Tag Archives: hipaa

How to protect sensitive data for its entire lifecycle in AWS

Post Syndicated from Raj Jain original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-to-protect-sensitive-data-for-its-entire-lifecycle-in-aws/

Many Amazon Web Services (AWS) customer workflows require ingesting sensitive and regulated data such as Payments Card Industry (PCI) data, personally identifiable information (PII), and protected health information (PHI). In this post, I’ll show you a method designed to protect sensitive data for its entire lifecycle in AWS. This method can help enhance your data security posture and be useful for fulfilling the data privacy regulatory requirements applicable to your organization for data protection at-rest, in-transit, and in-use.

An existing method for sensitive data protection in AWS is to use the field-level encryption feature offered by Amazon CloudFront. This CloudFront feature protects sensitive data fields in requests at the AWS network edge. The chosen fields are protected upon ingestion and remain protected throughout the entire application stack. The notion of protecting sensitive data early in its lifecycle in AWS is a highly desirable security architecture. However, CloudFront can protect a maximum of 10 fields and only within HTTP(S) POST requests that carry HTML form encoded payloads.

If your requirements exceed CloudFront’s native field-level encryption feature, such as a need to handle diverse application payload formats, different HTTP methods, and more than 10 sensitive fields, you can implement field-level encryption yourself using the [email protected] feature in CloudFront. In terms of choosing an appropriate encryption scheme, this problem calls for an asymmetric cryptographic system that will allow public keys to be openly distributed to the CloudFront network edges while keeping the corresponding private keys stored securely within the network core. One such popular asymmetric cryptographic system is RSA. Accordingly, we’ll implement a [email protected] function that uses asymmetric encryption using the RSA cryptosystem to protect an arbitrary number of fields in any HTTP(S) request. We will discuss the solution using an example JSON payload, although this approach can be applied to any payload format.

A complex part of any encryption solution is key management. To address that, I use AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS). AWS KMS simplifies the solution and offers improved security posture and operational benefits, detailed later.

Solution overview

You can protect data in-transit over individual communications channels using transport layer security (TLS), and at-rest in individual storage silos using volume encryption, object encryption or database table encryption. However, if you have sensitive workloads, you might need additional protection that can follow the data as it moves through the application stack. Fine-grained data protection techniques such as field-level encryption allow for the protection of sensitive data fields in larger application payloads while leaving non-sensitive fields in plaintext. This approach lets an application perform business functions on non-sensitive fields without the overhead of encryption, and allows fine-grained control over what fields can be accessed by what parts of the application.

A best practice for protecting sensitive data is to reduce its exposure in the clear throughout its lifecycle. This means protecting data as early as possible on ingestion and ensuring that only authorized users and applications can access the data only when and as needed. CloudFront, when combined with the flexibility provided by [email protected], provides an appropriate environment at the edge of the AWS network to protect sensitive data upon ingestion in AWS.

Since the downstream systems don’t have access to sensitive data, data exposure is reduced, which helps to minimize your compliance footprint for auditing purposes.

The number of sensitive data elements that may need field-level encryption depends on your requirements. For example:

  • For healthcare applications, HIPAA regulates 18 personal data elements.
  • In California, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) regulates at least 11 categories of personal information—each with its own set of data elements.

The idea behind field-level encryption is to protect sensitive data fields individually, while retaining the structure of the application payload. The alternative is full payload encryption, where the entire application payload is encrypted as a binary blob, which makes it unusable until the entirety of it is decrypted. With field-level encryption, the non-sensitive data left in plaintext remains usable for ordinary business functions. When retrofitting data protection in existing applications, this approach can reduce the risk of application malfunction since the data format is maintained.

The following figure shows how PII data fields in a JSON construction that are deemed sensitive by an application can be transformed from plaintext to ciphertext with a field-level encryption mechanism.

Figure 1: Example of field-level encryption

Figure 1: Example of field-level encryption

You can change plaintext to ciphertext as depicted in Figure 1 by using a [email protected] function to perform field-level encryption. I discuss the encryption and decryption processes separately in the following sections.

Field-level encryption process

Let’s discuss the individual steps involved in the encryption process as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Field-level encryption process

Figure 2: Field-level encryption process

Figure 2 shows CloudFront invoking a [email protected] function while processing a client request. CloudFront offers multiple integration points for invoking [email protected] functions. Since you are processing a client request and your encryption behavior is related to requests being forwarded to an origin server, you want your function to run upon the origin request event in CloudFront. The origin request event represents an internal state transition in CloudFront that happens immediately before CloudFront forwards a request to the downstream origin server.

You can associate your [email protected] with CloudFront as described in Adding Triggers by Using the CloudFront Console. A screenshot of the CloudFront console is shown in Figure 3. The selected event type is Origin Request and the Include Body check box is selected so that the request body is conveyed to [email protected]

Figure 3: Configuration of Lambda@Edge in CloudFront

Figure 3: Configuration of [email protected] in CloudFront

The [email protected] function acts as a programmable hook in the CloudFront request processing flow. You can use the function to replace the incoming request body with a request body with the sensitive data fields encrypted.

The process includes the following steps:

Step 1 – RSA key generation and inclusion in [email protected]

You can generate an RSA customer managed key (CMK) in AWS KMS as described in Creating asymmetric CMKs. This is done at system configuration time.

Note: You can use your existing RSA key pairs or generate new ones externally by using OpenSSL commands, especially if you need to perform RSA decryption and key management independently of AWS KMS. Your choice won’t affect the fundamental encryption design pattern presented here.

The RSA key creation in AWS KMS requires two inputs: key length and type of usage. In this example, I created a 2048-bit key and assigned its use for encryption and decryption. The cryptographic configuration of an RSA CMK created in AWS KMS is shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4: Cryptographic properties of an RSA key managed by AWS KMS

Figure 4: Cryptographic properties of an RSA key managed by AWS KMS

Of the two encryption algorithms shown in Figure 4— RSAES_OAEP_SHA_256 and RSAES_OAEP_SHA_1, this example uses RSAES_OAEP_SHA_256. The combination of a 2048-bit key and the RSAES_OAEP_SHA_256 algorithm lets you encrypt a maximum of 190 bytes of data, which is enough for most PII fields. You can choose a different key length and encryption algorithm depending on your security and performance requirements. How to choose your CMK configuration includes information about RSA key specs for encryption and decryption.

Using AWS KMS for RSA key management versus managing the keys yourself eliminates that complexity and can help you:

  • Enforce IAM and key policies that describe administrative and usage permissions for keys.
  • Manage cross-account access for keys.
  • Monitor and alarm on key operations through Amazon CloudWatch.
  • Audit AWS KMS API invocations through AWS CloudTrail.
  • Record configuration changes to keys and enforce key specification compliance through AWS Config.
  • Generate high-entropy keys in an AWS KMS hardware security module (HSM) as required by NIST.
  • Store RSA private keys securely, without the ability to export.
  • Perform RSA decryption within AWS KMS without exposing private keys to application code.
  • Categorize and report on keys with key tags for cost allocation.
  • Disable keys and schedule their deletion.

You need to extract the RSA public key from AWS KMS so you can include it in the AWS Lambda deployment package. You can do this from the AWS Management Console, through the AWS KMS SDK, or by using the get-public-key command in the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI). Figure 5 shows Copy and Download options for a public key in the Public key tab of the AWS KMS console.

Figure 5: RSA public key available for copy or download in the console

Figure 5: RSA public key available for copy or download in the console

Note: As we will see in the sample code in step 3, we embed the public key in the [email protected] deployment package. This is a permissible practice because public keys in asymmetric cryptography systems aren’t a secret and can be freely distributed to entities that need to perform encryption. Alternatively, you can use [email protected] to query AWS KMS for the public key at runtime. However, this introduces latency, increases the load against your KMS account quota, and increases your AWS costs. General patterns for using external data in [email protected] are described in Leveraging external data in [email protected].

Step 2 – HTTP API request handling by CloudFront

CloudFront receives an HTTP(S) request from a client. CloudFront then invokes [email protected] during origin-request processing and includes the HTTP request body in the invocation.

Step 3 – [email protected] processing

The [email protected] function processes the HTTP request body. The function extracts sensitive data fields and performs RSA encryption over their values.

The following code is sample source code for the [email protected] function implemented in Python 3.7:

import Crypto
import base64
import json
from Crypto.Cipher import PKCS1_OAEP
from Crypto.PublicKey import RSA

# PEM-formatted RSA public key copied over from AWS KMS or your own public key.
RSA_PUBLIC_KEY = "-----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY-----<your key>-----END PUBLIC KEY-----"
RSA_PUBLIC_KEY_OBJ = RSA.importKey(RSA_PUBLIC_KEY)
RSA_CIPHER_OBJ = PKCS1_OAEP.new(RSA_PUBLIC_KEY_OBJ, Crypto.Hash.SHA256)

# Example sensitive data field names in a JSON object. 
PII_SENSITIVE_FIELD_NAMES = ["fname", "lname", "email", "ssn", "dob", "phone"]

CIPHERTEXT_PREFIX = "#01#"
CIPHERTEXT_SUFFIX = "#10#"

def lambda_handler(event, context):
    # Extract HTTP request and its body as per documentation:
    # https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/lambda-event-structure.html
    http_request = event['Records'][0]['cf']['request']
    body = http_request['body']
    org_body = base64.b64decode(body['data'])
    mod_body = protect_sensitive_fields_json(org_body)
    body['action'] = 'replace'
    body['encoding'] = 'text'
    body['data'] = mod_body
    return http_request


def protect_sensitive_fields_json(body):
    # Encrypts sensitive fields in sample JSON payload shown earlier in this post.
    # [{"fname": "Alejandro", "lname": "Rosalez", … }]
    person_list = json.loads(body.decode("utf-8"))
    for person_data in person_list:
        for field_name in PII_SENSITIVE_FIELD_NAMES:
            if field_name not in person_data:
                continue
            plaintext = person_data[field_name]
            ciphertext = RSA_CIPHER_OBJ.encrypt(bytes(plaintext, 'utf-8'))
            ciphertext_b64 = base64.b64encode(ciphertext).decode()
            # Optionally, add unique prefix/suffix patterns to ciphertext
            person_data[field_name] = CIPHERTEXT_PREFIX + ciphertext_b64 + CIPHERTEXT_SUFFIX 
    return json.dumps(person_list)

The event structure passed into the [email protected] function is described in [email protected] Event Structure. Following the event structure, you can extract the HTTP request body. In this example, the assumption is that the HTTP payload carries a JSON document based on a particular schema defined as part of the API contract. The input JSON document is parsed by the function, converting it into a Python dictionary. The Python native dictionary operators are then used to extract the sensitive field values.

Note: If you don’t know your API payload structure ahead of time or you’re dealing with unstructured payloads, you can use techniques such as regular expression pattern searches and checksums to look for patterns of sensitive data and target them accordingly. For example, credit card primary account numbers include a Luhn checksum that can be programmatically detected. Additionally, services such as Amazon Comprehend and Amazon Macie can be leveraged for detecting sensitive data such as PII in application payloads.

While iterating over the sensitive fields, individual field values are encrypted using the standard RSA encryption implementation available in the Python Cryptography Toolkit (PyCrypto). The PyCrypto module is included within the [email protected] zip archive as described in [email protected] deployment package.

The example uses the standard optimal asymmetric encryption padding (OAEP) and SHA-256 encryption algorithm properties. These properties are supported by AWS KMS and will allow RSA ciphertext produced here to be decrypted by AWS KMS later.

Note: You may have noticed in the code above that we’re bracketing the ciphertexts with predefined prefix and suffix strings:

person_data[field_name] = CIPHERTEXT_PREFIX + ciphertext_b64 + CIPHERTEXT_SUFFIX

This is an optional measure and is being implemented to simplify the decryption process.

The prefix and suffix strings help demarcate ciphertext embedded in unstructured data in downstream processing and also act as embedded metadata. Unique prefix and suffix strings allow you to extract ciphertext through string or regular expression (regex) searches during the decryption process without having to know the data body format or schema, or the field names that were encrypted.

Distinct strings can also serve as indirect identifiers of RSA key pair identifiers. This can enable key rotation and allow separate keys to be used for separate fields depending on the data security requirements for individual fields.

You can ensure that the prefix and suffix strings can’t collide with the ciphertext by bracketing them with characters that don’t appear in cyphertext. For example, a hash (#) character cannot be part of a base64 encoded ciphertext string.

Deploying a Lambda function as a [email protected] function requires specific IAM permissions and an IAM execution role. Follow the [email protected] deployment instructions in Setting IAM Permissions and Roles for [email protected].

Step 4 – [email protected] response

The [email protected] function returns the modified HTTP body back to CloudFront and instructs it to replace the original HTTP body with the modified one by setting the following flag:

http_request['body']['action'] = 'replace'

Step 5 – Forward the request to the origin server

CloudFront forwards the modified request body provided by [email protected] to the origin server. In this example, the origin server writes the data body to persistent storage for later processing.

Field-level decryption process

An application that’s authorized to access sensitive data for a business function can decrypt that data. An example decryption process is shown in Figure 6. The figure shows a Lambda function as an example compute environment for invoking AWS KMS for decryption. This functionality isn’t dependent on Lambda and can be performed in any compute environment that has access to AWS KMS.

Figure 6: Field-level decryption process

Figure 6: Field-level decryption process

The steps of the process shown in Figure 6 are described below.

