Tag Archives: Events

Join AWS Cloud Infrastructure Day to learn cutting-edge innovations building global cloud infrastructure

Post Syndicated from Channy Yun (윤석찬) original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/join-aws-cloud-infrastructure-day-to-learn-cutting-edge-innovations-building-global-cloud-infrastructure/

I want to introduce the AWS Cloud Infrastructure Day to provide a comprehensive showcase of latest innovations in AWS cloud infrastructure. This event will highlight cutting-edge advances across compute, artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), storage solutions, networking capabilities, serverless, and accelerated technologies, and global infrastructure.

Join us for AWS Cloud Infrastructure Day, a free-to-attend one-day virtual event on May 22, 2025, starting at 11:00 AM PDT (2:00 PM EDT). We will stream the event simultaneously across multiple platforms, including LinkedIn Live, Twitter, YouTube, and Twitch.

Here are some of the highlights you can expect from this event:

Willem Visser, VP of EC2 Technology will open with the introduction of the AWS journey since 2006, when Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) was launched with the goal of customer-obsessed innovation. He will speak about the progress made over nearly two decades in cloud infrastructure to support both startups and enterprise workloads based on scale, capacity, and flexibility.

You can learn how AWS developed beyond computing instances to create a complete cloud infrastructure, including the parallel evolution of services like storage and networking capabilities.

Todd Kennedy, Principal Engineer, GoDaddy, will share GoDaddy’s Graviton adoption journey and the benefits it reaped from Graviton. Todd will walk through an example to demonstrate moving Rust workloads to Graviton. Learn how GoDaddy achieved 40 percent compute cost savings and over 20 percent performance gains.

This event covers a variety of topics related to AWS Cloud infrastructure. Here are interesting topics that caught my interest:

  • Generative AI at the edge – You can learn how to select, fine-tune, and deploy small language models (SLMs) for on-premises and edge use cases due to data residency requirements using AWS hybrid and edge services.
  • Serverless for agentic AI auditability – You can learn how AWS Step Functions and AWS Lambda transform opaque agentic AI system operations into transparent, auditable workflows.
  • Accelerated computing – You can get a close look at AWS innovation across silicon, server, and data centers and learn how customers are using AI chips. Learn how you can get started and reduce your generative AI costs.
  • Networking capability – You can learn how AWS infrastructure—from physical fiber to software-defined networking—enables unparalleled performance and reliability at global scale. The session covers modern application networking patterns while emphasizing secure connectivity solutions for hybrid environments.

This event is perfect for technical decision-makers and developers and offers deep technical insights and hands-on demonstrations of the latest AWS Cloud infrastructure solutions.

To learn more details, review the event schedule and register for AWS Cloud Infrastructure Day.

Channy


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Key Takeaways from the Take Command Summit 2025: From Zero to Hero: Building the Perfect Defense

Post Syndicated from Rapid7 original https://blog.rapid7.com/2025/05/06/key-takeaways-from-the-take-command-summit-2025-from-zero-to-hero-building-the-perfect-defense/

Key Takeaways from the Take Command Summit 2025: From Zero to Hero: Building the Perfect Defense

At Take Command 2025, bold ideas and fresh thinking took center stage — in particular in our opening talk From Zero to Hero: Building the Perfect Defense.

Led by Ted Harrington, Executive Partner at ISE, and hosted by Thom Langford, EMEA CTO at Rapid7, this session challenged security leaders to think beyond traditional defenses and imagine a future where cybersecurity is smarter, faster, and proactive by design.

Here’s a quick look at the key insights from the conversation.

Security needs a reset, not a retrofit

Ted kicked things off with a fundamental question: if we could rebuild cybersecurity from scratch, what would we do differently?
Instead of layering on more tools or chasing compliance checklists, today’s most resilient organizations are rethinking their architectures, embedding security principles like Zero Trust from the ground up, and designing systems to stop threats before they strike.

Think like an attacker to build defenses that work

The best defenders don’t just react, they anticipate. Ted emphasized the importance of adopting a hacker mindset within security teams. Creativity, curiosity, and a willingness to question assumptions are critical to staying ahead of adversaries who constantly innovate.
Security strategies must evolve to disrupt attacker workflows, not just patch known vulnerabilities.

Security is a business enabler, not a roadblock

One of the biggest missed opportunities in cybersecurity is the failure to connect security outcomes to business success.
Ted encouraged security leaders to speak the language of the boardroom, framing security initiatives as drivers of trust, resilience, and competitive advantage — not just cost centers or necessary evils.

Burnout and broken structures hold security back

Ted didn’t shy away from real talk about the internal challenges many security teams face.
Burnout, underfunded initiatives, and misaligned CISO roles are slowing progress across the industry.
Organizations must empower security leadership with proper funding, executive visibility, and a seat at the table if they want to build truly resilient programs.

Ready to take command? Watch the full session

Ted’s message was clear: the future of cybersecurity won’t be built on incremental improvements. It will be shaped by organizations bold enough to rethink, reframe, and rebuild from a position of strength.

Want to dive deeper? Catch the full session on demand and explore how you can take command of your defenses today.

Watch Now.

Top Lessons from Take Command 2025

Post Syndicated from Rapid7 original https://blog.rapid7.com/2025/04/21/top-lessons-from-take-command-2025/

Top Lessons from Take Command 2025

The live sessions may be over, but with every talk now available on demand, it’s the perfect time to reflect on the biggest takeaways from this year’s summit—and how they can help security teams move faster, act smarter, and take control of their attack surface.

From red teaming tactics to regulatory readiness, here are some of the standout lessons and ideas shared by speakers across the day.

1. Red Teaming Isn’t Just About Getting In—It’s About What Happens Next

In Outpacing the Adversary, Aaron Herndon, Senior Director, Sales Engineering at Rapid7 and Will Hunt, Co-Founder of In.security, reminded us that red teaming isn’t just about proving a breach is possible. It’s about helping teams understand how attackers think, where they’re likely to go, and whether detection and response controls actually work in practice.

From creative simulations to critical discussions on ethical boundaries and scope, the message was clear: red teaming is most valuable when it drives real organizational learning.

2. You Can’t Prioritize What You Can’t See

In Risk Revolution: Proactive Strategies for Exposure Management, panelists from Rapid7 and ESG made it clear that visibility remains the top challenge for most teams. Fragmented data, sprawling assets, and misaligned priorities are slowing teams down.

The solution? A unified, risk-aware approach to exposure management—one that considers cloud, identity, data, and application risk in context. Prioritization must reflect business reality, not just vulnerability severity.

3. Cloud Security Requires Context

In Demystifying Cloud Detection & Response, panelists shared how traditional tools aren’t built for dynamic, cloud-native environments. Logs are short-lived, workloads are ephemeral, and identity is often the weakest link.

To respond effectively, SOC teams need visibility, automation, and integrations that bring context across systems. The modern attack surface starts well before the endpoint.

4. Compliance Is Evolving. It’s Not a Checkbox Exercise

From Chaos to Compliant brought practical guidance for navigating frameworks like NIS2, DORA, and SEC cyber rules, among others. The takeaway? Compliance and security are strongest when they work together.

With the right tools, processes, and internal alignment, compliance can become a strategic advantage—not just a box to tick.

5. AI Is Here. Use It Thoughtfully

AI was a recurring theme throughout the day, especially in AI in Action. Rapid7’s engineering and product teams showcased how they’re applying AI across triage, prioritization, and detection, while keeping responsible deployment top of mind.

The takeaway: AI can boost speed and scale, but human oversight and thoughtful governance are still essential.

6. Visibility Gaps Are Where Attackers Thrive

In Inside the SOC, Rapid7 threat hunters shared stories of real-world breaches where attackers operated undetected due to logging gaps, missing coverage, or misconfigured systems.

Whether it’s credential theft through Microsoft Teams impersonation attacks or ransomware in unmanaged environments, the message was clear: you need full visibility to stay ahead.

7. Security Is a Team Sport

Across sessions—from exposure management to cloud strategy to customer-led discussions—one thing was clear: effective security requires collaboration.

Security teams, IT, engineering, and compliance all need shared context and coordinated goals to defend today’s growing attack surface.

Catch Up or Rewatch: All Sessions On Demand

Every session from Take Command 2025 is now available to watch. Whether you missed one or want to revisit a discussion with your team, you can dive back in anytime.

Watch on demand here.

Take Command 2025: A Day of Insight, Innovation, and Impact

Post Syndicated from Rapid7 original https://blog.rapid7.com/2025/04/14/take-command-2025-a-day-of-insight-innovation-and-impact/

Take Command 2025: A Day of Insight, Innovation, and Impact

Take Command 2025 is officially in the books. From the opening sessions to the final takeaways, the summit delivered a full day of high-impact discussions, fresh research, and powerful stories from across the cybersecurity spectrum.

This year’s event brought together cybersecurity leaders, researchers, red teamers, and policy experts for an honest look at the challenges we’re facing—and the tools, tactics, and mindsets helping us take command in a complex threat landscape.

We’re grateful to everyone who joined us and proud of the conversations that unfolded throughout the day. If you missed any sessions or want to rewatch key moments, every session is now available on demand.

A Day of Firsts: New Research, New Tools, Real Stories

One of the standout moments came during Inside the Mind of an Attacker: Navigating the Threat Horizon session, where Raj Samani and Trent Teyema previewed findings from Rapid7’s latest ransomware intelligence. Based on data from Q1 2025, the discussion touched on shifting attacker tactics, the growing professionalism of ransomware groups, and the need for visibility and response readiness at every level.

Another highlight was Ted Harrington’s keynote, From Zero to Hero: Building the Perfect Defense, which challenged us to reimagine security architecture from the ground up. Ted emphasized bold thinking, Zero Trust foundations, and security’s role as a business enabler—not a roadblock.

Technical Deep Dives and Practical Playbooks

This year’s agenda wasn’t just aspirational—it was tactical. The SOC team took us inside real-world threats in Expert Stories from the Frontlines of Threat Hunting and Malware Detection, sharing lessons from active ransomware and MFA-bypass investigations.

In Risk Revolution: Proactive Strategies for Exposure Management, speakers laid out practical frameworks for prioritizing risk across cloud, identity, data, and application layers. And in Demystifying Cloud Detection & Response, panelists explored how SOC teams can bridge traditional and cloud-native security gaps using the right integrations and context-rich telemetry.

We also heard from customer leaders during Expert Tips to Future-Proof Your VM Program, where panelists from Cross Financial, Miltenyi Biotec, and Phibro Animal Health discussed the shift from vulnerability management to exposure-led strategies.

Compliance, Resilience, and Looking Ahead

With global regulations evolving fast, From Chaos to Compliant session offered clear, actionable guidance for navigating global compliance legislations, such as SEC, NIS2, and DORA amongst many others—without compromising operational efficiency. Sabeen Malik and Lara Sunday reminded us that compliance, done right, can be a catalyst for organizational resilience.

And in one of the most engaging sessions of the day, The Tempest Two shared stories of adventure and mindset that resonated with security teams striving to adapt, overcome, and lead with purpose in high-pressure environments.

Now Streaming: All Sessions On Demand

Couldn’t attend live—or want to revisit a key session? Every session from Take Command 2025 is now available to watch on demand. Whether you’re catching up or sharing with your team, this is your chance to revisit the insights and strategies shaping the future of cybersecurity.

Watch now, on demand

Don’t Miss Out: What You Need to Know Before Take Command 2025

Post Syndicated from Rapid7 original https://blog.rapid7.com/2025/04/07/dont-miss-out-what-you-need-to-know-before-take-command-2025/

Don’t Miss Out: What You Need to Know Before Take Command 2025

Take Command 2025 is just two days away, and there’s still time to secure your spot. Whether you’ve already registered or are building your agenda now, there’s plenty to look forward to — and it all starts this Wednesday, April 9.

In the lead-up to the live summit, two new on-demand sessions are already available for viewing, giving you a head start on key themes like attacker behavior and regulatory change. And during the event itself, you’ll get an exclusive look at findings from Rapid7’s latest ransomware research — pulled directly from Q1 threat activity and shared publicly for the first time.

This year’s event brings together top minds in cybersecurity for a full day of insights on exposure management, MDR, AI ,threat intelligence, red teaming, and more. It’s practical, high-impact content designed for practitioners, team leaders, and CISOs alike.

Hear the Latest Findings First at Take Command

If you want a pulse check on what’s happening across the threat landscape, don’t miss Inside the Mind of an Attacker: Navigating the Threat Horizon, led by Raj Samani, Chief Scientist at Rapid7.

Raj will be joined by Trent Teyema, Founder of CSG Strategies and former head of the FBI Cyber Division, for a panel that explores attacker methodologies, tactics, and trends. During the session, Raj will share key findings from Rapid7’s latest ransomware research, which will add depth to this important and insightful discussion. Attend this session and you’ll get a special research infographic and link to the detailed blog, which dives into

  • Which ransomware groups are most active in 2025 so far
  • How pressure tactics and extortion models are evolving
  • Which industries are being targeted — and why
  • What security teams can do now to reduce risk

Still Time to Register

There’s still time to register and experience Take Command 2025 as it happens. Attending live means you’ll:

  • Ask your questions during real-time Q&As
  • Hear fresh research and insights as they’re shared
  • Connect with experts and peers across the industry

This is your chance to be part of the conversation — not just watch it later. And if your schedule shifts? All sessions will be available on-demand after the event, so you can catch up at your convenience.

