON represents ChoiceState.

"ChoiceState": {
   "Type" : "Choice",
   "Choices": [ 
   {

      "Variable": "$.keyT",
     "StringEquals": "3",
     "Next": "CurrentThreeKeys" 
   }, 
   {

     "Variable": "$.keyT",
    "StringEquals": "2",
    "Next": "CurrentTwooKeys" 
   } 
 ], 
 "Default": "DefaultState"
}

The variable $.keyT represents the number of keys retrieved from DynamoDB. This variable determines which of the parallel branches should be executed. At the time of publication, Step Functions does not support dynamic parallel state. Therefore, choices under ChoiceState are manually created and assigned hardcoded StringEquals values. These values represent the number of parallel executions for the second Lambda function.

For example, if $.keyT equals 3, the second Lambda function is executed three times in parallel with keys, $key1, $key2 and $key3 retrieved from DynamoDB. Similarly, if $.keyT equals two, the second Lambda function is executed twice in parallel.  The following JSON represents this parallel execution:

"CurrentThreeKeys": { 
  "Type": "Parallel",
  "Next": "NextState",
  "Branches": [ 
  {

     "StartAt": “key31",
    "States": { 
       “key31": {

          "Type": "Task",
        "InputPath": "$.key1",
        "Resource": "arn:aws:lambda:xx-xxxx-x:XXXXXXXXXXXX:function:Execution",
        "End": true 
       } 
    } 
  }, 
  {

     "StartAt": “key32",
    "States": { 
     “key32": {

        "Type": "Task",
       "InputPath": "$.key2",
         "Resource": "arn:aws:lambda:xx-xxxx-x:XXXXXXXXXXXX:function:Execution",
       "End": true 
      } 
     } 
   }, 
   {

      "StartAt": “key33",
       "States": { 
          “key33": {

                "Type": "Task",
             "InputPath": "$.key3",
             "Resource": "arn:aws:lambda:xx-xxxx-x:XXXXXXXXXXXX:function:Execution",
           "End": true 
       } 
     } 
    } 
  ] 
}

Step 4: Load data into Amazon Redshift
The second Lambda function in the state machine extracts records from RDS associated with keys retrieved for DynamoDB. It processes the data then loads into an Amazon Redshift table. The following is code snippet for the second Lambda function in Java 8.

public class LambdaFunctionHandler implements RequestHandler<String, String> {
 public static String key = null;

public String handleRequest(String input, Context context) { 
   key=input; 
   //1. Getting basic configurations for the next classes + s3 client Properties
   config = getConfig();

   AmazonS3 s3 = AmazonS3ClientBuilder.defaultClient(); 
   // 2. Export query results from RDS into S3 bucket 
   new RdsDataService(config).exportDataToS3(s3,key); 
   // 3. Import query results from S3 bucket into Redshift 
    new RedshiftDataService(config).importDataFromS3(s3,key); 
   System.out.println(input); 
   return "SUCCESS"; 
 } 
}

After the data is loaded into Amazon Redshift, end users can visualize it using their preferred business intelligence tools.

Lessons learned

  • At the time of publication, the 1.5–GB memory hard limit for Lambda functions was inadequate for processing our complex workload. Step Functions gave us the flexibility to chunk our large datasets and process them in parallel, saving on costs and time.
  • In our previous implementation, we assigned each key a dedicated Lambda function along with CloudWatch rules for schedule automation. This approach proved to be inefficient and quickly became an operational burden. Previously, we processed each key sequentially, with each key adding about five minutes to the overall processing time. For example, processing three keys meant that the total processing time was three times longer. With Step Functions, the entire state machine executes in about five minutes.
  • Using DynamoDB with Step Functions gave us the flexibility to manage keys efficiently. In our previous implementations, keys were hardcoded in Lambda functions, which became difficult to manage due to frequent updates. DynamoDB is a great way to store dynamic data that changes frequently, and it works perfectly with our serverless architectures.

Conclusion

With Step Functions, we were able to fully automate the frequent configuration updates to our dataset resulting in significant cost savings, reduced risk to data errors due to system downtime, and more time for us to focus on new product development rather than support related issues. We hope that you have found the information useful and that it can serve as a jump-start to building your own ETL processes on AWS with managed AWS services.

For more information about how Step Functions makes it easy to coordinate the components of distributed applications and microservices in any workflow, see the use case examples and then build your first state machine in under five minutes in the Step Functions console.

If you have questions or suggestions, please comment below.