Step 1 – Application retrieves the field-level encrypted data

The example application retrieves the field-level encrypted data from persistent storage that had been previously written during the data ingestion process.

Step 2 – Application invokes the decryption Lambda function

The application invokes a Lambda function responsible for performing field-level decryption, sending the retrieved data to Lambda.

Step 3 – Lambda calls the AWS KMS decryption API

The Lambda function uses AWS KMS for RSA decryption. The example calls the KMS decryption API that inputs ciphertext and returns plaintext. The actual decryption happens in KMS; the RSA private key is never exposed to the application, which is a highly desirable characteristic for building secure applications.

Note: If you choose to use an external key pair, then you can securely store the RSA private key in AWS services like AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store or AWS Secrets Manager and control access to the key through IAM and resource policies. You can fetch the key from relevant vault using the vault’s API, then decrypt using the standard RSA implementation available in your programming language. For example, the cryptography toolkit in Python or javax.crypto in Java.

The Lambda function Python code for decryption is shown below.

import base64
import boto3
import re

kms_client = boto3.client('kms')
CIPHERTEXT_PREFIX = "#01#"
CIPHERTEXT_SUFFIX = "#10#"

# This lambda function extracts event body, searches for and decrypts ciphertext 
# fields surrounded by provided prefix and suffix strings in arbitrary text bodies 
# and substitutes plaintext fields in-place.  
def lambda_handler(event, context):    
    org_data = event["body"]
    mod_data = unprotect_fields(org_data, CIPHERTEXT_PREFIX, CIPHERTEXT_SUFFIX)
    return mod_data

# Helper function that performs non-greedy regex search for ciphertext strings on
# input data and performs RSA decryption of them using AWS KMS 
def unprotect_fields(org_data, prefix, suffix):
    regex_pattern = prefix + "(.*?)" + suffix
    mod_data_parts = []
    cursor = 0

    # Search ciphertexts iteratively using python regular expression module
    for match in re.finditer(regex_pattern, org_data):
        mod_data_parts.append(org_data[cursor: match.start()])
        try:
            # Ciphertext was stored as Base64 encoded in our example. Decode it.
            ciphertext = base64.b64decode(match.group(1))

            # Decrypt ciphertext using AWS KMS  
            decrypt_rsp = kms_client.decrypt(
                EncryptionAlgorithm="RSAES_OAEP_SHA_256",
                KeyId="<Your-Key-ID>",
                CiphertextBlob=ciphertext)
            decrypted_val = decrypt_rsp["Plaintext"].decode("utf-8")
            mod_data_parts.append(decrypted_val)
        except Exception as e:
            print ("Exception: " + str(e))
            return None
        cursor = match.end()

    mod_data_parts.append(org_data[cursor:])
    return "".join(mod_data_parts)

The function performs a regular expression search in the input data body looking for ciphertext strings bracketed in predefined prefix and suffix strings that were added during encryption.

While iterating over ciphertext strings one-by-one, the function calls the AWS KMS decrypt() API. The example function uses the same RSA encryption algorithm properties—OAEP and SHA-256—and the Key ID of the public key that was used during encryption in [email protected]

Note that the Key ID itself is not a secret. Any application can be configured with it, but that doesn’t mean any application will be able to perform decryption. The security control here is that the AWS KMS key policy must allow the caller to use the Key ID to perform the decryption. An additional security control is provided by Lambda execution role that should allow calling the KMS decrypt() API.

Step 4 – AWS KMS decrypts ciphertext and returns plaintext

To ensure that only authorized users can perform decrypt operation, the KMS is configured as described in Using key policies in AWS KMS. In addition, the Lambda IAM execution role is configured as described in AWS Lambda execution role to allow it to access KMS. If both the key policy and IAM policy conditions are met, KMS returns the decrypted plaintext. Lambda substitutes the plaintext in place of ciphertext in the encapsulating data body.

Steps three and four are repeated for each ciphertext string.

Step 5 – Lambda returns decrypted data body

Once all the ciphertext has been converted to plaintext and substituted in the larger data body, the Lambda function returns the modified data body to the client application.

Conclusion

In this post, I demonstrated how you can implement field-level encryption integrated with AWS KMS to help protect sensitive data workloads for their entire lifecycle in AWS. Since your [email protected] is designed to protect data at the network edge, data remains protected throughout the application execution stack. In addition to improving your data security posture, this protection can help you comply with data privacy regulations applicable to your organization.

Since you author your own [email protected] function to perform standard RSA encryption, you have flexibility in terms of payload formats and the number of fields that you consider to be sensitive. The integration with AWS KMS for RSA key management and decryption provides significant simplicity, higher key security, and rich integration with other AWS security services enabling an overall strong security solution.

By using encrypted fields with identifiers as described in this post, you can create fine-grained controls for data accessibility to meet the security principle of least privilege. Instead of granting either complete access or no access to data fields, you can ensure least privileges where a given part of an application can only access the fields that it needs, when it needs to, all the way down to controlling access field by field. Field by field access can be enabled by using different keys for different fields and controlling their respective policies.

In addition to protecting sensitive data workloads to meet regulatory and security best practices, this solution can be used to build de-identified data lakes in AWS. Sensitive data fields remain protected throughout their lifecycle, while non-sensitive data fields remain in the clear. This approach can allow analytics or other business functions to operate on data without exposing sensitive data.

If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below.

Want more AWS Security how-to content, news, and feature announcements? Follow us on Twitter.

Author

Raj Jain

Raj is a Senior Cloud Architect at AWS. He is passionate about helping customers build well-architected applications in AWS. Raj is a published author in Bell Labs Technical Journal, has authored 3 IETF standards, and holds 12 patents in internet telephony and applied cryptography. In his spare time, Raj enjoys outdoors, cooking, reading, and travel.

NextGen Healthcare: Build and Deployment Pipelines with AWS

Post Syndicated from Annik Stahl original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/nextgen-healthcare-build-and-deployment-pipelines-with-aws/

Owen Zacharias, Vice President of Application Delivery at NextGen Healthcare, explains to AWS Solutions Architect Andrea Sabet how his company developed a series of build and deployment pipelines using native AWS services in the highly regulated healthcare sector.

Learn how the following services can be used to build and deploy infrastructure and application code:

Discover how AWS resources can be rapidly created and updated as part of a CI/CD pipeline while ensuring HIPAA compliance through approved/vetted AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles that AWS CloudFormation is permitted to assume.

February’s AWS Architecture Monthly magazine is all about healthcare. Check it out on Kindle Newsstand, download the PDF, or see it on Flipboard.

*Check out more This Is My Architecture video series.

Improve clinical trial outcomes by using AWS technologies

Post Syndicated from Mayank Thakkar original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/improve-clinical-trial-outcomes-by-using-aws-technologies/

We are living in a golden age of innovation, where personalized medicine is making it possible to cure diseases that we never thought curable. Digital medicine is helping people with diseases get healthier, and we are constantly discovering how to use the body’s immune system to target and eradicate cancer cells. According to a report published by ClinicalTrials.gov, the number of registered studies hit 293,000 in 2018, representing a 250x growth since 2000.

However, an internal rate of return (IRR) analysis by Endpoints News, using data from EvaluatePharma, highlights some interesting trends. A flourishing trend in pharma innovation is supported by strong growth in registered studies. However, the IRR shows a rapidly declining trend, from around 17 percent in 2000 to below the cost of capital in 2017 and projected to go to 0 percent by 2020.

This blog post is the first installment in a series that focuses on the end-to-end workflow of collecting, storing, processing, visualizing, and acting on clinical trials data in a compliant and secure manner. The series also discusses the application of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to the world of clinical trials. In this post, we highlight common architectural patterns that AWS customers use to modernize their clinical trials. These incorporate mobile technologies for better evidence generation, cost reduction, increasing quality, improving access, and making medicine more personalized for patients.

Improving the outcomes of clinical trials and reducing costs

Biotech and pharma organizations are feeling the pressure to use resources as efficiently as possible. This pressure forces them to search for any opportunity to streamline processes, get faster, and stay more secure, all while decreasing costs. More and more life sciences companies are targeting biologics, CAR-T, and precision medicine therapeutics, with focus shifting towards smaller, geographically distributed patient segments. This shift has resulted in an increasing mandate to capture data from previously unavailable, nontraditional sources. These sources include mobile devices, IoT devices, and in-home and clinical devices. Life sciences companies merge data from these sources with data from traditional clinical trials to build robust evidence around the safety and efficacy of a drug.

Early last year, the Clinical Trials Transformation Initiative (CTTI) provided recommendations about using mobile technologies for capturing holistic, high quality, attributable, real-world data from patients and for submission to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). By using mobile technologies, life sciences companies can reduce barriers to trial participation and lower costs associated with conducting clinical trials. Global regulatory groups such as the FDA, Health Canada, and Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), among others, are also in favor of using mobile technologies. Mobile technologies can make patient recruitment more efficient, reach endpoints faster, and reduce the cost and time required to conduct clinical trials.

Improvised data ingestion using mobile technologies can speed up outcomes, reduce costs, and improve the accuracy of clinical trials. This is especially true when mobile data ingestion is supplemented with artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) technologies.

Together, they can usher in a new age of smart clinical trials.

At the same time, traditional clinical trial processes and technology designed for mass-marketed blockbuster drugs can’t effectively meet emerging industry needs. This leaves life sciences and pharmaceutical companies in need of assistance for evolving their clinical trial operations. These circumstances result in making clinical trials one of the largest areas of investment for bringing a new drug to market.

Using mobile technologies with traditional technologies in clinical trials can improve the outcomes of the trials and simultaneously reduce costs. Some of the use cases that the integration of various technologies enables include these:

  • Identifying and tracking participants in clinical trials
    • Identifying participants for clinical trials recruitment
    • Educating and informing patients participating in clinical trials
    • Implementing standardized protocols and sharing associated information to trial participants
    • Tracking adverse events and safety profiles
  • Integrating genomic and phenotypic data for identifying novel biomarkers
  • Integrating mobile data into clinical trials for better clinical trial management
  • Creation of a patient-control arm based on historical data
  • Stratifying cohorts based on treatment, claims, and registry datasets
  • Building a collaborative, interoperable network for data sharing and knowledge creation
  • Building compliance-ready infrastructure for clinical trial management

The AWS Cloud provides HIPAA eligible services and solutions. As an AWS customer, you can use these to build solutions for global implementation of mobile devices and sensors in trials, secure capture of streaming Internet of Things (IoT) data, and advanced analytics through visualization tools or AI/ML capabilities. Some of the use cases these services and solutions enable are finding and recruiting patients using smart analytics, facilitating global data management, and remote or in-patient site monitoring. Others include predicting lack of adherence, detecting adverse events, and accelerating trial outcomes along with optimizing trial costs.

Clinical Trials 2.0 (CT2.0) at AWS is geared toward facilitating wider adoption of cloud-native services to enable data ingestion from disparate sources, cost-optimized and reliable storage, and holistic analytics. At the same time, CT2.0 provides the granular access control, end-to-end security, and global scalability needed to conduct clinical trials more efficiently.

Reference architecture

One of the typical architectures for managing a clinical trial using mobile technologies is shown following. This architecture focuses on capturing real-time data from mobile sources and providing a way to process it.

* – Additional considerations such as data security, access control, and compliance need to be incorporated into the architecture and are discussed in the remainder of this post.

Managing a trial by using this architecture consists of the following five major steps.

Step 1: Collect data

Mobile devices, personal wearables, instruments, and smart-devices are extensively being used (or being considered) by global pharmaceutical companies in patient care and clinical trials to provide data for activity tracking, vital signs monitoring, and so on, in real-time. Devices like infusion pumps, personal use dialysis machines, and so on require tracking and alerting of device consumables and calibration status. Remote settings management is also a major use case for these kinds of devices. The end-user mobile devices used in the clinical trial emit a lot of telemetry data that requires real-time data capture, data cleansing, transformation, and analysis.

Typically, these devices are connected to an edge node or a smart phone. Such a connection provides sufficient computing resources to stream data to AWS IoT Core. AWS IoT Core can then be configured to write data to Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose in near real time. Kinesis Data Firehose is a fully managed service for delivering real-time streaming data to destinations such as Amazon S3. S3 provides online, flexible, cost efficient, pay-as-you-go storage that can replicate your data on three Availability Zones within an AWS Region. The edge node or smart phone can use the AWS IoT SDKs to publish and subscribe device data to AWS IoT Core with MQTT. This process uses the AWS method of authentication (called ‘SigV4’), X.509 certificate–based authentication, and customer-created token-based authentication (through custom authorizers). This authenticated approach enables you to map your choice of policies to each certificate and remotely control device or application access. You can also use the Kinesis Data Firehose encryption feature to enable server-side data encryption.

You can also capture additional data such as Case Report Forms (CRF), Electronic Medical Records (EMR), and medical images using Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS). In addition, you can capture laboratory data (Labs) and other Patient Reported Outcomes data (ePRO). AWS provides multiple tools and services to effectively and securely connect to these data sources, enabling you to ingest data in various volumes, variety, and velocities. For more information about creating a HealthCare Data Hub and ingesting Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) data, see the AWS Big Data Blog post Create a Healthcare Data Hub with AWS and Mirth Connect.