Get Ready to Take Command

Take Command 2025 brings together frontline experience, original research, and actionable guidance — all in one virtual event. If you haven’t registered yet, now is the time.

Whether you’re joining live, watching on-demand, or getting a head start with early sessions, this is your opportunity to learn what today’s threats really look like — and how to stay ahead of them.

Register now.

Preview the Action: Two New Sessions Available Before Take Command 2025

Post Syndicated from Rapid7 original https://blog.rapid7.com/2025/04/02/preview-the-action-two-new-sessions-available-before-take-command-2025/

Preview the Action: Two New Sessions Available Before Take Command 2025

Take Command 2025 is packed with insights from cybersecurity experts, threat intelligence leaders, and hands-on practitioners. But you don’t have to wait until April 9 to start learning. Two exclusive sessions are now available on-demand — giving you early access to critical content designed to help you think like an attacker, respond like a pro, and prepare for what’s next.

Whether you’re in the trenches of daily operations or shaping security strategy at the executive level, here’s what’s in it for you — and why attending Take Command 2025 is a must.

Start Learning Now: Two Must-Watch Sessions, Now On-Demand

Demo: How Hackers Think – The Anatomy of a Real-World Attack.

Want to see how attackers operate in the real world — and how to stop them? In this hands-on demo, Zachary Jones, Senior Security Solutions Engineer at Rapid7, walks through the anatomy of a real-world cyberattack.

You’ll follow the attacker’s journey from initial access to exploitation, seeing how vulnerabilities are identified and used — and how proactive defenses can stop them in their tracks. This session is a great primer ahead of the event for teams looking to better understand attacker behavior and refine detection strategies.

Watch the session on-demand now and come to Take Command 2025 with a sharper perspective on how to defend against what you’ll face next.

Watch Now.

From Chaos to Compliant: Demystifying Cyber Regulations

Cyber regulations aren’t just growing — they’re shifting fast. This session unpacks the global compliance landscape and explores how security leaders can turn policy change into security strength.

Led by Ellis Fincham, EMEA Threat & XDR Sales Specialist Lead at Rapid7, the panel features Lara Sunday, Product Manager at Rapid7, and Sabeen Malik, VP of Global Government Affairs & Public Policy. Together, they provide real-world context on evolving frameworks like NIS2 and DORA, how to adapt to ongoing regulatory pressure, and what global organizations should consider when it comes to regional SaaS deployments and data residency requirements.

If you’re a CISO, compliance lead, or just trying to stay ahead of the next policy shift — this is one to bookmark.

Watch now.

Why Attend Take Command 2025?

This year’s event is built to give you practical guidance you can apply right away — whether you’re leading a security program, managing a team, or defending the frontlines.

Here’s what’s in store:

  • Expert-led panels and technical sessions on AI, MDR, threat intelligence, exposure management, red teaming, and more
  • Exclusive industry perspectives from Rapid7 researchers, product leaders, and global policy experts
  • On-demand content before and after the event, so you can engage on your terms

It’s everything you need to command your attack surface with confidence.

Take Command Starts Now

Take Command 2025 goes live on April 9, but you can start learning today. Watch both sessions now on-demand and get ready for a full day of insights that will move your security strategy forward.

Register Now.

Inside the Mind of the Attacker: A Conversation with Raj Samani

Post Syndicated from Rapid7 original https://blog.rapid7.com/2025/03/26/inside-the-mind-of-the-attacker-a-conversation-with-raj-samani/

Inside the Mind of the Attacker: A Conversation with Raj Samani

With Take Command 2025 just around the corner, we sat down with Raj Samani, Chief Scientist at Rapid7, for a preview of his upcoming session: Inside the Mind of an Attacker: Navigating the Threat Horizon.

Raj will be joined by Trent Teyema, Founder and President at CSG Strategies and former head of the FBI Cyber Division, and moderator Brian Honan, CEO of BH Consulting. Together, they bring decades of experience across cyber intelligence, national security, and frontline incident response.

So what can attendees expect from the session, and the day as a whole?

A Panel Built for Practical Impact

“This isn’t a talking shop,” Raj told us. “The people on this panel are practitioners. They do the job.”

Rather than focus on theory, the session aims to provide clear, actionable guidance rooted in real-world expertise. Raj describes the panel as a rare convergence of perspectives: vendors developing the tools, consultants advising organizations directly, and former government leaders who’ve pursued and prosecuted threat actors.

“We’ve got three legs of the solution represented,” he said. “And the audience is the fourth. Between us, we’re covering every side of the response equation.”

The Shift in Attacker Capabilities

While Raj didn’t give away too much ahead of the session, he offered a clear warning: attacker capabilities have evolved—rapidly.

“In the past, tools and techniques used by advanced nation-state actors were out of reach for most criminals,” he explained. “Now, even relatively inexperienced threat actors have access to those same capabilities. That changes everything.”

Organizations today face a constant flood of vulnerabilities, alerts, and data to prioritize – often without the context needed to make effective decisions.

“It’s not that we have a data problem,” Raj noted. “It’s that we have a context problem. We’re overwhelmed, and the inability to act quickly and decisively is putting organizations at risk.”

That’s where visibility and prioritization come into play—two capabilities central to Exposure Management and solutions like Rapid7’s Exposure Command.

Why This Session Matters

Raj emphasized that this session is about helping practitioners walk away with tangible answers to critical questions:

  • How do I know if I’ve been compromised?
  • Are adversaries still in my network?
  • Which vulnerabilities actually matter?
  • What can I do to reduce risk—today?

“These are the questions every security leader needs to be able to answer. Because if you can’t, how long will your executive team trust you to lead the charge?”

Why Attend Take Command 2025?

Raj was clear: this isn’t just another virtual event.

“Take Command is one of our most important moments of the year,” he told us. “It’s where we bring everything together, sharing the latest research, strategies, experiences and innovations from those on the front lines.and give people the chance to hear what’s actually happening on the front lines.”

He also noted that sessions like his don’t come around often, making this a rare opportunity to hear directly from experts working across national security, threat intelligence, and hands-on incident response.

Don’t Miss It

Take Command 2025 takes place April 9, 2025, and features a full day of virtual sessions covering AI, MDR, threat intelligence, red teaming, and more.

Raj Samani’s panel, “Inside the Mind of an Attacker,” is one you won’t want to miss.

Register now.

Fresh Faces Join the Take Command 2025 Lineup

Post Syndicated from Rapid7 original https://blog.rapid7.com/2025/03/19/fresh-faces-join-the-take-command-2025-lineup/

Fresh Faces Join the Take Command 2025 Lineup

Take Command 2025 is bringing together some of the sharpest minds in cybersecurity to tackle today’s most urgent challenges. From attacker methodologies and AI-driven security to MDR, red teaming, and exposure management, this year’s virtual event will provide security professionals with practical insights, cutting-edge research, and real-world defense strategies.

While we’ve already announced an impressive lineup of industry experts, we’re excited to introduce even more voices joining the discussion. These new speakers will bring fresh perspectives and invaluable expertise to the Take Command 2025 stage, making this year’s event even more essential for security practitioners, team leaders, and researchers.

Shawnee Delaney: Cyber Intelligence, Insider Threats & AI Resilience

Cyber threats aren’t just external—insider risks, intelligence tactics, and machine-driven attacks are playing an increasingly significant role in security breaches. Shawnee Delaney, CEO of Vaillance Group and expert on cybersecurity, insider threat & counterintelligence, brings deep expertise in intelligence-driven security, insider threat management, and proactive cyber defense strategies.

Her session, ‘Rise of the Machines: Building Cyber Resilience with AI’, will explore:

  • How organizations can manage overwhelming volumes of security data using big data analytics, data fabric, and Generative AI
  • Strategies for leveraging AI-driven insights to detect and mitigate emerging threats
  • The balance between automation, human expertise, and proactive risk management in modern security operations

This session will provide practical, real-world takeaways for security teams looking to harness AI effectively in their operations.

Future-Proofing Vulnerability Management with Rapid7 customers

Security teams are shifting from traditional vulnerability scanning to proactive exposure management, and leading organizations are pioneering new strategies. In this panel, security leaders from Miltenyi Biotec , Phibro Animal Health Corporation, and Cross Financial Corp.will share firsthand insights on how they are evolving their vulnerability management programs to keep pace with today’s complex threat landscape.

Moderated by Aniket Menon, VP, Product Management at Rapid7, this session,  Expert Tips to Help You Future-proof Your VM Program with Continuous Attack Surface Visibility, will explore real-world experiences from security leaders implementing modern vulnerability management frameworks. They will discuss the challenges of adapting to emerging threats, lessons learned from refining their security programs, and best practices for improving visibility and risk prioritization. This customer-led discussion will provide actionable insights for security teams looking to strengthen their exposure management strategies and build a more resilient security posture.

Industry Experts Leading the Conversation

Take Command 2025 brings together top cybersecurity minds to explore threat intelligence, AI-driven security, exposure management, and evolving regulations. Raj Samani (Rapid7) and Trent Teyema (CSG Strategies, former FBI Special Agent) will break down attacker methodologies, while Will Hunt (In.Security) will discuss how red teaming is adapting to modern threats.

Ted Harrington (ISE) and Tyler Shields (ESG) will share strategies on AI-driven defense and proactive risk management, while Sabeen Malik (Rapid7) will guide CISOs through pieces of legislation that are considered important for cybersecurity.. Throughout the event, Rapid7’s SOC and MDR experts will offer real-world insights into evolving detection and response strategies.

The Tempest Two: Lessons in Resilience

Cybersecurity isn’t just about technology—it’s about mindset, resilience, and adaptability. The Tempest Two will bring a unique perspective on overcoming challenges and decision-making under pressure, drawing from their experiences tackling some of the world’s most extreme endurance challenges.

Their session will provide actionable takeaways on mental resilience and adaptability, offering insights that security professionals can apply to cyber incident response, crisis management, and high-pressure decision-making.

Register Now to Take Command 2025

Take Command 2025 is a free, global, virtual event happening on April 9. Don’t miss your chance to hear from security leaders and experts on the biggest challenges shaping the industry.

Save Your Spot Today

Register now.

Inside the Take Command Summit 2025 Agenda: What’s in Store for This Year’s Event?

Post Syndicated from Rapid7 original https://blog.rapid7.com/2025/03/05/inside-the-take-command-summit-2025-agenda-whats-in-store-for-this-years-event/

Inside the Take Command Summit 2025 Agenda: What’s in Store for This Year’s Event?

The cybersecurity landscape is shifting fast—ransomware is evolving, AI is reshaping security operations, and regulations are becoming more complex than ever. Security teams are under pressure to outpace adversaries, manage risk, and defend against sophisticated threats.

That’s why Take Command 2025 is built to deliver the most relevant, actionable insights security leaders need to navigate these challenges. This full-day virtual event brings together top security minds—from Rapid7’s experts to industry analysts and frontline defenders—covering the strategies, tools, and intelligence to help you take command of your attack surface.

A pre-recorded message from Rapid7 CEO Corey Thomas is already live on our event site, providing an inside look at what you can expect from Take Command 2025, and how our global summit will help security teams stay ahead of emerging threats.See the full list of speakers and watch Corey Thomas’s message on the Take Command 2025 registration page.

A Glimpse Into This Year’s Key Themes

This year’s agenda is packed with deep-dive discussions, real-world case studies, and expert insights on the most pressing security topics today. Here are just a few of the key focus areas you can expect at Take Command 2025:

Understanding the Evolving Threat Landscape

Cybercriminals are always one step ahead—until you learn to think like they do. This panel discussion, led by Raj Samani, Rapid7’s Chief Scientist, will explore the latest attack methodologies, emerging ransomware tactics, and evolving adversary behaviors.

Raj will be joined by Trent Teyema, Founder and President of CSG Strategies, a former FBI Special Agent (SES retired), as they analyze real-world attacker techniques and share how security teams can leverage threat intelligence to anticipate and disrupt threats before they escalate.

Session: Inside the Mind of an Attacker: Navigating the Threat Horizon

AI & Cloud Security: Opportunities and Challenges

AI is transforming cybersecurity, but how can organizations implement it responsibly and effectively? Take Command 2025 will examine:

  • The future of AI-powered security operations—what’s hype vs. reality?
  • How SOC and MDR teams are leveraging AI to improve detection and response
  • Cloud security challenges and why cloud detection & response (CDR) is becoming a critical SOC capability

Thom Langford, Regional CTO at Rapid7, will host this discussion, featuring Ted Harrington, Executive Partner at ISE (the Company of Ethical Hackers). Together, they will explore how AI-powered, Zero Trust-based security models are changing how organizations approach risk and resilience, and what the next era of cybersecurity defense will look like in our ‘From Zero to Hero: Building the Perfect Defense’ session.