Step 2: Store data

After data is ingested from the devices and wearables used in the clinical trial, Kinesis Data Firehose is used to store the data on Amazon S3. This stored data serves as a raw copy and can later be used for historical analysis and pattern prediction. Using Amazon S3’s lifecycle policies, you can periodically move your data to reduced cost storage such as Amazon S3 Glacier for further optimizing their storage costs. Using Amazon S3 Intelligent Tiering can automatically optimize costs when data access patterns change, without performance impact or operational overhead by moving data between two access tiers—frequent access and infrequent access. You can also choose to encrypt data at rest and in motion using various encryption options available on S3.

Amazon S3 offers an extremely durable, highly available, and infinitely scalable data storage infrastructure, simplifying most data processing, backup, and replication tasks.

Step 3: Data processing—fast lane

After collecting and storing a raw copy of the data, Amazon S3 is configured to publish events to AWS Lambda and invoke a Lambda function by passing the event data as a parameter. The Lambda function is used to extract the key performance indicators (KPIs) such as adverse event notifications, medication adherence, and treatment schedule management from the incoming data. You can use Lambda to process these KPIs and store them in Amazon DynamoDB, along with encryption at rest, which powers a near-real-time clinical trial status dashboard. This alerts clinical trial coordinators in real time so that appropriate interventions can take place.

In addition to this, using a data warehouse full of medical records, you can train and implement a machine learning model. This model can predict which patients are about to switch medications or might exhibit adherence challenges in the future. Such prediction can enable clinical trial coordinators to narrow in on those patients with mitigation strategies.

Step 4: Data processing—batch

For historical analysis and pattern prediction, the staged data (stored in S3) is processed in batches. A Lambda function is used to trigger the extract, transform, and load (ETL) process every time new data is added to the raw data S3 bucket. This Lambda function triggers an ETL process using AWS Glue, a fully managed ETL service that makes it easy for you to prepare and load your data for analytics. This approach helps in mining current and historical data to derive actionable insights, which is stored on Amazon S3.

From there, data is loaded on to Amazon Redshift, a cost-effective, petabyte-scale data warehouse offering from AWS. You can also use Amazon Redshift Spectrum to extend data warehousing out to exabytes without loading any data to Amazon Redshift, as detailed in the Big Data blog post Amazon Redshift Spectrum Extends Data Warehousing Out to Exabytes—No Loading Required. This enables you to provide an all-encompassing picture of the entire clinical trial to your clinical trial coordinators, enabling you to react and respond faster.

In addition to this, you can train and implement a machine learning model to identify patients who might be at risk for adherence challenges. This enables clinical trial coordinators to reinforce patient education and support.

Step 5: Visualize and act on data

After the data is processed and ready to be consumed, you can use Amazon QuickSight, a cloud-native business intelligence service from AWS that offers native Amazon Redshift connectivity. Amazon QuickSight is serverless and so can be rolled out to your audiences in hours. You can also use a host of third-party reporting tools, which can use AWS-supplied JDBC or ODBC drivers or open-source PostgreSQL drivers to connect with Amazon Redshift. These tools include TIBCO Spotfire Analytics, Tableau Server, Qlik Sense Enterprise, Looker, and others. Real-time data processing (step 3 preceding) combines with historical-view batch processing (step 4). Together, they empower contract research organizations (CROs), study managers, trial coordinators, and other entities involved in the clinical trial journey to make effective and informed decisions at a speed and frequency that was previously unavailable. Using Amazon QuickSight’s unique Pay-per-Session pricing model, you can optimize costs for your bursty usage models by paying only when users access the dashboards.

Using Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), real-time feedback based on incoming data and telemetry is sent to patients by using text messages, mobile push, and emails. In addition, study managers and coordinators can send Amazon SNS notifications to patients. Amazon SNS provides a fully managed pub/sub messaging for micro services, distributed systems, and serverless applications. It’s designed for high-throughput, push-based, many-to-many messaging. Alerts and notifications can be based on current data or a combination of current and historical data.

To encrypt messages published to Amazon SNS, you can follow the steps listed in the post Encrypting messages published to Amazon SNS with AWS KMS, on the AWS Compute Blog.   

Data security, data privacy, data integrity, and compliance considerations

At AWS, customer trust is our top priority. We deliver services to millions of active customers, including enterprises, educational institutions, and government agencies in over 190 countries. Our customers include financial services providers, healthcare providers, and governmental agencies, who trust us with some of their most sensitive information.

To facilitate this, along with the services mentioned earlier, you should also use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) service. IAM enables you to maintain segregation of access, fine-grained access control, and securing end user mobile and web applications. You can also use AWS Security Token Service (AWS STS) to provide secure, self-expiring, time-boxed, temporary security credentials to third-party administrators and service providers, greatly strengthening your security posture. You can use AWS CloudTrail to log IAM and STS API calls. Additionally, AWS IoT Device Management makes it easy to securely onboard, organize, monitor, and remotely manage IoT devices at scale.

With AWS, you can add an additional layer of security to your data at rest in the cloud. AWS provides scalable and efficient encryption features for services like Amazon EBS, Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, Amazon SNS,  AWS Glue, and many more. Flexible key management options, including AWS Key Management Service, enable you to choose whether to have AWS manage the encryption keys or to keep complete control over their keys. In addition, AWS provides APIs for you to integrate encryption and data protection with any of the services that you develop or deploy in an AWS environment.

As a customer, you maintain ownership of your data, and select which AWS services can process, store, and host the content. Generally speaking, AWS doesn’t access or use customers’ content for any purpose without their consent. AWS never uses customer data to derive information for marketing or advertising.

When evaluating the security of a cloud solution, it’s important that you understand and distinguish between the security of the cloud and security in the cloud. The AWS Shared Responsibility Model details this relationship.

To assist you with your compliance efforts, AWS continues to add more services to the various compliance regulations, attestations, certifications, and programs across the world. To decide which services are suitable for you, see the services in scope page.

You can also use various services like, but not limited to, AWS CloudTrail, AWS Config, Amazon GuardDuty, and AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) to enhance your compliance and auditing efforts. Find more details in the AWS Compliance Solutions Guide.

Final thoughts

With the ever-growing interconnectivity and technological advances in the field of medical devices, mobile devices and sensors can improve numerous aspects of clinical trials. They can help in recruitment, informed consent, patient counseling, and patient communication management. They can also improve protocol and medication adherence, clinical endpoints measurement, and the process of alerting participants on adverse events. Smart sensors, smart mobile devices, and robust interconnecting systems can be central in conducting clinical trials.

Every biopharma organization conducting or sponsoring a clinical trial activity faces the conundrum of advancing their approach to trials while maintaining overall trial performance and data consistency. The AWS Cloud enables a new dimension for how data is collected, stored, and used for clinical trials. It thus addresses that conundrum as we march towards a new reality of how drugs are brought to market. The AWS Cloud abstracts away technical challenges such as scaling, security, and establishing a cost-efficient IT infrastructure. In doing so, it allows biopharma organizations to focus on their core mission of improving patent lives through the development of effective, groundbreaking treatments.

 

About the Author

Mayank Thakkar – Global Solutions Architect, AWS HealthCare and Life Sciences

 

 

 

 

Deven Atnoor, Ph.D. – Industry Specialist, AWS HealthCare and Life Sciences

 

 

 

 

New AWS services launch with HIPAA, PCI, ISO, and SOC – a company first

Post Syndicated from Chris Gile original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/new-aws-services-launch-with-hipaa-pci-iso-and-soc/

Our security culture is one of the things that sets AWS apart. Security is job zero — it is the foundation for all AWS employees and impacts the work we do every day, across the company. And that’s reflected in our services, which undergo exacting internal and external security reviews before being released. From there, we have historically waited for customer demand to begin the complex process of third-party assessment and validating services under specific compliance programs. However, we’ve heard you tell us you want every generally available (GA) service in scope to keep up with the pace of your innovation and at the same time, meet rigorous compliance and regulatory requirements.

I wanted to share how we’re meeting this challenge with a more proactive approach to service certification by certifying services at launch. For the first time, we’ve launched new GA services with PCI DSS, ISO 9001/27001/27017/27018, SOC 2, and HIPAA eligibility. That means customers who rely on or require these compliance programs can select from 10 brand new services right away, without having to wait for one or more trailing audit cycles.

Verifying the security and compliance of the following new services is as simple as going to the console and using AWS Artifact to download the audit reports.

  • Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) [HIPAA, PCI, ISO, SOC 2]
  • Amazon FSx [HIPAA, PCI, ISO]
  • Amazon Route 53 Resolver [ISO]
  • AWS Amplify [HIPAA, ISO]
  • AWS DataSync [HIPAA, PCI, ISO]
  • AWS Elemental MediaConnect [HIPAA, PCI, ISO]
  • AWS Global Accelerator [PCI, ISO]
  • AWS License Manager [ISO]
  • AWS RoboMaker [HIPAA, PCI, ISO]
  • AWS Transfer for SFTP [HIPAA, PCI, ISO]

This proactive compliance approach means we move upstream in the product development process. Over the last several months, we’ve made significant process improvements to deliver additional services with compliance certifications and HIPAA eligibility. Our security, compliance, and service teams have partnered in new ways to implement controls and audit earlier in a service’s development phase to demonstrate operating effectiveness. We also integrated auditing mechanisms into multiple stages of the launch process, enabling our security and compliance teams, as well as auditors, to assess controls throughout a service’s preview period. Additionally, we increased our audit frequency to meet services’ GA deadlines.

The work reflects a meaningful shift in our business. We’re excited to get these services into your hands sooner and wanted to report our overall progress. We also ask for your continued feedback since it drives our decisions and prioritization. Because going forward, we’ll continue to iterate and innovate until all of our services are certified at launch.

Powering HIPAA-compliant workloads using AWS Serverless technologies

Post Syndicated from Chris Munns original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/powering-hipaa-compliant-workloads-using-aws-serverless-technologies/

This post courtesy of Mayank Thakkar, AWS Senior Solutions Architect

Serverless computing refers to an architecture discipline that allows you to build and run applications or services without thinking about servers. You can focus on your applications, without worrying about provisioning, scaling, or managing any servers. You can use serverless architectures for nearly any type of application or backend service. AWS handles the heavy lifting around scaling, high availability, and running those workloads.

The AWS HIPAA program enables covered entities—and those business associates subject to the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA)—to use the secure AWS environment to process, maintain, and store protected health information (PHI). Based on customer feedback, AWS is trying to add more services to the HIPAA program, including serverless technologies.

AWS recently announced that AWS Step Functions has achieved HIPAA-eligibility status and has been added to the AWS Business Associate Addendum (BAA), adding to a growing list of HIPAA-eligible services. The BAA is an AWS contract that is required under HIPAA rules to ensure that AWS appropriately safeguards PHI. The BAA also serves to clarify and limit, as appropriate, the permissible uses and disclosures of PHI by AWS, based on the relationship between AWS and customers and the activities or services being performed by AWS.

Along with HIPAA eligibility for most of the rest of the serverless platform at AWS, Step Functions inclusion is a major win for organizations looking to process PHI using serverless technologies, opening up numerous new use cases and patterns. You can still use non-eligible services to orchestrate the storage, transmission, and processing of the metadata around PHI, but not the PHI itself.

In this post, I examine some common serverless use cases that I see in the healthcare and life sciences industry and show how AWS Serverless can be used to build powerful, cost-efficient, HIPAA-eligible architectures.

Provider directory web application

Running HIPAA-compliant web applications (like provider directories) on AWS is a common use case in the healthcare industry. Healthcare providers are often looking for ways to build and run applications and services without thinking about servers. They are also looking for ways to provide the most cost-effective and scalable delivery of secure health-related information to members, providers, and partners worldwide.

Unpredictable access patterns and spiky workloads often force organizations to provision for peak in these cases, and they end up paying for idle capacity. AWS Auto Scaling solves this challenge to a great extent but you still have to manage and maintain the underlying servers from a patching, high availability, and scaling perspective. AWS Lambda (along with other serverless technologies from AWS) removes this constraint.

The above architecture shows a serverless way to host a customer-facing website, with Amazon S3 being used for hosting static files (.js, .css, images, and so on). If your website is based on client-side technologies, you can eliminate the need to run a web server farm. In addition, you can use S3 features like server-side encryption and bucket access policies to lock down access to the content.

Using Amazon CloudFront, a global content delivery network, with S3 origins can bring your content closer to the end user and cut down S3 access costs, by caching the content at the edge. In addition, using AWS [email protected] gives you an ability to bring and execute your own code to customize the content that CloudFront delivers. That significantly reduces latency and improves the end user experience while maintaining the same Lambda development model. Some common examples include checking cookies, inspecting headers or authorization tokens, rewriting URLs, and making calls to external resources to confirm user credentials and generate HTTP responses.

You can power the APIs needed for your client application by using Amazon API Gateway, which takes care of creating, publishing, maintaining, monitoring, and securing APIs at any scale. API Gateway also provides robust ways to provide traffic management, authorization and access control, monitoring, API version management, and the other tasks involved in accepting and processing up to hundreds of thousands of concurrent API calls. This allows you to focus on your business logic. Direct, secure, and authenticated integration with Lambda functions allows this serverless architecture to scale up and down seamlessly with incoming traffic.

The CloudFront integration with AWS WAF provides a reliable way to protect your application against common web exploits that could affect application availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources.

API Gateway can integrate directly with Lambda, which by default can access the public resources. Lambda functions can be configured to access your Amazon VPC resources as well. If you have extended your data center to AWS using AWS Direct Connect or a VPN connection, Lambda can access your on-premises resources, with the traffic flowing over your VPN connection (or Direct Connect) instead of the public internet.

All the services mentioned above (except Amazon EC2) are fully managed by AWS in terms of high availability, scaling, provisioning, and maintenance, giving you a cost-effective way to host your web applications. It’s pay-as-you-go vs. pay-as-you-provision. Spikes in demand, typically encountered during the enrollment season, are handled gracefully, with these services scaling automatically to meet demand and then scale down. You get to keep your costs in control.

All AWS services referenced in the above architecture are HIPAA-eligible, thus enabling you to store, process, and transmit PHI, as long as it complies with the BAA.

Medical device telemetry (ingesting data @ scale)

The ever-increasing presence of IoT devices in the healthcare industry has created the challenges of ingesting this data at scale and making it available for processing as soon as it is produced. Processing this data in real time (or near-real time) is key to delivering urgent care to patients.

The infinite scalability (theoretical) along with low startup times offered by Lambda makes it a great candidate for these kinds of use cases. Balancing ballooning healthcare costs and timely delivery of care is a never-ending challenge. With subsecond billing and no charge for non-execution, Lambda becomes the best choice for AWS customers.

These end-user medical devices emit a lot of telemetry data, which requires constant analysis and real-time tracking and updating. For example, devices like infusion pumps, personal use dialysis machines, and so on require tracking and alerting of device consumables and calibration status. They also require updates for these settings. Consider the following architecture:

Typically, these devices are connected to an edge node or collector, which provides sufficient computing resources to authenticate itself to AWS and start streaming data to Amazon Kinesis Streams. The collector uses the Kinesis Producer Library to simplify high throughput to a Kinesis data stream. You can also use the server-side encryption feature, supported by Kinesis Streams, to achieve encryption-at-rest. Kinesis provides a scalable, highly available way to achieve loose coupling between data-producing (medical devices) and data-consuming (Lambda) layers.

After the data is transported via Kinesis, Lambda can then be used to process this data in real time, storing derived insights in Amazon DynamoDB, which can then power a near-real time health dashboard. Caregivers can access this real-time data to provide timely care and manage device settings.

End-user medical devices, via the edge node, can also connect to and poll an API hosted on API Gateway to check for calibration settings, firmware updates, and so on. The modifications can be easily updated by admins, providing a scalable way to manage these devices.

For historical analysis and pattern prediction, the staged data (stored in S3), can be processed in batches. Use AWS Batch, Amazon EMR, or any custom logic running on a fleet of Amazon EC2 instances to gain actionable insights. Lambda can also be used to process data in a MapReduce fashion, as detailed in the Ad Hoc Big Data Processing Made Simple with Serverless MapReduce post.

You can also build high-throughput batch workflows or orchestrate Apache Spark applications using Step Functions, as detailed in the Orchestrate Apache Spark applications using AWS Step Functions and Apache Livy post. These insights can then be used to calibrate the medical devices to achieve effective outcomes.

Use Lambda to load data into Amazon Redshift, a cost-effective, petabyte-scale data warehouse offering. One of my colleagues, Ian Meyers, pointed this out in his Zero-Administration Amazon Redshift Database Loader post.

Mobile diagnostics

Another use case that I see is using mobile devices to provide diagnostic care in out-patient settings. These environments typically lack the robust IT infrastructure that clinics and hospitals can provide, and often are subjected to intermittent internet connectivity as well. Various biosensors (otoscopes, thermometers, heart rate monitors, and so on) can easily talk to smartphones, which can then act as aggregators and analyzers before forwarding the data to a central processing system. After the data is in the system, caregivers and practitioners can then view and act on the data.

In the above diagram, an application running on a mobile device (iOS or Android) talks to various biosensors and collects diagnostic data. Using AWS mobile SDKs along with Amazon Cognito, these smart devices can authenticate themselves to AWS and access the APIs hosted on API Gateway. Amazon Cognito also offers data synchronization across various mobile devices, which helps you to build “offline” features in your mobile application. Amazon Cognito Sync resolves conflicts and intermittent network connectivity, enabling you to focus on delivering great app experiences instead of creating and managing a user data sync solution.

You can also use CloudFront and [email protected], as detailed in the first use case of this post, to cache content at edge locations and provide some light processing closer to your end users.

Lambda acts as a middle tier, processing the CRUD operations on the incoming data and storing it in DynamoDB, which is again exposed to caregivers through another set of Lambda functions and API Gateway. Caregivers can access the information through a browser-based interface, with Lambda processing the middle-tier application logic. They can view the historical data, compare it with fresh data coming in, and make corrections. Caregivers can also react to incoming data and issue alerts, which are delivered securely to the smart device through Amazon SNS.

Also, by using DynamoDB Streams and its integration with Lambda, you can implement Lambda functions that react to data modifications in DynamoDB tables (and hence, incoming device data). This gives you a way to codify common reactions to incoming data, in near-real time.

Lambda ecosystem

As I discussed in the above use cases, Lambda is a powerful, event-driven, stateless, on-demand compute platform offering scalability, agility, security, and reliability, along with a fine-grained cost structure.

For some organizations, migrating from a traditional programing model to a microservices-driven model can be a steep curve. Also, to build and maintain complex applications using Lambda, you need a vast array of tools, all the way from local debugging support to complex application performance monitoring tools. The following list of tools and services can assist you in building world-class applications with minimal effort:

  • AWS X-Ray is a distributed tracing system that allows developers to analyze and debug production for distributed applications, such as those built using a microservices (Lambda) architecture. AWS X-Ray was recently added to the AWS BAA, opening the doors for processing PHI workloads.
  • AWS Step Functions helps build HIPAA-compliant complex workflows using Lambda. It provides a way to coordinate the components of distributed applications and Lambda functions using visual workflows.
  • AWS SAM provides a fast and easy way of deploying serverless applications. You can write simple templates to describe your functions and their event sources (API Gateway, S3, Kinesis, and so on). AWS recently relaunched the AWS SAM CLI, which allows you to create a local testing environment that simulates the AWS runtime environment for Lambda. It allows faster, iterative development of your Lambda functions by eliminating the need to redeploy your application package to the Lambda runtime.

For more details, see the Serverless Application Developer Tooling webpage.

Conclusion

There are numerous other health care and life science use cases that customers are implementing, using Lambda with other AWS services. AWS is committed to easing the effort of implementing health care solutions in the cloud. Making Lambda HIPAA-eligible is just another milestone in the journey. For more examples of use cases, see Serverless. For the latest list of HIPAA-eligible services, see HIPAA Eligible Services Reference.

Accept a BAA with AWS for all accounts in your organization

Post Syndicated from Kristen Haught original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/accept-a-baa-with-aws-for-all-accounts-in-your-organization/

I’m excited to announce to our healthcare customers and partners that you can now accept a single AWS Business Associate Addendum (BAA) for all accounts within your organization. Once accepted, all current and future accounts created or added to your organization will immediately be covered by the BAA.

Our team is always thinking about how we can reduce manual processes related to your compliance tasks. That’s why I’ve been looking forward to the release of AWS Artifact Organization Agreements, which was designed to simplify the BAA process and improve your experience when designating AWS accounts as HIPAA accounts. Previously, if you wanted to designate several AWS accounts, you had to sign-in to each account individually to accept the BAA or email us. Now, an authorized master account user can accept the BAA once to automatically designate all existing and future member accounts in the organization as HIPAA accounts for use with protected health information (PHI). This release addresses a frequent customer request to be able to quickly designate multiple HIPAA accounts and confirm those accounts are covered under the terms of the BAA.

If you have a BAA in place already and want to leverage this new capability a master account user can accept the new AWS Organizations BAA in AWS Artifact today. To get started, your organization must use AWS Organizations to manage your accounts, and “all features” needs to be enabled. Learn more about creating an organization here.

Once you are using AWS Organizations with all features enabled, and you have the necessary user permissions, then accepting the AWS Organizations BAA takes about two minutes. We’ve created a video that shows you the process, step-by-step.

If your organization prefers to continue managing HIPAA accounts individually, you can still do that.  We have streamlined the process for accepting an individual account BAA as well. It takes less than two minutes to designate a single account as a HIPAA account in AWS Artifact. You can watch the new video here to learn how.

As with all AWS Artifact features, there is no additional cost to use AWS Artifact to review, accept, and manage individual account BAAs or the new organization BAA. To learn more, go to the FAQ page.

 

Securing messages published to Amazon SNS with AWS PrivateLink

Post Syndicated from Otavio Ferreira original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/securing-messages-published-to-amazon-sns-with-aws-privatelink/

Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) now supports VPC Endpoints (VPCE) via AWS PrivateLink. You can use VPC Endpoints to privately publish messages to SNS topics, from an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), without traversing the public internet. When you use AWS PrivateLink, you don’t need to set up an Internet Gateway (IGW), Network Address Translation (NAT) device, or Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection. You don’t need to use public IP addresses, either.

VPC Endpoints doesn’t require code changes and can bring additional security to Pub/Sub Messaging use cases that rely on SNS. VPC Endpoints helps promote data privacy and is aligned with assurance programs, including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), FedRAMP, and others discussed below.

VPC Endpoints for SNS in action

Here’s how VPC Endpoints for SNS works. The following example is based on a banking system that processes mortgage applications. This banking system, which has been deployed to a VPC, publishes each mortgage application to an SNS topic. The SNS topic then fans out the mortgage application message to two subscribing AWS Lambda functions:

  • Save-Mortgage-Application stores the application in an Amazon DynamoDB table. As the mortgage application contains personally identifiable information (PII), the message must not traverse the public internet.
  • Save-Credit-Report checks the applicant’s credit history against an external Credit Reporting Agency (CRA), then stores the final credit report in an Amazon S3 bucket.

The following diagram depicts the underlying architecture for this banking system:
 
Diagram depicting the architecture for the example banking system
 
To protect applicants’ data, the financial institution responsible for developing this banking system needed a mechanism to prevent PII data from traversing the internet when publishing mortgage applications from their VPC to the SNS topic. Therefore, they created a VPC endpoint to enable their publisher Amazon EC2 instance to privately connect to the SNS API. As shown in the diagram, when the VPC endpoint is created, an Elastic Network Interface (ENI) is automatically placed in the same VPC subnet as the publisher EC2 instance. This ENI exposes a private IP address that is used as the entry point for traffic destined to SNS. This ensures that traffic between the VPC and SNS doesn’t leave the Amazon network.

Set up VPC Endpoints for SNS

The process for creating a VPC endpoint to privately connect to SNS doesn’t require code changes: access the VPC Management Console, navigate to the Endpoints section, and create a new Endpoint. Three attributes are required:

  • The SNS service name.
  • The VPC and Availability Zones (AZs) from which you’ll publish your messages.
  • The Security Group (SG) to be associated with the endpoint network interface. The Security Group controls the traffic to the endpoint network interface from resources in your VPC. If you don’t specify a Security Group, the default Security Group for your VPC will be associated.

Help ensure your security and compliance

SNS can support messaging use cases in regulated market segments, such as healthcare provider systems subject to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and financial systems subject to the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), and is also in-scope with the following Assurance Programs:

The SNS API is served through HTTP Secure (HTTPS), and encrypts all messages in transit with Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificates issued by Amazon Trust Services (ATS). The certificates verify the identity of the SNS API server when encrypted connections are established. The certificates help establish proof that your SNS API client (SDK, CLI) is communicating securely with the SNS API server. A Certificate Authority (CA) issues the certificate to a specific domain. Hence, when a domain presents a certificate that’s issued by a trusted CA, the SNS API client knows it’s safe to make the connection.

Summary

VPC Endpoints can increase the security of your pub/sub messaging use cases by allowing you to publish messages to SNS topics, from instances in your VPC, without traversing the internet. Setting up VPC Endpoints for SNS doesn’t require any code changes because the SNS API address remains the same.

VPC Endpoints for SNS is now available in all AWS Regions where AWS PrivateLink is available. For information on pricing and regional availability, visit the VPC pricing page.
For more information and on-boarding, see Publishing to Amazon SNS Topics from Amazon Virtual Private Cloud in the SNS documentation.

If you have comments about this post, submit them in the Comments section below. If you have questions about anything in this post, start a new thread on the Amazon SNS forum or contact AWS Support.

Want more AWS Security news? Follow us on Twitter.

Security of Cloud HSMBackups

Post Syndicated from Balaji Iyer original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/security-of-cloud-hsmbackups/

Today, our customers use AWS CloudHSM to meet corporate, contractual and regulatory compliance requirements for data security by using dedicated Hardware Security Module (HSM) instances within the AWS cloud. CloudHSM delivers all the benefits of traditional HSMs including secure generation, storage, and management of cryptographic keys used for data encryption that are controlled and accessible only by you.

As a managed service, it automates time-consuming administrative tasks such as hardware provisioning, software patching, high availability, backups and scaling for your sensitive and regulated workloads in a cost-effective manner. Backup and restore functionality is the core building block enabling scalability, reliability and high availability in CloudHSM.

You should consider using AWS CloudHSM if you require:

  • Keys stored in dedicated, third-party validated hardware security modules under your exclusive control
  • FIPS 140-2 compliance
  • Integration with applications using PKCS#11, Java JCE, or Microsoft CNG interfaces
  • High-performance in-VPC cryptographic acceleration (bulk crypto)
  • Financial applications subject to PCI regulations
  • Healthcare applications subject to HIPAA regulations
  • Streaming video solutions subject to contractual DRM requirements

We recently released a whitepaper, “Security of CloudHSM Backups” that provides in-depth information on how backups are protected in all three phases of the CloudHSM backup lifecycle process: Creation, Archive, and Restore.