Exposure Management & Red Teaming: Proactive Security in Action

Security teams can’t afford to wait for attacks to happen. Implementing proactive security strategies are critical. Take Command 2025 will explore:

  • How red teaming is evolving to match today’s complex threat landscape
  • Real-world lessons from leading vulnerability management programs
  • Why organizations are shifting from traditional vulnerability scanning to proactive exposure management

Industry analyst Tyler Shields (ESG) and offensive security consultant Will Hunt (In.Security) will lead key discussions, sharing practical insights on prioritizing risk, testing defenses, and staying ahead of attackers.

With NIS2, DORA, SEC regulations, and other global mandates becoming more prescriptive, CISOs need to stay ahead of compliance changes—but these evolving policies also present an opportunity to strengthen security programs.

Sessions will focus on:

  • How regulatory frameworks are reshaping security practices across industries
  • Key compliance challenges for global organizations and strategies for staying ahead
  • The intersection of security, policy, and business risk—how to turn compliance into a competitive advantage

Sabeen Malik, Rapid7’s VP of Global Government Affairs & Public Policy, will help demystify cyber regulations, compliance challenges, and evolving data residency concerns in ‘From Chaos to Compliant: Demystifying Cyber Regulations’.

More to Come: A Full Day of Cybersecurity Insights

This is just a preview of the cutting-edge discussions, expert panels, and strategic deep-dives planned for Take Command 2025. Across the day, you’ll also hear from Rapid7’s own SOC experts, product leaders, and security researchers, who will provide real-world insights into:

  • What’s next for AI-driven security operations
  • How real-world attack simulations are changing security strategy
  • Inside the SOC: Expert stories from frontline threat hunters

Whether you’re a practitioner, security leader, or researcher, this event is designed to give you the insights and strategies needed to strengthen your security posture in 2025 and beyond.

Register Now to Take Command

Take Command 2025 is a free, global, virtual event happening on April 9. Don’t miss your chance to hear from security leaders and experts on the biggest challenges shaping the industry.

Register Now!

Take Command | Rapid7’s 2025 Cybersecurity Summit: First Look at Our Speaker Lineup

Post Syndicated from Rapid7 original https://blog.rapid7.com/2025/02/19/take-command-rapid7s-2025-cybersecurity-summit-first-look-at-our-speaker-lineup/

Take Command | Rapid7’s 2025 Cybersecurity Summit: First Look at Our Speaker Lineup

Take Command Summit 2025 is shaping up to be one of the most impactful cybersecurity events of the year, bringing together Rapid7’s own security experts alongside leading industry voices for a full day of insights into today’s evolving attack landscape. This virtual summit will offer actionable strategies, real-world case studies, and expert discussions designed to help security teams take command of their defenses.

While we’ll be revealing the full agenda soon, we’re excited to share a first look at some of the key voices joining us this year to explore proactive risk management and offensive security strategies. These industry leaders will be part of a speaker lineup that includes Rapid7’s own security researchers, SOC experts, and product leaders, all focused on equipping security teams with the knowledge they need to outpace today’s adversaries.

Building a Modern Approach to Risk and Exposure Management

Tyler Shields, Industry Analyst at ESG, brings more than 25 years of experience in cybersecurity research, threat intelligence, and market strategy. As attack surfaces grow—spanning cloud, identity, data, and applications—security teams must shift from reactive to proactive risk management.

At Take Command 2025, he’ll explore how organizations can prioritize risk signals across diverse attack surfaces to build smarter, more proactive defense strategies. His session will provide a roadmap for understanding evolving threats and ensuring security teams focus on the most critical risks before they escalate.

Staying Ahead of Attackers with Continuous Red Teaming

Will Hunt, IT Consultant at In.Security, is a recognized expert in red teaming, penetration testing, and security training, having delivered workshops at Black Hat USA, Asia, and EU. As cyber threats evolve, static defenses and annual penetration tests are no longer enough—security teams need continuous testing strategies to stay ahead of adversaries.

At Take Command 2025, Hunt will join a panel of security experts to discuss how red teaming is evolving in response to expanding and increasingly complex attack surfaces and helping organisations stay ahead of adversaries. This session will explore how proactive testing is helping organizations identify and eliminate weaknesses before attackers can exploit them.

More to Come: A Full Day of Cybersecurity Insights

Take Command 2025 is more than just individual sessions—it’s a full day of expert discussions, deep technical insights, and strategic guidance from some of the best minds in cybersecurity. In addition to these featured speakers, Rapid7’s own security leaders, researchers, and SOC practitioners will provide critical perspectives on:

  • The evolving threat landscape and attacker mindset
  • How AI is redefining security operations and automation
  • Managing risk exposure across complex environments
  • Threat detection, response, and red teaming strategies

…and this is just the beginning! More speakers and sessions will be announced soon, covering the most pressing challenges facing security teams today.

Save Your Spot

Take Command Summit 2025 takes place on April 9, 2025, as a fully virtual, one-day event. Don’t miss the opportunity to hear from industry leaders, engage with Rapid7 experts, and walk away with actionable security strategies.

Register Now

Take Command | Rapid7’s 2025 Cybersecurity Summit: Own Your Attack Surface on April 9

Post Syndicated from Rapid7 original https://blog.rapid7.com/2025/02/05/take-command-rapid7s-2025-cybersecurity-summit/

Take Command | Rapid7’s 2025 Cybersecurity Summit: Own Your Attack Surface on April 9

Save the date: April 9, 2025

Take Command is back. After a hugely successful event last year, Rapid7’s cybersecurity summit returns with another stellar lineup to equip security teams with the latest threat intelligence, expert insights, and real-world strategies to take control of an evolving attack landscape.

At Take Command 2025, leading security experts, practitioners, and Rapid7’s own research teams will break down the latest attacker tactics, showcase cutting-edge defensive strategies, and explore how AI, MDR, and exposure management are reshaping cybersecurity. Taking command means shutting down threats before they can disrupt your business, staying ahead of adversaries, and constantly refining your defences—and that’s exactly what this year’s event is all about.

Why Attend?

Expert Research and Intelligence

Gain insights from Rapid7 Labs, the curators of Metasploit and our renowned open-source community. Learn how to safeguard against emerging ransomware threats, state-sponsored tactics, and critical vulnerabilities with cutting-edge research you can act on immediately.

Inside the SOC & Real-World Security Insights

Go inside Rapid7’s always-on SOC and hear how security leaders are tackling attack detection, response, and board-level expectations. Learn from peers and industry experts about managing today’s cybersecurity challenges.

Take Command of Your Attack Surface

Discover how MDR, AI, and exposure management can help you proactively reduce risk and outpace attackers. Eliminate silos, enhance visibility, and take decisive action to secure your organization.

What’s on the Agenda?

Building on last year’s high-impact sessions—including “Ready and Resilient: Before, During, & After Ransomware Attacks” and “Control the Chaos: Building Resilient Cyber Defenses Through AI”—Take Command 2025 will deliver even more insights into today’s most urgent cybersecurity challenges.

This year’s event will focus on:

  • The evolving threat landscape – Understanding adversaries’ latest techniques and how to stay ahead
  • AI and security automation – How AI is transforming detection, response, and cyber resilience
  • Cloud security and MDR – Strengthening defences in modern, hybrid environments
  • Proactive risk and exposure management – Strategies to continuously assess and reduce attack surface risk
  • Security operations in action – Expert insights on threat hunting, red teaming, and real-world SOC strategies

Mark Your Calendar & Save Your Spot

Take Command Summit 2025 takes place on April 9, 2025. This one-day virtual event is completely free and designed to give security professionals the insights they need to stay ahead of attackers.

[Save your spot now]

To see what you missed last year, watch 2024’s sessions here.

Entry is open for Coolest Projects 2025

Post Syndicated from Lizzie Jackson original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/entry-is-open-for-coolest-projects-2025/

Coolest Projects is our global technology showcase for young people aged up to 18. Coolest Projects gives young creators the incredible opportunity to share the cool stuff they’ve made using digital technology with a global audience. Everyone who takes part will also receive certificates and rewards to celebrate their achievements.

Young creator Jay showcases his Coolest Projects creation at an in-person event.

What you need to know about Coolest Projects

The Coolest Projects online showcase is open to young people worldwide. Young creators can enter their projects to share them with the world in our online project gallery and join our extra special livestream event to celebrate what they have made with the global Coolest Projects community.

By taking part in Coolest Projects, young people can join an international community of young makers, represent their country, receive feedback on their projects, and get certificates to recognise their achievements.

Coolest Projects is completely free to take part in, and we welcome all digital technology projects, from young people’s very first projects to advanced builds. The projects also don’t have to be completed before they can be submitted.

Photo of two young people sitting at laptops at a Coolest Projects event.

Projects can be submitted to one of seven categories: Scratch, games, web, mobile apps, hardware, advanced programming, and AI (new for 2025).

  • Young creators up to age 18 can take part individually or in teams of up to five friends
  • Any young person anywhere in the world can take part in the online showcase, and there are in-person events in some countries for local creators, too (find out more below)
  • Submissions for the online showcase are now open and close on 28 May 2025
  • All creators, mentors, volunteers, teachers, parents, and supporters are invited to the special celebration livestream on 25 June 2025

We know Coolest Projects has a big impact on young people all over the world, and we can’t wait to see your creations for 2025. You can find out more about the incredible creativity and collaboration from mentors and makers worldwide in our 2024 impact report.

How to submit your project

Photo of three young creators discussing their project at an in-person Coolest Projects event.

Taking part in Coolest Projects is simple:

  • Young people think of an idea for their project or choose something they’ve already made and are proud of
  • Young people work with friends to create their project or make it on their own 
  • Creators (with the help of mentors if needed) enter projects via the Coolest Projects website by 28 May
  • Creators’ projects are shared with the world in the online showcase gallery
  • Creators, mentors, and supporters explore the amazing projects in the online gallery and join the livestream on 25 June to celebrate young creators’ achievements with the Coolest Projects community worldwide

Mentors — entering more than one project? Sign up for a group code, and your young people can link their projects to your account.

  1. Sign up or log in. If you don’t have one already, you’ll need to set up a Raspberry Pi account. Click on the ‘sign up’ link in the top right-hand corner of the website to create one, and provide your details. You’ll be emailed a verification code as part of the sign-up process. If you already have an account, you can just log in.
  1. Create a group. Once signed in, you’ll be able to create a group. You’ll be asked questions about your group, including the group name and the country you’re based in, and be asked to agree to some privacy policies before continuing. You will then be able to view your group code and group submissions on your group dashboard. 
Digital photo of the Coolest Porjects 2025 group code dashboard
  1. Share your group code with your young people. Your group dashboard should look like this, with your group code displayed. The group code is what your young people will need to link their submissions to your account. They’ll be asked to input their group code at the start of the project submission form.

Submit your coolest projects. Every young person who uses your group code will have their project linked to your account. You can review and edit their projects in your group dashboard and submit them from there. There is no limit to the number of young people who can submit entries using your group code.

For a more detailed run-through of how to use group codes, please see our ‘how-to’ video.

Coolest Projects in-person events in 2025

As well as the global online showcase, Coolest Projects in-person events are held for young people locally in certain countries. We encourage creators to take part in both the online showcase and their local in-person event. In 2025, creators can attend the following in-person events, run by the Raspberry Pi Foundation and partner organisations around the world:

  • Coolest Projects Ireland, 1 March 2025 (run by the Foundation) — entry closes on Friday 14 February 
  • Coolest Projects Belgium, 26 April 2025 (run by CoderDojo Belgium)
  • Coolest Projects USA, 5 April 2025 (run by the Foundation) — entry closes on Friday 14 March 2025
  • Coolest Projects UK, 17 May 2025 (run by the Foundation) — entry closes on Friday 2 May 2025 
  • Coolest Projects India, 2025 date coming soon (run by the Foundation)
  • Coolest Projects Ghana, 2025 date coming soon (run by Ghana Code Club)
  • Coolest Projects Malaysia, 2025 date coming soon (run by Penang Science Cluster)
  • Coolest Projects South Africa, 2025 date coming soon (run by CoderLevelUp)
Photo of young creators getting ready to cheer, whilst attending an in-person Coolest Projects event.

More events are on the way, so sign up for the Coolest Projects newsletter to be sure you hear about any in-person events in your country. And if there isn’t an event near you, don’t worry, as the online showcase is open to any young person anywhere in the world.

Need help with your submission? 

Coolest Projects welcomes all digital tech projects, from beginner to advanced, and there are loads of great resources available to help you help the young people in your community to take part. If you’re searching for inspiration, take a look at the 2024 showcase gallery, where you can explore the incredible projects submitted by participants last year.

You’ll find everything you need to know about all seven Coolest Projects categories on our category pages, including our brand new AI category. Our projects site is also a great place for participants to begin — there are hundreds of free step-by-step project guides to help young people create their own projects, whether they’re experienced tech creators or just getting started.

Photo of a young creator showcasing they're project to two Raspberry Pi Foundation judges.

We will also be running a series of online webinars for mentors and young people to help participants develop their creations for each Coolest Projects category. Sign up for the sessions here. All sessions will be recorded, so you can watch them back if you can’t join live.

Be sure to check out the Coolest Projects guidance page for resources to help you support young people throughout their Coolest Projects journey, including a mentor guide and session plans. 

There’s lots more exciting news to come, from the announcement of our VIP judges to details about this year’s swag, so sign up for updates to be the first to know. 