About the Author

Balaji Iyer is a senior consultant in the Professional Services team at Amazon Web Services. In this role, he has helped several customers successfully navigate their journey to AWS. His specialties include architecting and implementing highly-scalable distributed systems, operational security, large scale migrations, and leading strategic AWS initiatives.

Amazon Relational Database Service – Looking Back at 2017

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

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

Certification & Security

Features

Engine Versions & Features

Regional Support

Instance Support

Price Reductions

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

— Jeff;

 

The Top 10 Most Downloaded AWS Security and Compliance Documents in 2017

Post Syndicated from Sara Duffer original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/the-top-10-most-downloaded-aws-security-and-compliance-documents-in-2017/

AWS download logo

The following list includes the ten most downloaded AWS security and compliance documents in 2017. Using this list, you can learn about what other AWS customers found most interesting about security and compliance last year.

  1. AWS Security Best Practices – This guide is intended for customers who are designing the security infrastructure and configuration for applications running on AWS. The guide provides security best practices that will help you define your Information Security Management System (ISMS) and build a set of security policies and processes for your organization so that you can protect your data and assets in the AWS Cloud.
  2. AWS: Overview of Security Processes – This whitepaper describes the physical and operational security processes for the AWS managed network and infrastructure, and helps answer questions such as, “How does AWS help me protect my data?”
  3. Architecting for HIPAA Security and Compliance on AWS – This whitepaper describes how to leverage AWS to develop applications that meet HIPAA and HITECH compliance requirements.
  4. Service Organization Controls (SOC) 3 Report – This publicly available report describes internal AWS security controls, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy.
  5. Introduction to AWS Security –This document provides an introduction to AWS’s approach to security, including the controls in the AWS environment, and some of the products and features that AWS makes available to customers to meet your security objectives.
  6. AWS Best Practices for DDoS Resiliency – This whitepaper covers techniques to mitigate distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
  7. AWS: Risk and Compliance – This whitepaper provides information to help customers integrate AWS into their existing control framework, including a basic approach for evaluating AWS controls and a description of AWS certifications, programs, reports, and third-party attestations.
  8. Use AWS WAF to Mitigate OWASP’s Top 10 Web Application Vulnerabilities – AWS WAF is a web application firewall that helps you protect your websites and web applications against various attack vectors at the HTTP protocol level. This whitepaper outlines how you can use AWS WAF to mitigate the application vulnerabilities that are defined in the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) Top 10 list of most common categories of application security flaws.
  9. Introduction to Auditing the Use of AWS – This whitepaper provides information, tools, and approaches for auditors to use when auditing the security of the AWS managed network and infrastructure.
  10. AWS Security and Compliance: Quick Reference Guide – By using AWS, you inherit the many security controls that we operate, thus reducing the number of security controls that you need to maintain. Your own compliance and certification programs are strengthened while at the same time lowering your cost to maintain and run your specific security assurance requirements. Learn more in this quick reference guide.

– Sara

re:Invent Recap – Announcements to Boost Enterprise Innovation with Windows

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/reinvent-recap-announcements-to-boost-enterprise-innovation-with-windows/

My colleague Sandy Carter delivered the Enterprise Innovation State of the Union last week at AWS re:Invent. She wrote the guest post below to recap the announcements that she made from the stage.

— Jeff;

“I want my company to innovate, but I am not convinced we can execute successfully.” Far too many times I have heard this fear expressed by senior executives that I have met at different points in my career. In fact, a recent study published by Price Waterhouse Coopers found that while 93% of executives depend on innovation to drive growth, more than half are challenged to take innovative ideas to market quickly in a scalable way.

Many customers are struggling with how to drive enterprise innovation, so I was thrilled to share the stage at AWS re:Invent this past week with several senior executives who have successfully broken this mold to drive amazing enterprise innovation. In particular, I want to thank Parag Karnik from Johnson & Johnson, Bill Rothe from Hess Corporation, Dave Williams from Just Eat, and Olga Lagunova from Pitney Bowes for sharing their stories of innovation, creativity, and solid execution.

Among the many new announcements from AWS this past week, I am particularly excited about the following newly-launched AWS products and programs that I announced at re:Invent to drive new innovations by our enterprise customers:

AI: New Deep Learning Amazon Machine Image (AMI) on EC2 Windows
As I shared at re:Invent, customers such as Infor are already successfully leveraging artificial intelligence tools on AWS to deliver tailored, industry-specific applications to their customers. We want to facilitate more of our Windows developers to get started quickly and easily with AI, leveraging machine learning based tools with popular deep learning frameworks, such as Apache MXNet, TensorFlow, and Caffe2. In order to enable this, I announced at re:Invent that AWS now offers a new Deep Learning AMI for Microsoft Windows. The AMI is tailored to facilitate large scale training of deep-learning models, and enables quick and easy setup of Windows Server-based compute resources for machine learning applications.

IoT: Visualize and Analyze SQL and IoT Data
Forecasts show as many as 31 billion IoT devices by 2020. AWS wants every Windows customer to take advantage of the data available from their devices. Pitney Bowes, for example, now has more than 130,000 IoT devices streaming data to AWS. Using machine learning, Pitney Bowes enriches and analyzes data to enhance their customer experience, improve efficiencies, and create new data products. AWS IoT Analytics can now be leveraged to run analytics on IoT data and get insights that help you make better and more accurate decisions for IoT applications and machine learning use cases. AWS IoT Analytics can automatically enrich IoT device data with contextual metadata such as your SQL Server transactional data.

New Capabilities for .NET Developers on AWS
In addition to all of the enhancements we’ve introduced to deliver a first class experience to Windows developers on AWS, we announced that we are including .NET Core 2.0 support in AWS Lambda and AWS CodeBuild, which will be available for broader use early next year. .NET Core 2.0 packs a number of new features such as Razor pages, better compatibility with .NET framework, more than double the number of APIs compared to the previous versions, and much more. With this announcement, you will be able to take advantage of all latest .NET Core features on Lambda and CodeBuild for building modern serverless and DevOps centric solutions.

Simplified Backup for Windows Applications
We recently introduced application consistent snapshots with Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS). This enables you to take VSS snapshots with Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) for your running Windows instances without the need to create custom scripts or to shut down the instances. This removes the overhead associated with backing up your Windows applications.

License optimization for BYOL
AWS provides you a wide variety of instance types and families that best meet your workload needs. If you are using software licensed by the number of vCPUs, you want the ability to further tweak vCPU count to optimize license spend. I announced the upcoming ability to optimize CPUs for EC2, giving you greater control over your EC2 instances on two fronts:

  1. You can specify a custom number of vCPUs when launching new instances to save on vCPU based licensing costs. For example, SQL Server licensing spend.
  2. You can disable Hyper-Threading Technology for workloads that perform well with single-threaded CPUs, like some high-performance computing (HPC) applications.

Using these capabilities, customers who bring their own license (BYOL) will be able to optimize their license usage and save on the license costs.

Server Migration Service for Hyper-V Virtual Machines
As Bill Rothe from Hess Corporation shared at re:Invent, Hess has successfully migrated a wide range of workloads to the cloud, including SQL Server, SharePoint, SAP HANA, and many others. AWS Server Migration Service (SMS) now supports Hyper-V virtual machine (VM) migration, in order to further support enterprise migrations like these. AWS Server Migration Service will enable you to more easily co-ordinate large-scale server migrations from on-premise Hyper-V environments to AWS. AWS Server Migration Service allows you to automate, schedule, and track incremental replications of live server volumes. The replicated volumes are encrypted in transit and saved as a new Amazon Machine Image (AMI), which can be launched as an EC2 instance on AWS.

Microsoft Premier Support for AWS End-Customers
I was pleased to announce that Microsoft and AWS have developed new areas of support integration to help ensure a great customer experience. Microsoft Premier Support is on board to help AWS assist end customers. AWS Support engineers can escalate directly to Microsoft Support on behalf of AWS customers running Microsoft workloads.

Best Practice Tools: HIPAA Compliance and Digital Innovation Workshop
In November, we updated our HIPAA-focused white paper, outlining how you can use AWS to create HIPAA-compliant applications. In the first quarter of next year, we will publish a HIPAA Implementation Guide that expands on our HIPAA Quick Start to enable you to follow strict security, compliance, and risk management controls for common healthcare use cases. I was also pleased to award a Digital Innovation Workshop to one of our customers in my re:Invent session, and look forward to seeing more customers take advantage of this workshop.

AWS: The Continuous Innovation Cloud
A common thread we see across customers is that continuous innovation from AWS enables their ongoing reinvention. Continuous innovation means that you are always getting a newer, better offering every single day. Sometimes it is in the form of brand new services and capabilities, and sometimes it is happening invisibly, under the covers where your environment just keeps getting better. I invite you to learn more about how you can accelerate your innovation journey with recently launched AWS services and AWS best practices. If you are migrating Windows workloads, speak with your AWS sales representative or an AWS Microsoft Workloads Competency Partner to learn how you can leverage our re:Think for Windows program for credits to start your migration.

– Sandy Carter, Vice President, AWS

Amazon QuickSight Update – Geospatial Visualization, Private VPC Access, and More

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-quicksight-update-geospatial-visualization-private-vpc-access-and-more/

We don’t often recognize or celebrate anniversaries at AWS. With nearly 100 services on our list, we’d be eating cake and drinking champagne several times a week. While that might sound like fun, we’d rather spend our working hours listening to customers and innovating. With that said, Amazon QuickSight has now been generally available for a little over a year and I would like to give you a quick update!

QuickSight in Action
Today, tens of thousands of customers (from startups to enterprises, in industries as varied as transportation, legal, mining, and healthcare) are using QuickSight to analyze and report on their business data.

Here are a couple of examples:

Gemini provides legal evidence procurement for California attorneys who represent injured workers. They have gone from creating custom reports and running one-off queries to creating and sharing dynamic QuickSight dashboards with drill-downs and filtering. QuickSight is used to track sales pipeline, measure order throughput, and to locate bottlenecks in the order processing pipeline.

Jivochat provides a real-time messaging platform to connect visitors to website owners. QuickSight lets them create and share interactive dashboards while also providing access to the underlying datasets. This has allowed them to move beyond the sharing of static spreadsheets, ensuring that everyone is looking at the same and is empowered to make timely decisions based on current data.

Transfix is a tech-powered freight marketplace that matches loads and increases visibility into logistics for Fortune 500 shippers in retail, food and beverage, manufacturing, and other industries. QuickSight has made analytics accessible to both BI engineers and non-technical business users. They scrutinize key business and operational metrics including shipping routes, carrier efficient, and process automation.

Looking Back / Looking Ahead
The feedback on QuickSight has been incredibly helpful. Customers tell us that their employees are using QuickSight to connect to their data, perform analytics, and make high-velocity, data-driven decisions, all without setting up or running their own BI infrastructure. We love all of the feedback that we get, and use it to drive our roadmap, leading to the introduction of over 40 new features in just a year. Here’s a summary:

Looking forward, we are watching an interesting trend develop within our customer base. As these customers take a close look at how they analyze and report on data, they are realizing that a serverless approach offers some tangible benefits. They use Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) as a data lake and query it using a combination of QuickSight and Amazon Athena, giving them agility and flexibility without static infrastructure. They also make great use of QuickSight’s dashboards feature, monitoring business results and operational metrics, then sharing their insights with hundreds of users. You can read Building a Serverless Analytics Solution for Cleaner Cities and review Serverless Big Data Analytics using Amazon Athena and Amazon QuickSight if you are interested in this approach.

New Features and Enhancements
We’re still doing our best to listen and to learn, and to make sure that QuickSight continues to meet your needs. I’m happy to announce that we are making seven big additions today:

Geospatial Visualization – You can now create geospatial visuals on geographical data sets.

Private VPC Access – You can now sign up to access a preview of a new feature that allows you to securely connect to data within VPCs or on-premises, without the need for public endpoints.

Flat Table Support – In addition to pivot tables, you can now use flat tables for tabular reporting. To learn more, read about Using Tabular Reports.

Calculated SPICE Fields – You can now perform run-time calculations on SPICE data as part of your analysis. Read Adding a Calculated Field to an Analysis for more information.

Wide Table Support – You can now use tables with up to 1000 columns.

Other Buckets – You can summarize the long tail of high-cardinality data into buckets, as described in Working with Visual Types in Amazon QuickSight.

HIPAA Compliance – You can now run HIPAA-compliant workloads on QuickSight.

Geospatial Visualization
Everyone seems to want this feature! You can now take data that contains a geographic identifier (country, city, state, or zip code) and create beautiful visualizations with just a few clicks. QuickSight will geocode the identifier that you supply, and can also accept lat/long map coordinates. You can use this feature to visualize sales by state, map stores to shipping destinations, and so forth. Here’s a sample visualization:

To learn more about this feature, read Using Geospatial Charts (Maps), and Adding Geospatial Data.

Private VPC Access Preview
If you have data in AWS (perhaps in Amazon Redshift, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), or on EC2) or on-premises in Teradata or SQL Server on servers without public connectivity, this feature is for you. Private VPC Access for QuickSight uses an Elastic Network Interface (ENI) for secure, private communication with data sources in a VPC. It also allows you to use AWS Direct Connect to create a secure, private link with your on-premises resources. Here’s what it looks like:

If you are ready to join the preview, you can sign up today.

— Jeff;

 

AWS re:Invent 2017 Guide to All Things Containers

Post Syndicated from Nathan Taber original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/aws-reinvent-2017-guide-to-all-things-containers/

Contributed by Tiffany Jernigan, Developer Advocate for Amazon ECS

Get ready for takeoff!

We made sure that this year’s re:Invent is chock-full of containers: there are over 40 sessions! New to containers? No problem, we have several introductory sessions for you to dip your toes. Been using containers for years and know the ins and outs? Don’t miss our technical deep-dives and interactive chalk talks led by container experts.

If you can’t make it to Las Vegas, you can catch the keynotes and session recaps from our livestream and on Twitch.

Session types

Not everyone learns the same way, so we have multiple types of breakout content:

  • Birds of a Feather
    An interactive discussion with industry leaders about containers on AWS.
  • Breakout sessions
    60-minute presentations about building on AWS. Sessions are delivered by both AWS experts and customers and span all content levels.
  • Workshops
    2.5-hour, hands-on sessions that teach how to build on AWS. AWS credits are provided. Bring a laptop, and have an active AWS account.
  • Chalk Talks
    1-hour, highly interactive sessions with a smaller audience. They begin with a short lecture delivered by an AWS expert, followed by a discussion with the audience.

Session levels

Whether you’re new to containers or you’ve been using them for years, you’ll find useful information at every level.

  • Introductory
    Sessions are focused on providing an overview of AWS services and features, with the assumption that attendees are new to the topic.
  • Advanced
    Sessions dive deeper into the selected topic. Presenters assume that the audience has some familiarity with the topic, but may or may not have direct experience implementing a similar solution.
  • Expert
    Sessions are for attendees who are deeply familiar with the topic, have implemented a solution on their own already, and are comfortable with how the technology works across multiple services, architectures, and implementations.

Session locations

All container sessions are located in the Aria Resort.

MONDAY 11/27

Breakout sessions

Level 200 (Introductory)

CON202 – Getting Started with Docker and Amazon ECS
By packaging software into standardized units, Docker gives code everything it needs to run, ensuring consistency from your laptop all the way into production. But once you have your code ready to ship, how do you run and scale it in the cloud? In this session, you become comfortable running containerized services in production using Amazon ECS. We cover container deployment, cluster management, service auto-scaling, service discovery, secrets management, logging, monitoring, security, and other core concepts. We also cover integrated AWS services and supplementary services that you can take advantage of to run and scale container-based services in the cloud.

Chalk talks

Level 200 (Introductory)

CON211 – Reducing your Compute Footprint with Containers and Amazon ECS
Tomas Riha, platform architect for Volvo, shows how Volvo transitioned its WirelessCar platform from using Amazon EC2 virtual machines to containers running on Amazon ECS, significantly reducing cost. Tomas dives deep into the architecture that Volvo used to achieve the migration in under four months, including Amazon ECS, Amazon ECR, Elastic Load Balancing, and AWS CloudFormation.

CON212 – Anomaly Detection Using Amazon ECS, AWS Lambda, and Amazon EMR
Learn about the architecture that Cisco CloudLock uses to enable automated security and compliance checks throughout the entire development lifecycle, from the first line of code through runtime. It includes integration with IAM roles, Amazon VPC, and AWS KMS.

Level 400 (Expert)

CON410 – Advanced CICD with Amazon ECS Control Plane
Mohit Gupta, product and engineering lead for Clever, demonstrates how to extend the Amazon ECS control plane to optimize management of container deployments and how the control plane can be broadly applied to take advantage of new AWS services. This includes ark—an AWS CLI-based deployment to Amazon ECS, Dapple—a slack-based automation system for deployments and notifications, and Kayvee—log and event routing libraries based on Amazon Kinesis.

Workshops

Level 200 (Introductory)

CON209 – Interstella 8888: Learn How to Use Docker on AWS
Interstella 8888 is an intergalactic trading company that deals in rare resources, but their antiquated monolithic logistics systems are causing the business to lose money.  Join this workshop to get hands-on experience with Docker as you containerize Interstella 8888’s aging monolithic application and deploy it using Amazon ECS.

CON213 – Hands-on Deployment of Kubernetes on AWS
In this workshop, attendees get hands-on experience using Kubernetes and Kops (Kubernetes Operations), as described in our recent blog post. Attendees learn how to provision a cluster, assign role-based permissions and security, and launch a container. If you’re interested in learning best practices for running Kubernetes on AWS, don’t miss this workshop.

TUESDAY 11/28

Breakout Sessions

Level 200 (Introductory)

CON206 – Docker on AWS
In this session, Docker Technical Staff Member Patrick Chanezon discusses how Finnish Rail, the national train system for Finland, is using Docker on Amazon Web Services to modernize their customer facing applications, from ticket sales to reservations. Patrick also shares the state of Docker development and adoption on AWS, including explaining the opportunities and implications of efforts such as Project Moby, Docker EE, and how developers can use and contribute to Docker projects.

CON208 – Building Microservices on AWS
Increasingly, organizations are turning to microservices to help them empower autonomous teams, letting them innovate and ship software faster than ever before. But implementing a microservices architecture comes with a number of new challenges that need to be dealt with. Chief among these finding an appropriate platform to help manage a growing number of independently deployable services. In this session, Sam Newman, author of Building Microservices and a renowned expert in microservices strategy, discusses strategies for building scalable and robust microservices architectures. He also tells you how to choose the right platform for building microservices, and about common challenges and mistakes organizations make when they move to microservices architectures.

Level 300 (Advanced)

CON302 – Building a CICD Pipeline for Containers on AWS
Containers can make it easier to scale applications in the cloud, but how do you set up your CICD workflow to automatically test and deploy code to containerized apps? In this session, we explore how developers can build effective CICD workflows to manage their containerized code deployments on AWS.

Ajit Zadgaonkar, Director of Engineering and Operations at Edmunds walks through best practices for CICD architectures used by his team to deploy containers. We also deep dive into topics such as how to create an accessible CICD platform and architect for safe blue/green deployments.

CON307 – Building Effective Container Images
Sick of getting paged at 2am and wondering “where did all my disk space go?” New Docker users often start with a stock image in order to get up and running quickly, but this can cause problems as your application matures and scales. Creating efficient container images is important to maximize resources, and deliver critical security benefits.

In this session, AWS Sr. Technical Evangelist Abby Fuller covers how to create effective images to run containers in production. This includes an in-depth discussion of how Docker image layers work, things you should think about when creating your images, working with Amazon ECR, and mise-en-place for install dependencies. Prakash Janakiraman, Co-Founder and Chief Architect at Nextdoor discuss high-level and language-specific best practices for with building images and how Nextdoor uses these practices to successfully scale their containerized services with a small team.

CON309 – Containerized Machine Learning on AWS
Image recognition is a field of deep learning that uses neural networks to recognize the subject and traits for a given image. In Japan, Cookpad uses Amazon ECS to run an image recognition platform on clusters of GPU-enabled EC2 instances. In this session, hear from Cookpad about the challenges they faced building and scaling this advanced, user-friendly service to ensure high-availability and low-latency for tens of millions of users.

CON320 – Monitoring, Logging, and Debugging for Containerized Services
As containers become more embedded in the platform tools, debug tools, traces, and logs become increasingly important. Nare Hayrapetyan, Senior Software Engineer and Calvin French-Owen, Senior Technical Officer for Segment discuss the principals of monitoring and debugging containers and the tools Segment has implemented and built for logging, alerting, metric collection, and debugging of containerized services running on Amazon ECS.

Chalk Talks

Level 300 (Advanced)

CON314 – Automating Zero-Downtime Production Cluster Upgrades for Amazon ECS
Containers make it easy to deploy new code into production to update the functionality of a service, but what happens when you need to update the Amazon EC2 compute instances that your containers are running on? In this talk, we’ll deep dive into how to upgrade the Amazon EC2 infrastructure underlying a live production Amazon ECS cluster without affecting service availability. Matt Callanan, Engineering Manager at Expedia walk through Expedia’s “PRISM” project that safely relocates hundreds of tasks onto new Amazon EC2 instances with zero-downtime to applications.

CON322 – Maximizing Amazon ECS for Large-Scale Workloads
Head of Mobfox DevOps, David Spitzer, shows how Mobfox used Docker and Amazon ECS to scale the Mobfox services and development teams to achieve low-latency networking and automatic scaling. This session covers Mobfox’s ecosystem architecture. It compares 2015 and today, the challenges Mobfox faced in growing their platform, and how they overcame them.

CON323 – Microservices Architectures for the Enterprise
Salva Jung, Principle Engineer for Samsung Mobile shares how Samsung Connect is architected as microservices running on Amazon ECS to securely, stably, and efficiently handle requests from millions of mobile and IoT devices around the world.

CON324 – Windows Containers on Amazon ECS
Docker containers are commonly regarded as powerful and portable runtime environments for Linux code, but Docker also offers API and toolchain support for running Windows Servers in containers. In this talk, we discuss the various options for running windows-based applications in containers on AWS.

CON326 – Remote Sensing and Image Processing on AWS
Learn how Encirca services by DuPont Pioneer uses Amazon ECS powered by GPU-instances and Amazon EC2 Spot Instances to run proprietary image-processing algorithms against satellite imagery. Mark Lanning and Ethan Harstad, engineers at DuPont Pioneer show how this architecture has allowed them to process satellite imagery multiple times a day for each agricultural field in the United States in order to identify crop health changes.

Workshops

Level 300 (Advanced)

CON317 – Advanced Container Management at Catsndogs.lol
Catsndogs.lol is a (fictional) company that needs help deploying and scaling its container-based application. During this workshop, attendees join the new DevOps team at CatsnDogs.lol, and help the company to manage their applications using Amazon ECS, and help release new features to make our customers happier than ever.Attendees get hands-on with service and container-instance auto-scaling, spot-fleet integration, container placement strategies, service discovery, secrets management with AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store, time-based and event-based scheduling, and automated deployment pipelines. If you are a developer interested in learning more about how Amazon ECS can accelerate your application development and deployment workflows, or if you are a systems administrator or DevOps person interested in understanding how Amazon ECS can simplify the operational model associated with running containers at scale, then this workshop is for you. You should have basic familiarity with Amazon ECS, Amazon EC2, and IAM.

Additional requirements:

  • The AWS CLI or AWS Tools for PowerShell installed
  • An AWS account with administrative permissions (including the ability to create IAM roles and policies) created at least 24 hours in advance.

WEDNESDAY 11/29

Birds of a Feather (BoF)

CON01 – Birds of a Feather: Containers and Open Source at AWS
Cloud native architectures take advantage of on-demand delivery, global deployment, elasticity, and higher-level services to enable developer productivity and business agility. Open source is a core part of making cloud native possible for everyone. In this session, we welcome thought leaders from the CNCF, Docker, and AWS to discuss the cloud’s direction for growth and enablement of the open source community. We also discuss how AWS is integrating open source code into its container services and its contributions to open source projects.

Breakout Sessions

Level 300 (Advanced)

CON308 – Mastering Kubernetes on AWS
Much progress has been made on how to bootstrap a cluster since Kubernetes’ first commit and is now only a matter of minutes to go from zero to a running cluster on Amazon Web Services. However, evolving a simple Kubernetes architecture to be ready for production in a large enterprise can quickly become overwhelming with options for configuration and customization.

In this session, Arun Gupta, Open Source Strategist for AWS and Raffaele Di Fazio, software engineer at leading European fashion platform Zalando, show the common practices for running Kubernetes on AWS and share insights from experience in operating tens of Kubernetes clusters in production on AWS. We cover options and recommendations on how to install and manage clusters, configure high availability, perform rolling upgrades and handle disaster recovery, as well as continuous integration and deployment of applications, logging, and security.

CON310 – Moving to Containers: Building with Docker and Amazon ECS
If you’ve ever considered moving part of your application stack to containers, don’t miss this session. We cover best practices for containerizing your code, implementing automated service scaling and monitoring, and setting up automated CI/CD pipelines with fail-safe deployments. Manjeeva Silva and Thilina Gunasinghe show how McDonalds implemented their home delivery platform in four months using Docker containers and Amazon ECS to serve tens of thousands of customers.

Level 400 (Expert)

CON402 – Advanced Patterns in Microservices Implementation with Amazon ECS
Scaling a microservice-based infrastructure can be challenging in terms of both technical implementation and developer workflow. In this talk, AWS Solutions Architect Pierre Steckmeyer is joined by Will McCutchen, Architect at BuzzFeed, to discuss Amazon ECS as a platform for building a robust infrastructure for microservices. We look at the key attributes of microservice architectures and how Amazon ECS supports these requirements in production, from configuration to sophisticated workload scheduling to networking capabilities to resource optimization. We also examine what it takes to build an end-to-end platform on top of the wider AWS ecosystem, and what it’s like to migrate a large engineering organization from a monolithic approach to microservices.

CON404 – Deep Dive into Container Scheduling with Amazon ECS
As your application’s infrastructure grows and scales, well-managed container scheduling is critical to ensuring high availability and resource optimization. In this session, we deep dive into the challenges and opportunities around container scheduling, as well as the different tools available within Amazon ECS and AWS to carry out efficient container scheduling. We discuss patterns for container scheduling available with Amazon ECS, the Blox scheduling framework, and how you can customize and integrate third-party scheduler frameworks to manage container scheduling on Amazon ECS.