Whether your coders have already made something that they want to share, or they’re inspired to make something new, Coolest Projects is the place for them. We can’t wait to see what they create!

The post Entry is open for Coolest Projects 2025 appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.

Your DevOps and Developer Productivity guide to 2024 re:Invent

Post Syndicated from Artur Rodrigues original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/your-devops-and-developer-productivity-guide-to-2024-reinvent/

It’s that time of the year again. The annual AWS re:Invent conference is just around the corner. Still need to save your spot? You can register here.

This year’s DevOps and Developer Productivity (DOP) track features an impressive lineup, including 11 breakout sessions, 14 chalk talks, 2 code talks, 8 workshops, 3 builder sessions, and 2 lightning talks.

I have curated a list of the DOP sessions that you should pay attention. I also invite you to visit the re:Invent catalog to explore the full range of DOP offerings. There is a collection of GenAI related sessions, leveraging Amazon Q Developer and Amazon Bedrock, as well as the usual AWS DevOps tools that we all love, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD).

How to reserve a seat in the sessions

Reserved seating is available for registered attendees to secure seats in the sessions of their choice. Reserve a seat by signing in to the attendee portal and navigating to “Event”, then “Sessions”.

Do not miss the Innovation Talk led by VP of Developer Experience, Adam Seligman. In DOP220 – Reimagining the Developer Experience at AWS – Software development is undergoing a seismic shift driven by generative AI, transforming how developers work, what they build, and who can become a developer. AWS empowers developers to fearlessly embrace this evolution, integrating cutting-edge yet responsible generative AI solutions across the development lifecycle. Explore real-world use cases accelerating legacy modernization, elevating cloud-native innovation, and unlocking remarkable results. Gain insights into AWS’s pragmatic approach, fueling creativity and customer impact. Join the vibrant community on this transformative journey, where generative AI is redefining software development, opening new frontiers for innovation, and democratizing access to coding for diverse creators shaping technology’s future.

DevOps and Developer Productivity breakout sessions

What are breakout sessions?

AWS re:Invent breakout sessions are lecture-style and 60 minutes long. These sessions are delivered by AWS experts and typically reserve 10–15 minutes for Q&A at the end. Breakout sessions are recorded and made available on-demand after the event.

DOP201 – AWS infrastructure as code: A year in review – AWS provides services that enable the creation, deployment and maintenance of application infrastructure in a programmatic, descriptive, and declarative way. These services provide rigor, clarity, and reliability to application development. Join this session to learn about the new features and improvements for AWS infrastructure as code with AWS CloudFormation and AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) and discover how they can benefit your team.

DOP202 – Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) for AWS – AWS provides one place where you can plan work, collaborate on code, and build, test, and deploy applications with continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) tools. In this session, learn about creating complete CI/CD pipelines using infrastructure as code on AWS.

DOP204 – Amazon Q Developer: Your gen AI assistant for software development – In this session, learn how Amazon Q Developer is transforming the developer experience by speeding up a range of tasks that support you as you research how to get started, evaluate system design, build secure and scalable applications, upgrade existing applications, and optimize application performance. Learn firsthand how Amazon Q capabilities for building, troubleshooting, and transforming applications faster and more easily frees you up to focus on experimentation and innovation.

DOP209 – Accelerate application maintenance and upgrades with generative AI – Developers spend significant time completing the undifferentiated work of maintaining and upgrading legacy applications. Teams need to balance investments in building new features with mandatory patching and update work. Now, using the power of generative AI, the Amazon Q Developer agent for code transformation can expedite these critical upgrade tasks, transforming applications to use the latest language features and versions in hours or days and saving significant costs. Join the session to learn what’s new and how your team can automate Java application upgrades.

DOP214 – Unleashing generative AI: Amazon’s journey with Amazon Q Developer – Join us to discover how Amazon rolled out Amazon Q Developer to thousands of developers, trained them in prompt engineering, and measured its transformative impact on productivity. In this session, learn best practices for effectively adopting generative AI in your organization. Gain insights into training strategies, productivity metrics, and real-world use cases to empower your developers to harness the full potential of this game-changing technology. Don’t miss this opportunity to stay ahead of the curve and drive innovation within your team.

DevOps and Developer Productivity chalk talks

What are chalk talks?

Chalk Talks are highly interactive sessions with a small audience. Experts lead you through problems and solutions on a digital whiteboard as the discussion unfolds. Each begins with a short lecture (10–15 minutes) delivered by an AWS expert, followed by a 45- or 50-minute Q&A session with the audience.

DOP318 – Prompt engineering expertise: Unleashing code with Amazon Q Developer – Dive into the art of prompt engineering and discover how to harness the full potential of Amazon Q Developer, AWS’s cutting-edge generative AI service. Learn techniques to craft compelling prompts that yield remarkable code generation results. Explore strategies to provide contextual information beyond prompts, such as import statements, to enhance the accuracy and relevance of your AI-generated code. Elevate your software development workflow and unleash the transformative capabilities of generative AI.

DOP324 – Incorporating generative AI in the CI/CD pipeline – In this chalk talk, discover how generative AI can revolutionize your continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipeline. Learn how AI models can analyze code changes and generate recommendations for safe deployments. Explore automated orchestration capabilities that trigger deployments, monitor metrics, and adapt strategies. Gain insights into using AI for continual monitoring and self-improving release cycles, streamlining your software delivery while minimizing risks and manual efforts.

DOP314 – Automate Java app upgrades & accelerate innovation with generative AI – Amazon Q Developer’s agent for code transformation automates the end-to-end process of upgrading and transforming code. Reduce the time and costs associated with modernizing applications, unlock previously cost-prohibitive and cumbersome modernization opportunities, and save customers months or even years of effort. By automating undifferentiated upgrade and modernization tasks, customers can enhance application performance and security and accelerate innovation. Join this chalk talk to learn how to take your application modernization to the next level.

DOP323 – From Windows to Linux: .NET application modernization – Porting and upgrades of .NET applications running on Windows servers to Linux can deliver cost savings and enhance security and compliance, but the modernization process can be long and laborious. This interactive chalk talk explores strategies for porting server-side components of a .NET application within days by refactoring. The session includes codebase analysis, code decomposition into buildable units, transformation plan creation, and execution of key transformation tasks with approval from the developer.

DevOps and Developer Productivity workshops

What are workshops?

Workshops are two-hour interactive learning sessions where you work in small group teams to solve problems using AWS services. Each workshop starts with a short lecture (10–15 minutes) by the main speaker, and the rest of the time is spent working as a group.

DOP304 – Develop AWS CDK resources to deploy your applications on AWS – In this workshop, learn how to build and deploy applications using infrastructure as code with AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK). Create resources using AWS CDK, and learn maintenance and operations tips. In addition, get an introduction to building your own constructs. You must bring your laptop to participate.

DOP305 – Modern CI/CD with GitHub and AWS CodePipeline – In this workshop, learn how to build modern continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines using GitHub and AWS CodePipeline through the AWS Management Console. Learn how to work with monorepos and branching strategies. Explore advanced features such as automatic rollbacks, pipeline parameters, stage level conditions, and concurrent execution modes to improve your pipeline performance. You must bring your laptop to participate.

DOP309 – The Amazon Q Developer coding challenge – Join this workshop to participate in 20 increasingly complex coding challenges aided by Amazon Q Developer, an AI-powered assistant for software development. Discover how Amazon Q Developer’s auto-generated code recommendations and chat explanations can help you develop code and understand complex algorithmic coding challenges more efficiently compared to manual coding alone. Learn about Amazon Q Developer capabilities and how it can help you improve productivity. You must bring your laptop to participate.

DOP325 – Boost code quality with generative AI – In this hands-on workshop, you unleash the power of generative AI to boost code quality using Amazon Q Developer. You learn to use Amazon Q Developer to generate unit tests and documentation automatically, addressing the challenge of balancing new feature development with writing unit tests and documentation. By the end of the workshop, you have firsthand experience streamlining your development process and freeing up time to focus on core feature development. Come follow along with step-by-step instructions and gain practical experience with this cutting-edge AWS service. You must bring your laptop to participate.

DevOps and Developer Productivity builders’ sessions

What are builders’ sessions?

These 60-minute group sessions are led by an AWS expert and provide an interactive learning experience for building on AWS. Builders’ sessions are designed to create a hands-on experience where questions are encouraged.

DOP205 – Learning new skills with Amazon Q Developer – Experience the power of Amazon Q Developer, your AI-powered assistant for software development. In this session, explore how Amazon Q Developer can streamline your daily workflow on AWS. Stuck in the console? Open the Amazon Q Developer panel for instant assistance. Can’t find your way through the documentation? Amazon Q Developer guides you effortlessly. Need help crafting CLI commands? Amazon Q Developer has you covered. Want assistance right in Slack or Microsoft Teams? Amazon Q Developer is by your side, helping you work smarter, faster, and more efficiently across your favorite tools. You must bring your laptop to participate.

DOP302 – Creating secure code with Amazon Q Developer – In this builders’ session, gain hands-on experience using Amazon Q Developer to create secure code. Write unit tests, optimize code, and scan for vulnerabilities, and discover how Amazon Q Developer suggests remediations that help fix your code instantaneously. Also, learn how you can use Amazon Q Developer security scanning to outperform other publicly benchmarkable tools on detection across popular programming languages. You must bring your laptop to participate.

DOP401 – Modernizing Java applications with Amazon Q Developer – In this builders’ session, use Amazon Q Developer Agent for code transformation to modernize a Java application. Learn how Amazon Q Developer can leverage generative AI to automate common language upgrade tasks like updating your code, conducting unit tests, and verifying deployment readiness starting with Java. Save days’ or even months’ worth of the undifferentiated work involved in moving from older language versions. You must bring your laptop to participate.

DevOps and Developer Productivity lightning talks

What are lightning talks?

Lightning talks are short, 20-minute demos led from a stage.

DOP217 – Best practices for customizing Amazon Q Developer – With Amazon Q Developer, you can securely connect to your private repositories to generate even more relevant code recommendations based on your internal code repositories, ask questions about your company code, and understand your internal code bases faster. In this session, learn how to set up customizations and generate code based on your internal repos. Use the Amazon Q Developer chat in your IDE to ask questions about how your internal code base is structured, where and how certain functions or libraries are used, and how to use specific functions, methods, or APIs.

DOP219 – How NAB uses Amazon Q Developer for increased productivity – Significantly accelerate development by customizing Amazon Q Developer to generate even more relevant inline code recommendations and chat responses (in preview) by making it aware of your internal libraries, APIs, best practices, and architectural patterns. In this lightning talk, you learn how National Australia Bank (NAB) is using Amazon Q Developer to help their development teams ship faster, and innovate more for their customers, by using customizations.

DevOps and Developer Productivity code talks

What are code talks?

Code talks are 60-minute, highly-interactive discussions featuring live coding. Attendees are encouraged to dig in and ask questions about the speaker’s approach.

DOP313 – Get tailored code insights with Amazon Q Developer and private repos – Unlock the full potential of Amazon Q Developer with customized code recommendations tailored to your organization’s code base. In this code talk, learn how to securely connect Amazon Q to your private repositories, enabling it to generate highly relevant code suggestions based on your internal coding practices. Discover how to create and utilize customizations, and witness firsthand the transformative impact on code comprehension and development efficiency by comparing suggestions with and without customization. Elevate your coding experience with this powerful feature.

DOP315 – Optimize your cloud environments in the AWS console with generative AI – Available in the AWS Management Console, Amazon Q Developer is the only AI assistant that is an expert on AWS, helping developers and IT pros optimize their AWS cloud environments. Proactively diagnose and resolve errors and networking issues, provide guidance on architectural best practices, analyze billing information and trends, and use natural language in chat to manage resources in your AWS account. Learn how Amazon Q Developer accelerates task completion with tailored recommendations based on your specific AWS workloads, shifting from a reactive review to proactive notifications and remediation.

Want to stay connected?

Get the latest updates for DevOps and Developer Productivity by following us on Twitter and visiting the AWS devops blog.

If you are unable to join us in-person, Breakout Sessions will be available via our YouTube channel after the event. Contact your AWS Account Team is you are interested in learning more about any of these sessions or how to bring our experts to you.

We look forward to seeing you at re:Invent 2024!

Artur Rodrigues

Artur Rodrigues is a Principal Solutions Architect for Generative AI at Amazon Web Services (AWS), where he empowers developers to leverage cutting-edge AI technologies to enhance their workflows and drive innovation. As a co-founder of the University of British Columbia Cloud Innovation Center (UBC-CIC), powered by AWS, Artur has collaborated with researchers, physicians, and students to develop over 50 solutions addressing real-world challenges. Artur enjoys cycling and exploring the great outdoors of beautiful British Columbia in Canada. He is also a gelato aficionado and a fan of soccer and jiu-jitsu.

The attendee’s guide to the AWS re:Invent 2024 Compute track

Post Syndicated from aostan original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/the-attendees-guide-to-the-aws-reinvent-2024-compute-track/

From December 2nd to December 6th, AWS will hold its annual premier learning event: re:Invent. At this event, attendees can become stronger and more proficient in any area of AWS technology through a variety of experiences: large keynotes given by AWS leaders, smaller innovation talks and interactive working sessions given by AWS experts, and fun activities such as live music and games at re:Play.

There are over 2000+ learning sessions that focus on specific topics at various skill levels, and the compute team have created 72 unique sessions for you to choose. There are many sessions you can choose from, and we are here to help you choose the sessions that best fits your needs. Even if you are not able to join in person, you can catch-up with many of the sessions on-demand and even watch the keynote and innovation sessions live.

The Basic: Session types

If you’re able to join us, just a reminder that we offer several types of sessions which can help maximize your learning in a variety of AWS topics.

re:Invent attendees can also choose to attend chalk-talks, builder sessions, workshops, or code talk sessions. Each of these are live non-recorded interactive sessions.

  • Breakout sessions: Attendees will be in a lecture-style 60-minute informative sessions presented by AWS experts, customers, or partners. These sessions are recorded and uploaded a few days after to the AWS Events YouTube channel.
  • Chalk-talk sessions: Attendees will interact with presenters, asking questions and using a whiteboard in session.
  • Builder Sessions: Attendees participate in a one-hour session and build something.
  • Workshops sessions: Attendees join a two-hour interactive session where they work in a small team to solve a real problem using AWS services.
  • Code talk sessions: Attendees participate in engaging code-focused sessions where an expert leads a live coding session.
  • Lightning talk sessions: Attendees watch a 20-minute demo dedicated to either a specific service or customer story (located in the Expo Hall).

Getting started with Amazon EC2

The foundation of compute in AWS is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Amazon EC2 offers the broadest and deepest compute platform, with over 800 instances and choice of the latest processor, storage, networking, operating system, and purchase model to help you best match the needs of your workload. We’ve created the following sessions to help you implement and manage your workloads in Amazon EC2.

  • CMP101 | What’s new with Amazon EC2
    Learn about the latest compute innovations from AWS. This session helps you better understand Amazon EC2 instances and how organizations like yours can use them to run any workload while meeting your cost, performance, and sustainability goals.
  • CMP343 | Select and launch the right instance for your workload and budget
    With more than 800 instances for various use cases, including instances best for common workloads and for workloads with specific requirements, how do you choose instances? Learn how to determine which instance is best for your specific use case and budget.
  • CMP319 | Managing Amazon EC2 capacity and availability
    Amazon EC2 offers a variety of capacity usage and reservation models, so you can choose the right combination for your workload and budget. Learn how to combine these models in a way that’s best for your business and manage your capacity to improve utilization and availability.
  • CMP207 | AWS-accelerated computing enables customer success with generative AI
    Discover how AWS provides the most performant, low-cost infrastructure for building and scaling large-scale generative AI models. Come learn what’s new in the accelerated computing portfolio including our GPU-based and AWS AI chips-powered instances.
  • CMP318 | Choose the optimal compute environment for your AI/ML workloads
    If you’re trying to decide between accelerators such as AWS Inferentia and AWS Trainium, GPUs from NVIDIA and AMD, processors such as AWS Graviton, or managed services such as Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker, this chalk covers the different options available on AWS.

Learn about AWS compute innovations

AWS has invested years designing custom silicon optimized for the cloud to deliver the best price performance for a wide range of applications and workloads using AWS services. Learn more about the AWS Nitro System, processors at AWS, and ML chips.

The AWS Nitro System is a rich collection of building block technologies that are powering the recent and future generations of Amazon EC2 instances. Dive deep into the Nitro System and see how it made the seemingly impossible possible.

Generative AI promises to revolutionize industries, but its immense computational demands and escalating costs pose significant challenges. To overcome these hurdles, AWS designed and purpose-built AI chips including AWS Trainium2 and AWS Inferentia2.

Optimize your compute costs

At AWS, we focus on delivering the best possible cost structure for our customers. Frugality is one of our founding leadership principles. Cost effective design continues to shape everything we do, from how we develop products to how we run our operations. Come learn of new ways to optimize your compute costs through AWS services, tools, and optimization strategies in the following sessions:

Maximize you workload’s performance

Your workload’s performance matters beyond just cost because it directly impacts the quality, efficiency, and effectiveness of your compute solution. It can significantly influence customer satisfaction, business growth, and overall productivity. Even if a cheaper option exists, a low-cost option with poor performance can lead to long-term financial losses due to issues such as lost customers, engineering rework, and negative reputation. We have a number of sessions that help you optimize your workload’s performance.

  • CMP411 | Everything you’ve wanted to know about performance on EC2 instances
    This session covers all the details you’ve always wanted to know to optimize your compute performance such as memory topology, accessing hardware counters, accounting for the side-effects of hyperthreading, properly running performance tests, and optimizing your latency.
  • CMP413 | Moving from naive benchmarking to application performance engineering
    Most of the time, benchmarks aren’t representative of their applications’ behaviors. In this session, learn the tools and best practices that will help you understand your applications’ performance behaviors on Amazon EC2 instances so that you can maximize your performance.
  • CMP405 | How to optimize latency and throughput
    The availability of processors with and without hyperthreading makes performance evaluation a tricky game. In this code talk, study a web application and evaluate its performance in various scenarios, and discover how to optimize throughput and latency along the way.

Customer experiences and applications with machine learning

Machine learning (ML) has been evolving for decades and has an inflection point with generative AI applications capturing widespread attention and imagination. More customers, across a diverse set of industries, choose AWS compared to any other major cloud provider to build, train, and deploy their ML applications. Learn about generative AI infrastructure at Amazon or get hands-on experience building ML applications through our ML focused sessions, such as the following:

Accelerate your AWS Graviton adoption journey

The AWS Graviton Processors are custom designed server processors designed by AWS. They deliver the best price performance for your cloud workloads running in AWS, and help you reduce your carbon footprint. Ready to realize up to 40% better price performance for your workloads? We have curated the following session to help you accelerate your Graviton adoption:

  • CMP305 | Learnings from developers adopting AWS Graviton at scale
    In this chalk talk, engage directly with AWS specialists that help customers on a daily basis with their adoption journey—from workload selection to running at scale in production. Explore AWS Graviton use cases, best practices, performance, and customer success stories.
  • CMP310 | Migrating applications to AWS Graviton on Amazon EKS
    During this hands-on workshop, walk through the steps for migrating a workload running on x86 to AWS Graviton-based instances including performing tests locally and modifying the CI/CD pipeline to build and deploy the application in Amazon EKS using Karpenter.
  • CMP316 | AWS Graviton GameDay: Optimize your Amazon EC2 workload with Graviton
    Ready to learn more about AWS Graviton in an immersive environment? In this team-based gamified learning setting, perform a live migration of your workload to Graviton. You learn how to unlock Graviton’s full price-performance potential and optimize the size of an Amazon EC2 fleet.
  • CMP404 | Exploring performance analysis with AWS Graviton instances
    In this session, AWS experts open a shell on an Amazon EC2 instance and dig into the system to see which tools and resources you can use, including the Amazon Aperf tool. Learn as they write some mini-applications to study their performance behavior and how to improve them.

Check out workload-specific sessions

Amazon EC2 offers the broadest and deepest compute platform to help you best match the needs of your workload. More SAP, high performance computing (HPC), ML, and Windows workloads run on AWS than any other cloud. Join sessions focused around your specific workload to learn about how you can leverage AWS solutions to accelerate your innovations.

Ready to unlock new possibilities?

The AWS Compute team looks forward to seeing you in Las Vegas. Come meet us at the Compute Booth in the Expo and check out our various Amazon EC2 demos. And if you’re looking for more session recommendations, check-out additional re:Invent attendee guides curated by experts.

Modernize your legacy databases with AWS data lakes, Part 2: Build a data lake using AWS DMS data on Apache Iceberg

Post Syndicated from Shaheer Mansoor original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/modernize-your-legacy-databases-with-aws-data-lakes-part-2-build-a-data-lake-using-aws-dms-data-on-apache-iceberg/

This is part two of a three-part series where we show how to build a data lake on AWS using a modern data architecture. This post shows how to load data from a legacy database (SQL Server) into a transactional data lake (Apache Iceberg) using AWS Glue. We show how to build data pipelines using AWS Glue jobs, optimize them for both cost and performance, and implement schema evolution to automate manual tasks. To review the first part of the series, where we load SQL Server data into Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) using AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS), see Modernize your legacy databases with AWS data lakes, Part 1: Migrate SQL Server using AWS DMS.

Solution overview

In this post, we go over the process of building a data lake, providing the rationale behind the different decisions, and share best practices when building such a solution.

The following diagram illustrates the different layers of the data lake.

Overall Architecture

To load data into the data lake, AWS Step Functions can define a workflow, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) can track the order of incoming files, and AWS Glue jobs and the Data Catalog can be used create the data lake silver layer. AWS DMS produces files and writes these files to the bronze bucket (as we explained in Part 1).

We can turn on Amazon S3 notifications and push the new arriving file names to an SQS first-in-first-out (FIFO) queue. A Step Functions state machine can consume messages from this queue to process the files in the order they arrive.

For processing the files, we need to create two types of AWS Glue jobs:

  • Full load – This job loads the entire table data dump into an Iceberg table. Data types from the source are mapped to an Iceberg data type. After the data is loaded, the job updates the Data Catalog with the table schemas.
  • CDC – This job loads the change data capture (CDC) files into the respective Iceberg tables. The AWS Glue job implements the schema evolution feature of Iceberg to handle schema changes such as addition or deletion of columns.

As in Part 1, the AWS DMS jobs will place the full load and CDC data from the source database (SQL Server) in the raw S3 bucket. Now we process this data using AWS Glue and save it to the silver bucket in Iceberg format. AWS Glue has a plugin for Iceberg; for details, see Using the Iceberg framework in AWS Glue.

Along with moving data from the bronze to the silver bucket, we also create and update the Data Catalog for further processing the data for the gold bucket.

The following diagram illustrates how the full load and CDC jobs are defined inside the Step Functions workflow.

Step Functions for loading data into the lake

In this post, we discuss the AWS Glue jobs for defining the workflow. We recommend using AWS Step Functions Workflow Studio, and setting up Amazon S3 event notifications and an SNS FIFO queue to receive the filename as messages.

Prerequisites

To follow the solution, you need the following prerequisites set up as well as certain access rights and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) privileges:

  • An IAM role to run Glue jobs
  • IAM privileges to create AWS DMS resources (this role was created in Part 1 of this series; you can use the same role here)
  • The AWS DMS job from Part 1 working and producing files for the source database on Amazon S3.

Create an AWS Glue connection for the source database

We need to create a connection between AWS Glue and the source SQL Server database so the AWS Glue job can query the source for the latest schema while loading the data files. To create the connection, follow these steps:

  1. On the AWS Glue console, choose Connections in the navigation pane.
  2. Choose Create custom connector.
  3. Give the connection a name and choose JDBC as the connection type.
  4. In the JDBC URL section, enter the following string and replace the name of your source database endpoint and database that was set up in Part 1: jdbc:sqlserver://{Your RDS End Point Name}:1433/{Your Database Name}.
  5. Select Require SSL connection, then choose Create connector.

Clue Connections

Create and configure the full load AWS Glue job

Complete the following steps to create the full load job:

  1. On the AWS Glue console, choose ETL jobs in the navigation pane.
  2. Choose Script editor and select Spark.
  3. Choose Start fresh and select Create script.
  4. Enter a name for the full load job and choose the IAM role (mentioned in the prerequisites) for running the job.
  5. Finish creating the job.
  6. On the Job details tab, expand Advanced properties.
  7. In the Connections section, add the connection you created.
  8. Under Job parameters, pass the following arguments to the job:
    1. target_s3_bucket – The silver S3 bucket name.
    2. source_s3_bucket – The raw S3 bucket name.
    3. secret_id – The ID of the AWS Secrets Manager secret for the source database credentials.
    4. dbname – The source database name.
    5. datalake-formats – This sets the data format to iceberg.

Glue Job Parameters

The full load AWS Glue job starts after the AWS DMS task reaches 100%. The job loops over the files located in the raw S3 bucket and processes them one at time. For each file, the job infers the table name from the file name and gets the source table schema, including column names and primary keys.

If the table has one or more primary keys, the job creates an equivalent Iceberg table. If the job has no primary key, the file is not processed. In our use case, all the tables have primary keys, so we enforce this check. Depending on your data, you might need to handle this scenario differently.