Chalk Talks

Level 300 (Advanced)

CON312 – Building a Selenium Fleet on the Cheap with Amazon ECS with Spot Fleet
Roberto Rivera and Matthew Wedgwood, engineers at RetailMeNot, give a practical overview of setting up a fleet of Selenium nodes running on Amazon ECS with Spot Fleet. Discuss the challenges of running Selenium with high availability at minimum cost using Amazon ECS container introspection to connect the Selenium Hub with its nodes.

CON315 – Virtually There: Building a Render Farm with Amazon ECS
Learn how 8i Corp scales its multi-tenanted, volumetric render farm up to thousands of instances using AWS, Docker, and an API-driven infrastructure. This render farm enables them to turn the video footage from an array of synchronized cameras into a photo-realistic hologram capable of playback on a range of devices, from mobile phones to high-end head mounted displays. Join Owen Evans, VP of Engineering for 8i, as they dive deep into how 8i’s rendering infrastructure is built and maintained by just a handful of people and powered by Amazon ECS.

CON325 – Developing Microservices – from Your Laptop to the Cloud
Wesley Chow, Staff Engineer at Adroll, shows how his team extends Amazon ECS by enabling local development capabilities. Hologram, Adroll’s local development program, brings the capabilities of the Amazon EC2 instance metadata service to non-EC2 hosts, so that developers can run the same software on local machines with the same credentials source as in production.

CON327 – Patterns and Considerations for Service Discovery
Roven Drabo, head of cloud operations at Kaplan Test Prep, illustrates Kaplan’s complete container automation solution using Amazon ECS along with how his team uses NGINX and HashiCorp Consul to provide an automated approach to service discovery and container provisioning.

CON328 – Building a Development Platform on Amazon ECS
Quinton Anderson, Head of Engineering for Commonwealth Bank of Australia, walks through how they migrated their internal development and deployment platform from Mesos/Marathon to Amazon ECS. The platform uses a custom DSL to abstract a layered application architecture, in a way that makes it easy to plug or replace new implementations into each layer in the stack.

Workshops

Level 300 (Advanced)

CON318 – Interstella 8888: Monolith to Microservices with Amazon ECS
Interstella 8888 is an intergalactic trading company that deals in rare resources, but their antiquated monolithic logistics systems are causing the business to lose money. Join this workshop to get hands-on experience deploying Docker containers as you break Interstella 8888’s aging monolithic application into containerized microservices. Using Amazon ECS and an Application Load Balancer, you create API-based microservices and deploy them leveraging integrations with other AWS services.

CON332 – Build a Java Spring Application on Amazon ECS
This workshop teaches you how to lift and shift existing Spring and Spring Cloud applications onto the AWS platform. Learn how to build a Spring application container, understand bootstrap secrets, push container images to Amazon ECR, and deploy the application to Amazon ECS. Then, learn how to configure the deployment for production.

THURSDAY 11/30

Breakout Sessions

Level 200 (Introductory)

CON201 – Containers on AWS – State of the Union
Just over four years after the first public release of Docker, and three years to the day after the launch of Amazon ECS, the use of containers has surged to run a significant percentage of production workloads at startups and enterprise organizations. Join Deepak Singh, General Manager of Amazon Container Services, as he covers the state of containerized application development and deployment trends, new container capabilities on AWS that are available now, options for running containerized applications on AWS, and how AWS customers successfully run container workloads in production.

Level 300 (Advanced)

CON304 – Batch Processing with Containers on AWS
Batch processing is useful to analyze large amounts of data. But configuring and scaling a cluster of virtual machines to process complex batch jobs can be difficult. In this talk, we show how to use containers on AWS for batch processing jobs that can scale quickly and cost-effectively. We also discuss AWS Batch, our fully managed batch-processing service. You also hear from GoPro and Here about how they use AWS to run batch processing jobs at scale including best practices for ensuring efficient scheduling, fine-grained monitoring, compute resource automatic scaling, and security for your batch jobs.

Level 400 (Expert)

CON406 – Architecting Container Infrastructure for Security and Compliance
While organizations gain agility and scalability when they migrate to containers and microservices, they also benefit from compliance and security, advantages that are often overlooked. In this session, Kelvin Zhu, lead software engineer at Okta, joins Mitch Beaumont, enterprise solutions architect at AWS, to discuss security best practices for containerized infrastructure. Learn how Okta built their development workflow with an emphasis on security through testing and automation. Dive deep into how containers enable automated security and compliance checks throughout the development lifecycle. Also understand best practices for implementing AWS security and secrets management services for any containerized service architecture.

Chalk Talks

Level 300 (Advanced)

CON329 – Full Software Lifecycle Management for Containers Running on Amazon ECS
Learn how The Washington Post uses Amazon ECS to run Arc Publishing, a digital journalism platform that powers The Washington Post and a growing number of major media websites. Amazon ECS enabled The Washington Post to containerize their existing microservices architecture, avoiding a complete rewrite that would have delayed the platform’s launch by several years. In this session, Jason Bartz, Technical Architect at The Washington Post, discusses the platform’s architecture. He addresses the challenges of optimizing Arc Publishing’s workload, and managing the application lifecycle to support 2,000 containers running on more than 50 Amazon ECS clusters.

CON330 – Running Containerized HIPAA Workloads on AWS
Nihar Pasala, Engineer at Aetion, discusses the Aetion Evidence Platform, a system for generating the real-world evidence used by healthcare decision makers to implement value-based care. This session discusses the architecture Aetion uses to run HIPAA workloads using containers on Amazon ECS, best practices, and learnings.

Level 400 (Expert)

CON408 – Building a Machine Learning Platform Using Containers on AWS
DeepLearni.ng develops and implements machine learning models for complex enterprise applications. In this session, Thomas Rogers, Engineer for DeepLearni.ng discusses how they worked with Scotiabank to leverage Amazon ECS, Amazon ECR, Docker, GPU-accelerated Amazon EC2 instances, and TensorFlow to develop a retail risk model that helps manage payment collections for millions of Canadian credit card customers.

Workshops

Level 300 (Advanced)

CON319 – Interstella 8888: CICD for Containers on AWS
Interstella 8888 is an intergalactic trading company that deals in rare resources, but their antiquated monolithic logistics systems are causing the business to lose money.  Join this workshop to learn how to set up a CI/CD pipeline for containerized microservices. You get hands-on experience deploying Docker container images using Amazon ECS, AWS CloudFormation, AWS CodeBuild, and AWS CodePipeline, automating everything from code check-in to production.

FRIDAY 12/1

Breakout Sessions

Level 400 (Expert)

CON405 – Moving to Amazon ECS – the Not-So-Obvious Benefits
If you ask 10 teams why they migrated to containers, you will likely get answers like ‘developer productivity’, ‘cost reduction’, and ‘faster scaling’. But teams often find there are several other ‘hidden’ benefits to using containers for their services. In this talk, Franziska Schmidt, Platform Engineer at Mapbox and Yaniv Donenfeld from AWS will discuss the obvious, and not so obvious benefits of moving to containerized architecture. These include using Docker and Amazon ECS to achieve shared libraries for dev teams, separating private infrastructure from shareable code, and making it easier for non-ops engineers to run services.

Chalk Talks

Level 300 (Advanced)

CON331 – Deploying a Regulated Payments Application on Amazon ECS
Travelex discusses how they built an FCA-compliant international payments service using a microservices architecture on AWS. This chalk talk covers the challenges of designing and operating an Amazon ECS-based PaaS in a regulated environment using a DevOps model.

Workshops

Level 400 (Expert)

CON407 – Interstella 8888: Advanced Microservice Operations
Interstella 8888 is an intergalactic trading company that deals in rare resources, but their antiquated monolithic logistics systems are causing the business to lose money. In this workshop, you help Interstella 8888 build a modern microservices-based logistics system to save the company from financial ruin. We give you the hands-on experience you need to run microservices in the real world. This includes implementing advanced container scheduling and scaling to deal with variable service requests, implementing a service mesh, issue tracing with AWS X-Ray, container and instance-level logging with Amazon CloudWatch, and load testing.

Know before you go

Want to brush up on your container knowledge before re:Invent? Here are some helpful resources to get started:

– Tiffany
@tiffanyfayj

Amazon ElastiCache for Redis Is Now a HIPAA Eligible Service and You Can Use It to Power Real-Time Healthcare Applications

Post Syndicated from Manan Goel original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/now-you-can-use-amazon-elasticache-for-redis-a-hipaa-eligible-service-to-power-real-time-healthcare-applications/

HIPAA image

Amazon ElastiCache for Redis is now a HIPAA Eligible Service and has been added to the AWS Business Associate Addendum (BAA). This means you can use ElastiCache for Redis to help you power healthcare applications as well as process, maintain, and store protected health information (PHI). ElastiCache for Redis is a Redis-compatible, fully-managed, in-memory data store and cache in the cloud that provides sub-millisecond latency to power applications. Now you can use the speed, simplicity, and flexibility of ElastiCache for Redis to build secure, fast, and internet-scale healthcare applications.

ElastiCache for Redis with HIPAA eligibility is available for all current-generation instance node types and requires Redis engine version 3.2.6. You must ensure that nodes are configured to encrypt the data in transit and at rest, and to authenticate Redis commands before the engine executes them. See Architecting for HIPAA Security and Compliance on Amazon Web Services for information about how to configure Amazon HIPAA Eligible Services to store, process, and transmit PHI.

ElastiCache for Redis uses Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)-512 symmetric keys to encrypt data on disk. The Redis backups stored in Amazon S3 are encrypted with server-side encryption (SSE) using AES-256 symmetric keys. ElastiCache for Redis uses Transport Layer Security (TLS) to encrypt data in transit. It uses the Redis AUTH token that you provide at the time of Redis cluster creation to authenticate the Redis commands coming from clients. The AUTH token is encrypted using AWS Key Management Service.

There is no additional charge for using ElastiCache for Redis clusters with HIPAA eligibility. To get started, see HIPAA Compliance for Amazon ElastiCache for Redis.

– Manan

New – AWS Direct Connect Gateway – Inter-Region VPC Access

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-aws-direct-connect-gateway-inter-region-vpc-access/

As I was preparing to write this post, I took a nostalgic look at the blog post I wrote when we launched AWS Direct Connect back in 2012. We created Direct Connect after our enterprise customers asked us to allow them to establish dedicated connections to an AWS Region in pursuit of enhanced privacy, additional data transfer bandwidth, and more predictable data transfer performance. Starting from one AWS Region and a single colo, Direct Connect is now available in every public AWS Region and accessible from dozens of colos scattered across the world (over 60 locations at last count). Our customers have taken to Direct Connect wholeheartedly and we have added features such as Link Aggregation, Amazon EFS support, CloudWatch monitoring, and HIPAA eligibility. In the past five weeks alone we have added Direct Connect locations in Houston (Texas), Vancouver (Canada), Manchester (UK), Canberra (Australia), and Perth (Australia).

Today we are making Direct Connect simpler and more powerful with the addition of the Direct Connect Gateway. We are also giving Direct Connect customers in any Region the ability to create public virtual interfaces that receive our global IP routes and enable access to the public endpoints for our services and updating the Direct Connect pricing model.

Let’s take a look at each one!

New Direct Connect Gateway
You can use the new Direct Connect Gateway to establish connectivity that spans Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) spread across multiple AWS Regions. You no longer need to establish multiple BGP sessions for each VPC; this reduces your administrative workload as well as the load on your network devices.

This feature also allows you to connect to any of the participating VPCs from any Direct Connect location, further reducing your costs for making using AWS services on a cross-region basis.

Here is a diagram that illustrates the simplification that you can achieve with a Direct Connect Gateway (each “lock” icon represents a Virtual Private Gateway). Start with this:

And end up like this:

The VPCs that reference a particular Direct Connect Gateway must have IP address ranges that do not overlap. Today, the VPCs must all be in the same AWS account; we plan to make this more flexible in the future.

Each Gateway is a global object that exists across all of the public AWS Regions. All communication between the Regions via the Gateways takes place across the AWS network backbone.

Creating a Direct Connect Gateway
You can create a Direct Connect Gateway from the Direct Connect Console or by calling the CreateDirectConnectGateway function from your code. I’ll use the Console!

I open the Direct Connect Console and click on Direct Connect Gateways to get started:

The list is empty since I don’t have any Gateways yet. Click on Create Direct Connect Gateway to change that:

I give my Gateway a name, enter a private ASN for my network, then click on Create. The ASN (Autonomous System Number) must be in one of the ranges defined as private in RFC 6996:

My new Gateway will appear in the other AWS Regions within a moment or two:

I have a Direct Connect Connection in Ohio that I will use to create my VIF:

Now I create a private VIF that references the Gateway and the Connection:

It is ready to use within seconds:

I already have a pair of VPCs with non-overlapping CIDRs, and a Virtual Private Gateway attached to each one. Here are the VPCs (since this is a demo I’ll show both in the same Region for convenience):

And the Virtual Private Gateways:

I return to the Direct Connect Console and navigate to the Direct Connect Gateways. I select my Gateway and choose Associate Virtual Private Gateway from the Actions menu:

Then I select both of my Virtual Private Gateways and click on Associate:

If, as would usually be the case, my VPCs are in distinct AWS Regions, the same procedure would apply. For this blog post it was easier to show you the operations once rather than twice.