You can use the following code to process the full load files. To start the job, choose Run.

import sys, boto3, json
import boto3
import json
from awsglue.utils import getResolvedOptions
from pyspark.context import SparkContext
from awsglue.context import GlueContext
from awsglue.job import Job
from pyspark.sql import SparkSession

#Get the arguments passed to the script
args = getResolvedOptions(sys.argv, ['JOB_NAME',
                           'target_s3_bucket',
                           'secret_id',
                           'source_s3_bucket'])
dbname = "AdventureWorks"
schema = "HumanResources"

#Initialize parameters
target_s3_bucket = args['target_s3_bucket']
source_s3_bucket = args['source_s3_bucket']
secret_id = args['secret_id']
unprocessed_tables = []
drop_column_list = ['db', 'table_name', 'schema_name', 'Op', 'last_update_time']  # DMS added columns

#Helper Function: Get Credentials from Secrets Manager
def get_db_credentials(secret_id):
    secretsmanager = boto3.client('secretsmanager')
    response = secretsmanager.get_secret_value(SecretId=secret_id)
    secrets = json.loads(response['SecretString'])
    return secrets['host'], int(secrets['port']), secrets['username'], secrets['password']

#Helper Function: Load Iceberg table with Primary key(s)
def load_table(full_load_data_df, dbname, table_name):

    try:
        full_load_data_df = full_load_data_df.drop(*drop_column_list)
        full_load_data_df.createOrReplaceTempView('full_data')

        query = """
        CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS glue_catalog.{0}.{1}
        USING iceberg
        LOCATION "s3://{2}/{0}/{1}"
        AS SELECT * FROM full_data
        """.format(dbname, table_name, target_s3_bucket)
        spark.sql(query)
        
        #Update Table property to accept Schema Changes
        spark.sql("""ALTER TABLE glue_catalog.{0}.{1} SET TBLPROPERTIES (
                      'write.spark.accept-any-schema'='true'
                    )""".format(dbname, table_name))
        
    except Exception as ex:
        print(ex)
        failed_table = {"table_name": table_name, "Reason": ex}
        unprocessed_tables.append(failed_table)
        
def get_table_key(host, port, username, password, dbname):
    
    jdbc_url = "jdbc:sqlserver://{0}:{1};databaseName={2}".format(host, port, dbname)
    
    connectionProperties = {
      "user" : username,
      "password" : password
    }
    
    spark.read.jdbc(url=jdbc_url, table='INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLE_CONSTRAINTS', properties=connectionProperties).createOrReplaceTempView("TABLE_CONSTRAINTS")
    spark.read.jdbc(url=jdbc_url, table='INFORMATION_SCHEMA.CONSTRAINT_COLUMN_USAGE', properties=connectionProperties).createOrReplaceTempView("CONSTRAINT_COLUMN_USAGE")
    df_table_pkeys = spark.sql("select c.TABLE_NAME, C.COLUMN_NAME as primary_key FROM TABLE_CONSTRAINTS T JOIN CONSTRAINT_COLUMN_USAGE C ON C.CONSTRAINT_NAME=T.CONSTRAINT_NAME WHERE T.CONSTRAINT_TYPE='PRIMARY KEY'")
    return df_table_pkeys


#Setup Spark configuration for reading and writing Iceberg tables
spark = (
    SparkSession.builder
    .config("spark.sql.extensions", "org.apache.iceberg.spark.extensions.IcebergSparkSessionExtensions")
    .config("spark.sql.catalog.glue_catalog", "org.apache.iceberg.spark.SparkCatalog")
    .config("spark.sql.catalog.glue_catalog.warehouse", "s3://{0}".format(dbname))
    .config("spark.sql.catalog.glue_catalog.catalog-impl", "org.apache.iceberg.aws.glue.GlueCatalog")
    .config("spark.sql.catalog.glue_catalog.io-impl", "org.apache.iceberg.aws.s3.S3FileIO")
    .getOrCreate()
)


#Initialize MSSQL credentials
host, port, username, password = get_db_credentials(secret_id)

#Initialize primary keys for all tables
df_table_pkeys = get_table_key(host, port, username, password, dbname)

#Read Full load csv files from s3
s3 = boto3.client('s3')
full_load_tables = s3.list_objects_v2(Bucket=source_s3_bucket, Prefix="raw/{0}/{1}".format(args['dbname'], args['schema']))

#Loop over files
for item in full_load_tables['Contents']:
    pkey_list = []
    table_name = item["Key"].split("/")[3].lower()
    print("Table name {0}".format(table_name))
    current_table_df = df_table_pkeys.where(df_table_pkeys.TABLE_NAME == table_name)

    # Only Process tables with at least 1 Primary key
    if not current_table_df.isEmpty():
        for i in current_table_df.collect():
            pkey_list.append(i["primary_key"])
    else:
        failed_table = {"table_name": table_name, "Reason": "No primary key"}
        unprocessed_tables.append(failed_table)
        # ToDo Handle these cases

    full_data_path = "s3://{0}/{1}".format(source_s3_bucket, item['Key'])
    full_load_data_df = (spark
                        .read
                        .option("header", True)
                        .option("inferSchema", True)
                        .option("recursiveFileLookup", "true")
                        .csv(full_data_path)
                        )

    primary_key = ",".join(pkey_list)

    if table_name not in unprocessed_tables:
        load_table(full_load_data_df, dbname, table_name)

When the job is complete, it creates the database and tables in the Data Catalog, as shown in the following screenshot.

Data lake silver layer data

Create and configure the CDC AWS Glue job

The CDC AWS Glue job is created similar to the full load job. As with the full load AWS Glue job, you need to use the source database connection and pass the job parameters with one additional parameter, cdc_file, which contains the location of the CDC file to be processed. Because a CDC file can contain data for multiple tables, the job loops over the tables in a file and loads the table metadata from the source table ( RDS column names).

If the CDC operation is DELETE, the job deletes the records from the Iceberg table. If the CDC operation is INSERT or UPDATE, the job merges the data into the Iceberg table.

You can use the following code to process the CDC files. To start the job, choose Run

import sys
import boto3
import json
from awsglue.utils import getResolvedOptions
from pyspark.context import SparkContext
from awsglue.context import GlueContext
from awsglue.job import Job
from pyspark.sql import SparkSession

# Get the arguments passed to the script
args = getResolvedOptions(sys.argv, ['JOB_NAME',
                           'target_s3_bucket',
                           'secret_id',
                           'source_s3_bucket',
                           'cdc_file'])
dbname = "AdventureWorks"
schema = "HumanResources"
target_s3_bucket = args['target_s3_bucket']
source_s3_bucket = args['source_s3_bucket']
secret_id = args['secret_id']
cdc_file = args['cdc_file']
unprocessed_tables = []
drop_column_list = ['db', 'table_name', 'schema_name', 'Op', 'last_update_time']  # DMS added columns
source_s3_cdc_file_key = "raw/AdventureWorks/cdc/" + cdc_file



# Helper Function: Get Credentials from Secrets Manager
def get_db_credentials(secret_id):
    secretsmanager = boto3.client('secretsmanager')
    response = secretsmanager.get_secret_value(SecretId=secret_id)
    secrets = json.loads(response['SecretString'])
    return secrets['host'], int(secrets['port']), secrets['username'], secrets['password']

# Helper Function: Column names from RDS
def get_table_colums(table, host, port, username, password, dbname):

    jdbc_url = "jdbc:sqlserver://{0}:{1};databaseName={2}".format(host, port, dbname)
    
    connectionProperties = {
      "user" : username,
      "password" : password
    }
    
    spark.read.jdbc(url=jdbc_url, table='INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS', properties= connectionProperties).createOrReplaceTempView("TABLE_COLUMNS")
    columns = list((row.COLUMN_NAME) for (index, row) in spark.sql("select TABLE_NAME, TABLE_CATALOG, COLUMN_NAME from TABLE_COLUMNS where TABLE_NAME = '{0}' and TABLE_CATALOG = '{1}'".format(table, dbname)).select("COLUMN_NAME").toPandas().iterrows())
    return columns

# Helper Function: Get Colum names and datatypes from RDS
def get_table_colum_datatypes(table, host, port, username, password, dbname):

    jdbc_url = "jdbc:sqlserver://{0}:{1};databaseName={2}".format(host, port, dbname)
    
    connectionProperties = {
      "user" : username,
      "password" : password
    }
    
    spark.read.jdbc(url=jdbc_url, table='INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS', properties= connectionProperties).createOrReplaceTempView("TABLE_COLUMNS")
    return spark.sql("select TABLE_NAME, COLUMN_NAME, DATA_TYPE from TABLE_COLUMNS WHERE TABLE_NAME ='{0}'".format(table))

# Helper Function: Setup the primary key condition
def get_iceberg_table_condition(database, tablename):
    
    jdbc_url = "jdbc:sqlserver://{0}:{1};databaseName={2}".format(host, port, database)
    
    connectionProperties = {
      "user" : username,
      "password" : password
    }
    
    spark.read.jdbc(url=jdbc_url, table='INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLE_CONSTRAINTS', properties=connectionProperties).createOrReplaceTempView("TABLE_CONSTRAINTS")
    spark.read.jdbc(url=jdbc_url, table='INFORMATION_SCHEMA.CONSTRAINT_COLUMN_USAGE', properties=connectionProperties).createOrReplaceTempView("CONSTRAINT_COLUMN_USAGE")
    
    condition = ''
    
    for key in spark.sql("select C.COLUMN_NAME FROM TABLE_CONSTRAINTS T JOIN CONSTRAINT_COLUMN_USAGE C ON C.CONSTRAINT_NAME=T.CONSTRAINT_NAME WHERE T.CONSTRAINT_TYPE='PRIMARY KEY' AND c.TABLE_NAME = '{0}'".format(table)).collect():
        condition += "target.{0} = source.{0} and".format(key.COLUMN_NAME)
    return condition[:-4]

    
# Read incoming data from Amazon S3
def read_cdc_S3(source_s3_bucket, source_s3_cdc_file_key):
    
    inputDf = (spark
                    .read
                    .option("header", False)
                    .option("inferSchema", True)
                    .option("recursiveFileLookup", "true")
                    .csv("s3://" + source_s3_bucket + "/" + source_s3_cdc_file_key)
                    )
    return inputDf

# Setup Spark configuration for reading and writing Iceberg tables
spark = (
    SparkSession.builder
    .config("spark.sql.extensions", "org.apache.iceberg.spark.extensions.IcebergSparkSessionExtensions")
    .config("spark.sql.catalog.glue_catalog", "org.apache.iceberg.spark.SparkCatalog")
    .config("spark.sql.catalog.glue_catalog.warehouse", "s3://{0}".format(target_s3_bucket))
    .config("spark.sql.catalog.glue_catalog.catalog-impl", "org.apache.iceberg.aws.glue.GlueCatalog")
    .config("spark.sql.catalog.glue_catalog.io-impl", "org.apache.iceberg.aws.s3.S3FileIO")
    .getOrCreate()
)

#Initialize MSSQL credentials
host, port, username, password = get_db_credentials(secret_id)

#Read the cdc file 
cdc_df = read_cdc_S3(source_s3_bucket, source_s3_cdc_file_key)

tables = cdc_df.toPandas()._c1.unique().tolist()

#Loop over tables in the cdc file
for table in tables:
    #Create dataframes for delets and for inserts and updates
    table_df_deletes = cdc_df.where((cdc_df._c1 == table) & (cdc_df._c0 == "D")).drop(cdc_df.columns[0], cdc_df.columns[1], cdc_df.columns[2], cdc_df.columns[3])
    table_df_upserts = cdc_df.where((cdc_df._c1 == table) & ((cdc_df._c0 == "I") | (cdc_df._c0 == "U"))).drop(cdc_df.columns[0], cdc_df.columns[1], cdc_df.columns[2], cdc_df.columns[3])
    
    #Update column names for the dataframes
    columns = get_table_colums(table, host, port, username, password, dbname) 
    selectExpr = [] 

    for column in columns: 
        selectExpr.append(cdc_df.where((cdc_df._c1 == table)).drop(cdc_df.columns[0], cdc_df.columns[1], cdc_df.columns[2], cdc_df.columns[3]).columns[columns.index(column)] + " as " + column)

    table_df_deletes = table_df_deletes.selectExpr(selectExpr) 
    table_df_upserts = table_df_upserts.selectExpr(selectExpr)
    
    #Process Deletes
    if table_df_deletes.count() > 0:
        
        print("Delete Triggered")
        table_df_deletes.createOrReplaceTempView('deleted_rows')
        
        sql_string = """MERGE INTO glue_catalog.{0}.{1} target
                        USING (SELECT * FROM deleted_rows) source
                        ON {2}
                        WHEN MATCHED 
                        THEN DELETE""".format(database, table.lower(), get_iceberg_table_condition(database, table.lower()))
        spark.sql(sql_string)
    
    if table_df_upserts.count() > 0:
        print("Upsert triggered")

        #Upsert Records when there are Schema Changes
        if len(table_df_upserts.columns) != len(columns):

            #Handle column deletes
            if len(table_df_upserts.columns) < len(columns):

                drop_columns = list(set(columns) - set(table_df_upserts.columns))

                for drop_column in drop_columns:
                    sql_string = """
                                    ALTER TABLE glue_catalog.{0}.{1}
                                    DROP COLUMN {2}""".format(dbname.lower(), table.lower(), drop_column)
                    spark.sql(sql_string)

            #Handle column additions
            elif len(table_df_upserts.columns) > len(columns):

                column_datatype_df = get_table_colum_datatypes(table, host, port, username, password, dbname)
                add_columns = list(set(table_df_upserts.columns) - set(columns))

                for add_column in add_columns:

                    #Set Iceberg data type
                    data_type = list((row.DATA_TYPE) for (index, row) in column_datatype_df.filter("COLUMN_NAME='{0}'".format(add_column)).select("DATA_TYPE").toPandas().iterrows())[0]

                    # Convert MSSQL Datatypes to Iceberg supported datatypes
                    if data_type.lower() in ["varchar", "char"]:
                        data_type = "string"

                    if data_type.lower() in ["bigint"]:
                        data_type = "long"

                    if data_type.lower() in ["array"]:
                        data_type = "list"

                    sql_string = """
                                    ALTER TABLE glue_catalog.{0}.{1}
                                    ADD COLUMN {2} {3}""".format(dbname.lower(), table.lower(), add_column, data_type)
                    spark.sql(sql_string)
                    
            #Create statement to update columns
            update_table_column_list = ""
            insert_column_list = ""
            columns = get_table_colums(table, host, port, username, password, dbname)             

            for column in columns:

                update_table_column_list+="""target.{0}=source.{0},""".format(column)
                insert_column_list+="""source.{0},""".format(column)

            table_df_upserts.createOrReplaceTempView('updated_rows')

            sql_string = """MERGE INTO glue_catalog.{0}.{1} target
                            USING (SELECT * FROM updated_rows) source
                            ON {2}
                            WHEN MATCHED 
                            THEN UPDATE SET {3} 
                            WHEN NOT MATCHED THEN INSERT ({4}) VALUES ({5})""".format(dbname.lower(), 
                                                                                      table.lower(), 
                                                                                      get_iceberg_table_condition(dbname.lower(), table.lower()), 
                                                                                      update_table_column_list.rstrip(","), 
                                                                                      ",".join(columns), 
                                                                                      insert_column_list.rstrip(","))

            spark.sql(sql_string)

    
print("CDC job complete")

The Iceberg MERGE INTO syntax can handle cases where a new column is added. For more details on this feature, see the Iceberg MERGE INTO syntax documentation. If the CDC job needs to process many tables in the CDC file, the job can be multi-threaded to process the file in parallel.

 

Configure EventBridge notifications, SQS queue, and Step Functions state machine

You can use EventBridge notifications to send notifications to EventBridge when certain events occur on S3 buckets, such as when new objects are created and deleted. For this post, we’re interested in the events when new CDC files from AWS DMS arrive in the bronze S3 bucket. You can create event notifications for new objects and insert the file names into an SQS queue. A Lambda function within Step Functions would consume from the queue, extract the file name, start a CDC Glue job, and pass the file name as a parameter to the job.

AWS DMS CDC files contain database insert, update, and delete statements. We need to process these in order, so we use an SQS FIFO queue, which preserves the order of messages in which they arrive. You can also configure Amazon SQS to set a time to live (TTL); this parameter defines how long a message stays in the queue before it expires.

Another important parameter to consider when configuring an SQS queue is the message visibility timeout value. While a message is being processed, it disappears from the queue to make sure that the message isn’t consumed by multiple consumers (AWS Glue jobs in our case). If the message is consumed successfully, it should be deleted from the queue before the visibility timeout. However, if the visibility timeout expires and the message isn’t deleted, the message reappears in the queue. In our solution, this timeout must be greater than the time it takes for the CDC job to process a file.

Lastly, we recommend using Step Functions to define a workflow for handling the full load and CDC files. Step Functions has built-in integrations to other AWS services like Amazon SQS, AWS Glue, and Lambda, which makes it a good candidate for this use case.

The Step Functions state machine starts with checking the status of the AWS DMS task. The AWS DMS tasks can be queried to check the status of the full load, and we check the value of the parameter FullLoadProgressPercent. When this value gets to 100%, we can start processing the full load files. After the AWS Glue job processes the full load files, we start polling the SQS queue to check the size of the queue. If the queue size is greater than 0, this means new CDC files have arrived and we can start the AWS Glue CDC job to process these files. The AWS Glue jobs processes the CDC files and deletes the messages from the queue. When the queue size reaches 0, the AWS Glue job exits and we loop in the Step Functions workflow to check the SQS queue size.

Because the Step Functions state machine is supposed to run indefinitely, it’s good to keep in mind that there will be service limits you need to adhere to. Namely, the maximum runtime, which is 1 year, and maximum run history size, i.e., state transitions or events for a state machine which is 25,000. We recommend adding an additional step at the end to check if either of these conditions are being met to stop the current state machine run and start a new one.

The following diagram illustrates how you can use Step Functions state machine history size to monitor and start a new Step Functions state machine run.

Step Functions Workflow

Configure the pipeline

The pipeline needs to be configured to address cost, performance, and resilience goals. You might want a pipeline that can load fresh data into the data lake and make it available quickly, and you might also want to optimize costs by loading large chunks of data into the data lake. At the same time, you should make the pipeline resilient and be able to recover in case of failures. In this section, we cover the different parameters and recommended settings to achieve these goals.

Step Functions is designed to process incoming AWS DMS CDC files by running AWS Glue jobs. AWS Glue jobs can take a couple of minutes to boot up, and when they’re running, it’s efficient to process large chunks of data. You can configure AWS DMS to write CSV files to Amazon S3 by configuring the following AWS DMS task parameters:

  • CdcMaxBatchInterval – Defines the maximum time limit AWS DMS will wait before writing a batch to Amazon S3
  • CdcMinFileSize – Defines the minimum file size AWS DMS will write to Amazon S3

Whichever condition is met first will invoke the write operation. If you want to prioritize data freshness, you should have a short CdcMaxBatchInterval value (10 seconds) and a small CdcMinFileSize value (1–5 MB). This will result in many small CSV files being written to Amazon S3 and will invoke a lot of AWS Glue jobs to process the data, making the extract, transform, and load (ETL) process faster. If you want to optimize costs, you should have a moderate CdcMaxBatchInterval (minutes) and a large CdcMinFileSize value (100–500 MB). In this scenario, we start a few AWS Glue jobs that will process large chunks of data, making the ETL flow more efficient. In a real-world use case, the required values for these parameters might fall somewhere that’s a good compromise between throughput and cost. You can configure these parameters when creating a target endpoint using the AWS DMS console, or by using the create-endpoint command in the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI).

For the full list of parameters, see Using Amazon S3 as a target for AWS Database Migration Service.

Choosing the right AWS Glue worker types for the full load and CDC jobs is also crucial for performance and cost optimization. The AWS Glue (Spark) workers range from G1X to G8X, which have an increasing number of data processing units (DPUs). Full load files are usually much larger in size compared to CDC files, and therefore it’s more cost- and performance-effective to select a larger worker. For CDC files, it would be more cost-effective to select a smaller worker because files sizes are smaller.

You should design the Step Functions state machine in such a way that if anything fails, the pipeline can be redeployed after repair and resume processing from where it left off. One important parameter here is TTL for the messages in the SQS queue. This parameter defines how long a message stays in the queue before expiring. In case of failures, we want this parameter to be long enough for us to deploy a fix. Amazon SQS has a maximum of 14 days for a message’s TTL. We recommend setting this to a large enough value to minimize messages being expired in case of pipeline failures.

Clean up

Complete the following steps to clean up the resources you created in this post:

  1. Delete the AWS Glue jobs:
    1. On the AWS Glue console, choose ETL jobs in the navigation pane.
    2. Select the full load and CDC jobs and on the Actions menu, choose Delete.
    3. Choose Delete to confirm.
  2. Delete the Iceberg tables:
    1. On the AWS Glue console, under Data Catalog in the navigation pane, choose Databases.
    2. Choose the database in which the Iceberg tables reside.
    3. Select the tables to delete, choose Delete, and confirm the deletion.
  3. Delete the S3 bucket:
    1. On the Amazon S3 console, choose Buckets in the navigation pane.
    2. Choose the silver bucket and empty the files in the bucket.
    3. Delete the bucket.

Conclusion

In this post, we showed how to use AWS Glue jobs to load AWS DMS files into a transactional data lake framework such as Iceberg. In our setup, AWS Glue provided highly scalable and simple-to-maintain ETL jobs. Furthermore, we share a proposed solution using Step Functions to create an ETL pipeline workflow, with Amazon S3 notifications and an SQS queue to capture newly arriving files. We shared how to design this system to be resilient towards failures and to automate one of the most time-consuming tasks in maintaining a data lake: schema evolution.

In Part 3, we will share how to process the data lake to create data marts.


About the Authors

Shaheer Mansoor is a Senior Machine Learning Engineer at AWS, where he specializes in developing cutting-edge machine learning platforms. His expertise lies in creating scalable infrastructure to support advanced AI solutions. His focus areas are MLOps, feature stores, data lakes, model hosting, and generative AI.

Anoop Kumar K M is a Data Architect at AWS with focus in the data and analytics area. He helps customers in building scalable data platforms and in their enterprise data strategy. His areas of interest are data platforms, data analytics, security, file systems and operating systems. Anoop loves to travel and enjoys reading books in the crime fiction and financial domains.

Sreenivas Nettem is a Lead Database Consultant at AWS Professional Services. He has experience working with Microsoft technologies with a specialization in SQL Server. He works closely with customers to help migrate and modernize their databases to AWS.

AWS Weekly Roundup: Agentic workflows, Amazon Transcribe, AWS Lambda insights, and more (October 21, 2024)

Post Syndicated from Antje Barth original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-weekly-roundup-agentic-workflows-amazon-transcribe-aws-lambda-insights-and-more-october-21-2024/

Agentic workflows are quickly becoming a cornerstone of AI innovation, enabling intelligent systems to autonomously handle and refine complex tasks in a way that mirrors human problem-solving. Last week, we launched Serverless Agentic Workflows with Amazon Bedrock, a new short course developed in collaboration with Dr. Andrew Ng and DeepLearning.AI.

Serverless Agentic Workflows with Amazon Bedrock

This hands-on course, taught by my colleague Mike Chambers, teaches how to build serverless agents that can handle complex tasks without the hassle of managing infrastructure. You will learn everything you need to know about integrating tools, automating workflows, and deploying responsible agents with built-in guardrails on Amazon Web Services (AWS) with Amazon Bedrock. The hands-on labs provided with the course let you apply your knowledge directly in an AWS environment, hosted by AWS Partner Vocareum. Find more information and enroll for free on the DeepLearning.AI course page.

Now, let’s turn our attention to other exciting news in the AWS universe from last week.

Last week’s launches
Here are some launches that got my attention:

Amazon Transcribe now supports streaming transcription in 30 additional languagesAmazon Transcribe has expanded its support to include 30 additional languages, bringing the total number of supported languages to 54. This enhancement helps you reach a broader global audience and improves accessibility across various industries, including contact centers, broadcasting, and e-learning. The expanded language support allows for more efficient content moderation, improved agent productivity, and automatic subtitling for live events and meetings.

AWS Lambda console now surfaces key function insights and supports real-time log analytics – The AWS Lambda console now features a built-in Amazon CloudWatch Metrics Insights dashboard and supports CloudWatch Logs Live Tail, providing instant visibility into critical function metrics and real-time log streaming. You can now identify and troubleshoot errors or performance issues for your Lambda functions without leaving the console, as well as view and analyze logs in real time as they become available. You can reduce context switching and accelerate the development and troubleshooting processes for serverless applications. Check out the launch post for more details.

Amazon Bedrock Model Evaluation now supports evaluating custom model import models – You can now evaluate custom models you’ve imported to Amazon Bedrock using the model evaluation feature. This helps you to complete the full cycle of selecting, customizing, and evaluating models before deploying them. To evaluate an imported model, select the custom model from the list of models to evaluate in the model selector tool when creating an evaluation job.

Amazon Q in AWS Supply Chain – You can now use Amazon Q, an interactive AI assistant, to analyze your supply chain data in AWS Supply Chain and get insights to operate your supply chain more efficiently. Amazon Q can answer your supply chain questions by diving into your data. This reduces the time spent searching for information and streamlines finding answers to improve your supply chain operations.

For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New at AWS page.

Other AWS news
Here are some additional news items and posts that you might find interesting:

New Amazon OpenSearch Service YouTube channel – The channel offers bite-sized tutorials, curated content, and organized playlists on topics such as log analytics, semantic search, vector databases, and operational best practices. You can also provide feedback to influence future channel content and the OpenSearch Service roadmap. Check out the launch post for more details and subscribe to the Amazon OpenSearch Service YouTube channel.

Deploying Generative AI Applications with NVIDIA NIM Microservices on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) – This post shows you how to use Amazon EKS to orchestrate the deployment of pods containing NVIDIA NIM microservices, to enable quick-to-setup and optimized large-scale large language model (LLM) inference on Amazon EC2 G5 instances. It also demonstrates how to scale (both pod and cluster) by monitoring for custom metrics through Prometheus, and how you can load balance using an Application Load Balancer.

Instant Well-Architected CDK Resources with Solutions Constructs Factories – You can now create well-architected AWS resources such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets and AWS Step Functions state machines with a single function call using the new AWS Solutions Constructs Factories. These factories handle all the best practices configuration for you while still allowing customization. Try using a Constructs factory the next time you need to deploy one of the supported resources.

Upcoming AWS events
Check your calendars and sign up for these AWS events:

AWS GenAI LoftsAWS GenAI LoftsAWS GenAI Lofts are about more than just the tech, they bring together startups, developers, investors, and industry experts. Whether you’re looking to gain deep insights, or get your questions answered by generative AI pros, our GenAI Lofts have you covered and provide everything you need to start building your next innovation. Join events in London (through October 25), Seoul (October 30–November 6), São Paulo (through November 20), and Paris (through November 25).