The Virtual Gateway association is complete within a minute or so (the state starts out as associating):

When the state transitions to associated, traffic can flow between your on-premises network and your VPCs, over your AWS Direct Connect connection, regardless of the AWS Regions where your VPCs reside.

Public Virtual Interfaces for Service Endpoints
You can now create Public Virtual Interfaces that will allow you to access AWS public service endpoints for AWS services running in any AWS Region (except AWS China Region) over Direct Connect. These interfaces receive (via BGP) Amazon’s global IP routes. You can create these interfaces in the Direct Connect Console; start by selecting the Public option:

After you create it you will need to associate it with a VPC.

Updated Pricing Model
In light of the ever-expanding number of AWS Regions and AWS Direct Connect locations, data transfer pricing is now based on the location of the Direct Connect and the source AWS Region. The new pricing is simpler that the older model which was based on AWS Direct Connect locations.

Now Available
This new feature is available today and you can start to use it right now. You can create and use Direct Connect Gateways at no charge; you pay the usual Direct Connect prices for port hours and data transfer.

— Jeff;

 

98, 99, 100 CloudFront Points of Presence!

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/98-99-100-cloudfront-points-of-presence/

Nine years ago I showed you how you could Distribute Your Content with Amazon CloudFront. We launched CloudFront in 2008 with 14 Points of Presence and have been expanding rapidly ever since. Today I am pleased to announce the opening of our 100th Point of Presence, the fifth one in Tokyo and the sixth in Japan. With 89 Edge Locations and 11 Regional Edge Caches, CloudFront now supports traffic generated by millions of viewers around the world.

23 Countries, 50 Cities, and Growing
Those 100 Points of Presence span the globe, with sites in 50 cities and 23 countries. In the past 12 months we have expanded the size of our network by about 58%, adding 37 Points of Presence, including nine in the following new cities:

  • Berlin, Germany
  • Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
  • Prague, Czech Republic
  • Boston, Massachusetts, USA
  • Munich, Germany
  • Vienna, Austria
  • Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
  • Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
  • Zurich, Switzerland

We have even more in the works, including an Edge Location in the United Arab Emirates, currently planned for the first quarter of 2018.

Innovating for Our Customers
As I mentioned earlier, our network consists of a mix of Edge Locations and Regional Edge Caches. First announced at re:Invent 2016, the Regional Edge Caches sit between our Edge Locations and your origin servers, have even more memory than the Edge Locations, and allow us to store content close to the viewers for rapid delivery, all while reducing the load on the origin servers.

While locations are important, they are just a starting point. We continue to focus on security with the recent launch of our Security Policies feature and our announcement that CloudFront is a HIPAA-eligible service. We gave you more content-serving and content-generation options with the launch of [email protected], letting you run AWS Lambda functions close to your users.

We have also been working to accelerate the processing of cache invalidations and configuration changes. We now accept invalidations within milliseconds of the request and confirm that the request has been processed world-wide, typically within 60 seconds. This helps to ensure that your customers have access to fresh, timely content!

Visit our Getting Started with Amazon CloudFront page for sign-up information, tutorials, webinars, on-demand videos, office hours, and more.

— Jeff;

 

AWS HIPAA Eligibility Update (October 2017) – Sixteen Additional Services

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-hipaa-eligibility-post-update-october-2017-sixteen-additional-services/

Our Health Customer Stories page lists just a few of the many customers that are building and running healthcare and life sciences applications that run on AWS. Customers like Verge Health, Care Cloud, and Orion Health trust AWS with Protected Health Information (PHI) and Personally Identifying Information (PII) as part of their efforts to comply with HIPAA and HITECH.

Sixteen More Services
In my last HIPAA Eligibility Update I shared the news that we added eight additional services to our list of HIPAA eligible services. Today I am happy to let you know that we have added another sixteen services to the list, bringing the total up to 46. Here are the newest additions, along with some short descriptions and links to some of my blog posts to jog your memory:

Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL Compatibility – This brand-new addition to Amazon Aurora allows you to encrypt your relational databases using keys that you create and manage through AWS Key Management Service (KMS). When you enable encryption for an Amazon Aurora database, the underlying storage is encrypted, as are automated backups, read replicas, and snapshots. Read New – Encryption at Rest for Amazon Aurora to learn more.

Amazon CloudWatch Logs – You can use the logs to monitor and troubleshoot your systems and applications. You can monitor your existing system, application, and custom log files in near real-time, watching for specific phrases, values, or patterns. Log data can be stored durably and at low cost, for as long as needed. To learn more, read Store and Monitor OS & Application Log Files with Amazon CloudWatch and Improvements to CloudWatch Logs and Dashboards.

Amazon Connect – This self-service, cloud-based contact center makes it easy for you to deliver better customer service at a lower cost. You can use the visual designer to set up your contact flows, manage agents, and track performance, all without specialized skills. Read Amazon Connect – Customer Contact Center in the Cloud and New – Amazon Connect and Amazon Lex Integration to learn more.

Amazon ElastiCache for Redis – This service lets you deploy, operate, and scale an in-memory data store or cache that you can use to improve the performance of your applications. Each ElastiCache for Redis cluster publishes key performance metrics to Amazon CloudWatch. To learn more, read Caching in the Cloud with Amazon ElastiCache and Amazon ElastiCache – Now With a Dash of Redis.

Amazon Kinesis Streams – This service allows you to build applications that process or analyze streaming data such as website clickstreams, financial transactions, social media feeds, and location-tracking events. To learn more, read Amazon Kinesis – Real-Time Processing of Streaming Big Data and New: Server-Side Encryption for Amazon Kinesis Streams.

Amazon RDS for MariaDB – This service lets you set up scalable, managed MariaDB instances in minutes, and offers high performance, high availability, and a simplified security model that makes it easy for you to encrypt data at rest and in transit. Read Amazon RDS Update – MariaDB is Now Available to learn more.

Amazon RDS SQL Server – This service lets you set up scalable, managed Microsoft SQL Server instances in minutes, and also offers high performance, high availability, and a simplified security model. To learn more, read Amazon RDS for SQL Server and .NET support for AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Amazon RDS for Microsoft SQL Server – Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) to learn more.

Amazon Route 53 – This is a highly available Domain Name Server. It translates names like www.example.com into IP addresses. To learn more, read Moving Ahead with Amazon Route 53.

AWS Batch – This service lets you run large-scale batch computing jobs on AWS. You don’t need to install or maintain specialized batch software or build your own server clusters. Read AWS Batch – Run Batch Computing Jobs on AWS to learn more.

AWS CloudHSM – A cloud-based Hardware Security Module (HSM) for key storage and management at cloud scale. Designed for sensitive workloads, CloudHSM lets you manage your own keys using FIPS 140-2 Level 3 validated HSMs. To learn more, read AWS CloudHSM – Secure Key Storage and Cryptographic Operations and AWS CloudHSM Update – Cost Effective Hardware Key Management at Cloud Scale for Sensitive & Regulated Workloads.

AWS Key Management Service – This service makes it easy for you to create and control the encryption keys used to encrypt your data. It uses HSMs to protect your keys, and is integrated with AWS CloudTrail in order to provide you with a log of all key usage. Read New AWS Key Management Service (KMS) to learn more.

AWS Lambda – This service lets you run event-driven application or backend code without thinking about or managing servers. To learn more, read AWS Lambda – Run Code in the Cloud, AWS Lambda – A Look Back at 2016, and AWS Lambda – In Full Production with New Features for Mobile Devs.

[email protected] – You can use this new feature of AWS Lambda to run Node.js functions across the global network of AWS locations without having to provision or manager servers, in order to deliver rich, personalized content to your users with low latency. Read [email protected] – Intelligent Processing of HTTP Requests at the Edge to learn more.

AWS Snowball Edge – This is a data transfer device with 100 terabytes of on-board storage as well as compute capabilities. You can use it to move large amounts of data into or out of AWS, as a temporary storage tier, or to support workloads in remote or offline locations. To learn more, read AWS Snowball Edge – More Storage, Local Endpoints, Lambda Functions.

AWS Snowmobile – This is an exabyte-scale data transfer service. Pulled by a semi-trailer truck, each Snowmobile packs 100 petabytes of storage into a ruggedized 45-foot long shipping container. Read AWS Snowmobile – Move Exabytes of Data to the Cloud in Weeks to learn more (and to see some of my finest LEGO work).

AWS Storage Gateway – This hybrid storage service lets your on-premises applications use AWS cloud storage (Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon Glacier, and Amazon Elastic File System) in a simple and seamless way, with storage for volumes, files, and virtual tapes. To learn more, read The AWS Storage Gateway – Integrate Your Existing On-Premises Applications with AWS Cloud Storage and File Interface to AWS Storage Gateway.

And there you go! Check out my earlier post for a list of resources that will help you to build applications that comply with HIPAA and HITECH.

— Jeff;

 

Catching Up on Some Recent AWS Launches and Publications

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/catching-up-on-some-recent-aws-launches-and-publications/

As I have noted in the past, the AWS Blog Team is working hard to make sure that you know about as many AWS launches and publications as possible, without totally burying you in content! As part of our balancing act, we will occasionally publish catch-up posts to clear our queues and to bring more information to your attention. Here’s what I have in store for you today:

  • Monitoring for Cross-Region Replication of S3 Objects
  • Tags for Spot Fleet Instances
  • PCI DSS Compliance for 12 More Services
  • HIPAA Eligibility for WorkDocs
  • VPC Resizing
  • AppStream 2.0 Graphics Design Instances
  • AMS Connector App for ServiceNow
  • Regtech in the Cloud
  • New & Revised Quick Starts

Let’s jump right in!

Monitoring for Cross-Region Replication of S3 Objects
I told you about cross-region replication for S3 a couple of years ago. As I showed you at the time, you simply enable versioning for the source bucket and then choose a destination region and bucket. You can check the replication status manually, or you can create an inventory (daily or weekly) of the source and destination buckets.

The Cross-Region Replication Monitor (CRR Monitor for short) solution checks the replication status of objects across regions and gives you metrics and failure notifications in near real-time.

To learn more, read the CRR Monitor Implementation Guide and then use the AWS CloudFormation template to Deploy the CRR Monitor.

Tags for Spot Instances
Spot Instances and Spot Fleets (collections of Spot Instances) give you access to spare compute capacity. We recently gave you the ability to enter tags (key/value pairs) as part of your spot requests and to have those tags applied to the EC2 instances launched to fulfill the request:

To learn more, read Tag Your Spot Fleet EC2 Instances.

PCI DSS Compliance for 12 More Services
As first announced on the AWS Security Blog, we recently added 12 more services to our PCI DSS compliance program, raising the total number of in-scope services to 42. To learn more, check out our Compliance Resources.

HIPAA Eligibility for WorkDocs
In other compliance news, we announced that Amazon WorkDocs has achieved HIPAA eligibility and PCI DSS compliance in all AWS Regions where WorkDocs is available.

VPC Resizing
This feature allows you to extend an existing Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) by adding additional blocks of addresses. This gives you more flexibility and should help you to deal with growth. You can add up to four secondary /16 CIDRs per VPC. You can also edit the secondary CIDRs by deleting them and adding new ones. Simply select the VPC and choose Edit CIDRs from the menu:

Then add or remove CIDR blocks as desired:

To learn more, read about VPCs and Subnets.

AppStream 2.0 Graphics Design Instances
Powered by AMD FirePro S7150x2 Server GPUs and equipped with AMD Multiuser GPU technology, the new Graphics Design instances for Amazon AppStream 2.0 will let you run and stream graphics applications more cost-effectively than ever. The instances are available in four sizes, with 2-16 vCPUs and 7.5 GB to 61 GB of memory.

To learn more, read Introducing Amazon AppStream 2.0 Graphics Design, a New Lower Costs Instance Type for Streaming Graphics Applications.

AMS Connector App for ServiceNow
AWS Managed Services (AMS) provides Infrastructure Operations Management for the Enterprise. Designed to accelerate cloud adoption, it automates common operations such as change requests, patch management, security and backup.

The new AMS integration App for ServiceNow lets you interact with AMS from within ServiceNow, with no need for any custom development or API integration.

To learn more, read Cloud Management Made Easier: AWS Managed Services Now Integrates with ServiceNow.

Regtech in the Cloud
Regtech (as I learned while writing this), is short for regulatory technology, and is all about using innovative technology such as cloud computing, analytics, and machine learning to address regulatory challenges.

Working together with APN Consulting Partner Cognizant, TABB Group recently published a thought leadership paper that explains why regulations and compliance pose huge challenges for our customers in the financial services, and shows how AWS can help!

New & Revised Quick Starts
Our Quick Starts team has been cranking out new solutions and making significant updates to the existing ones. Here’s a roster:

Alfresco Content Services (v2) Atlassian Confluence Confluent Platform Data Lake
Datastax Enterprise GitHub Enterprise Hashicorp Nomad HIPAA
Hybrid Data Lake with Wandisco Fusion IBM MQ IBM Spectrum Scale Informatica EIC
Magento (v2) Linux Bastion (v2) Modern Data Warehouse with Tableau MongoDB (v2)
NetApp ONTAP NGINX (v2) RD Gateway Red Hat Openshift
SAS Grid SIOS Datakeeper StorReduce SQL Server (v2)

And that’s all I have for today!

— Jeff;