AWS Community DaysAWS Community Days – Join community-led conferences that feature technical discussions, workshops, and hands-on labs led by expert AWS users and industry leaders from around the world: Malta (November 8), Chile (November 9), and Kochi, India (December 14).

AWS re:Invent 2024AWS re:InventRegistration is now open for the annual tech extravaganza, taking place December 2–6 in Las Vegas. At re:Invent 2024, you’ll get a front row seat to hear real stories from customers and AWS leaders about navigating pressing topics, such as generative AI. Learn about new product launches, watch demos, and get behind-the-scenes insights during five headline-making keynotes.

You can browse all upcoming in-person and virtual events.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!

— Antje

This post is part of our Weekly Roundup series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS!

Amazon Q Developer Code Challenge

Post Syndicated from Aaron Sempf original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/amazon-q-developer-code-challenge/

Amazon Q Developer is a generative artificial intelligence (AI) powered conversational assistant that can help you understand, build, extend, and operate AWS applications. You can ask questions about AWS architecture, your AWS resources, best practices, documentation, support, and more.

With Amazon Q Developer in your IDE, you can write a comment in natural language that outlines a specific task, such as, “Upload a file with server-side encryption.” Based on this information, Amazon Q Developer recommends one or more code snippets directly in the IDE that can accomplish the task. You can quickly and easily accept the top suggestions (tab key), view more suggestions (arrow keys), or continue writing your own code.

However, Amazon Q Developer in the IDE is more than just a code completion plugin. Amazon Q Developer is a generative AI (GenAI) powered assistant for software development that can be used to have a conversation about your code, get code suggestions, or ask questions about building software. This provides the benefits of collaborative paired programming, powered by GenAI models that have been trained on billions of lines of code, from the Amazon internal code-base and publicly available sources.

The challenge

At the 2024 AWS Summit in Sydney, an exhilarating code challenge took center stage, pitting a Blue Team against a Red Team, with approximately 10 to 15 challengers in each team, in a battle of coding prowess. The challenge consisted of 20 tasks, starting with basic math and string manipulation, and progressively escalating in difficulty to include complex algorithms and intricate ciphers.

The Blue Team had a distinct advantage, leveraging the powerful capabilities of Amazon Q Developer, the most capable generative AI-powered assistant for software development. With Q Developer’s guidance, the Blue Team navigated increasingly complex tasks with ease, tapping into Q Developer’s vast knowledge base and problem-solving abilities. In contrast, the Red Team competed without assistance, relying solely on their own coding expertise and problem-solving skills to tackle daunting challenges.

As the competition unfolded, the two teams battled it out, each striving to outperform the other. The Blue Team’s efficient use of Amazon Q Developer proved to be a game-changer, allowing them to tackle the most challenging tasks with remarkable speed and accuracy. However, the Red Team’s sheer determination and technical prowess kept them in the running, showcasing their ability to think outside the box and devise innovative solutions.

The culmination of the code challenge was a thrilling finale, with both teams pushing the boundaries of their skills and ultimately leaving the audience in a state of admiration for their remarkable achievements.

Graph of elapsed time of teams in the AWS Sydney Summit code challenge

The graph shows the average completion time in which Team Blue “Q Developer” completed more questions across the board in less time than Team Red “Solo Coder”. Within the 1-hour time limit, Team Blue got all the way to Question 19, whereas Team Red only got to Question 16.

There are some assumptions and validations. People who consider themselves very experienced programmers were encouraged to choose team Red and not use AI, to test themselves against team Blue, those using AI. The code challenges were designed to test the output of applying logic. They were specifically designed to be passable without the use of Amazon Q Developer, to test the optimization of writing logical code with Amazon Q Developer. As a result, the code tasks worked well with Amazon Q Developer due to the nature of and underlying training of Amazon Q Developer models. Many people who attended the event were not Python Programmers (we constrained the challenge to Python only), and walked away impressed at how much of the challenge they could complete.

As an example of one of the more complex questions competitors were given to solve was:

Implement the rail fence cipher.
In the Rail Fence cipher, the message is written downwards on successive "rails" of an imaginary fence, then moving up when we get to the bottom (like a zig-zag). Finally the message is then read off in rows.

For example, using three "rails" and the message "WE ARE DISCOVERED FLEE AT ONCE", the cipherer writes out: 

W . . . E . . . C . . . R . . . L . . . T . . . E
. E . R . D . S . O . E . E . F . E . A . O . C .
. . A . . . I . . . V . . . D . . . E . . . N . .

Then reads off: WECRLTEERDSOEEFEAOCAIVDEN

Given variable a. Use a three-rail fence cipher so that result is equal to the decoded message of variable a.

The questions were both algorithmic and logical in nature, which made them great for testing conversational natural language capability to solve questions using Amazon Q Developer, or by applying one’s own logic to write code to solve the question.

Top scoring individual per team:

Total Questions Complete individual time (min)
With Q Developer (Blue Team) 19 30.46
Solo Coder (Red Team) 16 58.06

By comparing the top two competitors, and considering the solo coder was a highly experienced programmer versus the top Q Developer coder, who was a relatively new programmer not familiar with Python, you can see the efficiency gain when using Q Developer as an AI peer programmer. It took the entire 60 minutes for the solo coder to complete 16 questions, whereas the Q Developer coder got to the final question (Question 20, incomplete) in half of the time.

Summary

Integrating advanced IDE features and adopting paired programming have significantly improved coding efficiency and quality. However, the introduction of Amazon Q Developer has taken this evolution to new heights. By tapping into Q Developer’s vast knowledge base and problem-solving capabilities, the Blue Team was able to navigate complex coding challenges with remarkable speed and accuracy, outperforming the unassisted Red Team. This highlights the transformative impact of leveraging generative AI as a collaborative pair programmer in modern software development, delivering greater efficiency, problem-solving, and, ultimately, higher-quality code. Get started with Amazon Q Developer for your IDE by installing the plugin and enabling your builder ID today.

About the authors:

Aaron Sempf

Aaron Sempf is Next Gen Tech Lead for the AWS Partner Organization in Asia-Pacific and Japan. With over twenty years in software engineering and distributed system, he focuses on solving for large scale complex integration and event driven systems. In his spare time, he can be found coding prototypes for autonomous robots, IoT devices, distributed solutions and designing Agentic Architecture patterns for GenAI assisted business automation.

Paul Kukiel

Paul Kukiel

Paul Kukiel is a Senior Solutions Architect at AWS. With a background of over twenty years in software engineering, he particularly enjoys helping customers build modern, API Driven software architectures at scale. In his spare time, he can be found building prototypes for micro front ends and event driven architectures.

Command with Confidence: Insights from Andrew Bustamante

Post Syndicated from Emma Burdett original https://blog.rapid7.com/2024/08/28/command-with-confidence-insights-from-andrew-bustamante/

Command with Confidence: Insights from Andrew Bustamante

At the recent Take Command Summit, former CIA intelligence officer and US Air Force combat veteran Andrew Bustamante shared valuable tools, tactics, and techniques from elite intelligence agencies with Rapid7’s Americas Field CTO Jeffrey Gardner in an informal chat. His session, “Command with Confidence,” offered cybersecurity professionals insights to enhance their security strategies with clarity and confidence.

Key Takeaways:

  1. The Four C’s Framework: Bustamante introduced the “Four C’s” framework—consideration, consistency, collaboration, and control. This structured approach is designed to build rapport, ensure consistent performance, and effectively lead teams by taking proactive control.
  2. Goal Setting Techniques: Highlighting a three-step framework for goal setting, Bustamante emphasized starting with SMART goals, then stretching them, and finally aiming for “scary goals” to push boundaries and achieve exceptional outcomes.
  3. The Power of Soft Skills and Persuasion: Bustamante explained how persuasion is rooted in emotional connections rather than logical arguments. By assessing individuals and understanding their emotional triggers, professionals can create compelling narratives that drive action. These soft skills are critical in building effective teams and leading security projects successfully.

“Consideration, consistency, collaboration, and control—these are the pillars of effective leadership and influence. Mastering these can make you unstoppable in any professional environment.” – Andrew Bustamante

Survey Insight: We surveyed our attendees on the importance of soft skills versus technical skills in new security projects. The results showed:

  • 37.5% agree and 34.38% strongly agree that the security community prioritizes technical skills over soft skills.

Ransomware attacks are a significant threat, but with the right strategies and proactive measures, organizations can enhance their defenses and build resilience. To dive deeper into these strategies and hear more from the experts, watch the full video from the Rapid7 Take Command Summit.

Key Takeaways From The Take Command Summit: Navigating New SEC Cybersecurity Disclosure Rules

Post Syndicated from Emma Burdett original https://blog.rapid7.com/2024/08/23/key-takeaways-from-the-take-command-summit-navigating-new-sec-cybersecurity-disclosure-rules/

Key Takeaways From The Take Command Summit: Navigating New SEC Cybersecurity Disclosure Rules

Understanding and complying with the new SEC Cybersecurity Disclosure Rules is a daunting task for many organizations. The Rapid7 Take Command Summit provided an in-depth look at these regulations, offering valuable guidance for cybersecurity professionals.

Here are three key takeaways from the session that are crucial for ensuring compliance and enhancing your organization’s cybersecurity posture.

1. Understand Materiality and Disclosure Requirements

One of the most critical aspects of the new SEC rules is determining the materiality of a cybersecurity incident. Kyra Ayo Caros, Director, Corporate Securities & Compliance at Rapid7  said, “materiality in this context is what would be material for investors to know…what sort of incident would your stakeholders or stockholders need to know about?” This involves assessing the incident’s impact on business operations and financial results. Companies must disclose material incidents within four days of determining their significance, highlighting the need for a robust incident response and evaluation process.

2. Foster Cross-Departmental Collaboration

Effective compliance with SEC rules requires coordination across various departments. Legal Counsel, Cybersecurity Services Group, Venable LLP Harley Geiger emphasized the importance of involving security, legal, and communications teams early in the process to meet disclosure requirements effectively. “Companies should ensure that security, legal, and communications teams are part of the process early on to collaborate on the most effective way of meeting these disclosure requirements.” This collaboration ensures that all relevant information is accurately assessed and reported.

3. Build a Comprehensive Cybersecurity Risk Management Program

The SEC rules also mandate annual disclosure of cybersecurity risk management processes and the role of senior management in overseeing these efforts. Organizations need to describe how they integrate cybersecurity into their overall risk management and governance framework. “It’s crucial to provide an accurate snapshot of your cybersecurity processes and management’s oversight to ensure investor trust,” said Ayo Caros. Ensuring these disclosures are accurate and reflect actual practices is vital for maintaining transparency and compliance.

57% of our post event survey respondents found the complexity and scope of regulations to be the most inhibiting factor in abiding by the SEC Cybersecurity Disclosure Rules. Navigating these intricate requirements poses a significant challenge, often leading to compliance difficulties.

The SEC Cybersecurity Disclosure Rules require a strategic and collaborative approach to ensure compliance and transparency. Understanding materiality, fostering cross-departmental collaboration, and building a comprehensive cybersecurity risk management program are essential steps. For a deeper dive into these strategies and expert insights, click here to watch the full video from the Rapid7 Take Command Event.

Key Takeaways From The Take Command Summit: Enhancing Cybersecurity Culture

Post Syndicated from Emma Burdett original https://blog.rapid7.com/2024/08/16/key-takeaways-from-the-take-command-summit-enhancing-cybersecurity-culture/

Key Takeaways From The Take Command Summit: Enhancing Cybersecurity Culture

Building a resilient cybersecurity culture is crucial in today’s digital landscape. The recent Rapid7 Take Command Summit session titled “Commander in Chief: Enhancing Cybersecurity Culture” offered valuable insights into fostering a strong security mindset within organizations.

Here are three key takeaways from the discussion that every cybersecurity professional should consider.

1. Align Security Objectives with Business Goals: Jaya Baloo, Chief Security Officer at Rapid7, emphasized the importance of aligning security goals with company objectives. “I rarely disjoint what needs to be done for security from the company’s core values and core business.” By integrating security initiatives with overall business goals, organizations can ensure that security measures receive the necessary support and resources.

2. Foster Empathy and Inclusion: Cultivating a cybersecurity culture that values empathy and inclusion is vital. Sofia Dozier, who leads Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Rapid7, highlighted the importance of understanding diverse perspectives within the workforce. “Empathy means putting yourself in someone else’s shoes to understand their experience.” By promoting inclusive behaviors, organizations can create a supportive environment where all employees are committed to security.

3. Navigate Complex Regulations with Clarity: A significant challenge for many organizations is navigating the intricate SEC Cybersecurity Disclosure Rules. According to a post summit survey of attendees, 57% of respondents find the complexity and scope of regulations to be the most inhibiting factor in compliance. Baloo stressed the importance of transparency and honesty in security practices, warning against the dangers of “lying by omission” due to fear of repercussions.

Enhancing cybersecurity culture requires aligning security with business goals, fostering empathy and inclusion, and navigating complex regulations transparently. “Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” Baloo said, emphasizing the critical role of a strong security culture in achieving cybersecurity success.

To delve deeper into these strategies and hear more expert insights, click here to watch the full video from Rapid7’s Take Command Summit.