Tag Archives: networking

Protect your remote workforce by using a managed DNS firewall and network firewall

Post Syndicated from Patrick Duffy original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/protect-your-remote-workforce-by-using-a-managed-dns-firewall-and-network-firewall/

More of our customers are adopting flexible work-from-home and remote work strategies that use virtual desktop solutions, such as Amazon WorkSpaces and Amazon AppStream 2.0, to deliver their user applications. Securing these workloads benefits from a layered approach, and this post focuses on protecting your users at the network level. Customers can now apply these security measures by using Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall and AWS Network Firewall, two managed services that provide layered protection for the customer’s virtual private cloud (VPC). This blog post provides recommendations for how you can build network protection for your remote workforce by using DNS Firewall and Network Firewall.

Overview

DNS Firewall helps you block DNS queries that are made for known malicious domains, while allowing DNS queries to trusted domains. DNS Firewall has a simple deployment model that makes it straightforward for you to start protecting your VPCs by using managed domain lists, as well as custom domain lists. With DNS Firewall, you can filter and regulate outbound DNS requests. The service inspects DNS requests that are handled by Route 53 Resolver and applies actions that you define to allow or block requests.

DNS Firewall consists of domain lists and rule groups. Domain lists include custom domain lists that you create and AWS managed domain lists. Rule groups are associated with VPCs and control the response for domain lists that you choose. You can configure rule groups at scale by using AWS Firewall Manager. Rule groups process in priority order and stop processing after a rule is matched.

Network Firewall helps customers protect their VPCs by protecting the workload at the network layer. Network Firewall is an automatically scaling, highly available service that simplifies deployment and management for network administrators. With Network Firewall, you can perform inspection for inbound traffic, outbound traffic, traffic between VPCs, and traffic between VPCs and AWS Direct Connect or AWS VPN traffic. You can deploy stateless rules to allow or deny traffic based on the protocol, source and destination ports, and source and destination IP addresses. Additionally, you can deploy stateful rules that allow or block traffic based on domain lists, standard rule groups, or Suricata compatible intrusion prevention system (IPS) rules.

To configure Network Firewall, you need to create Network Firewall rule groups, a Network Firewall policy, and finally, a network firewall. Rule groups consist of stateless and stateful rule groups. For both types of rule groups, you need to estimate the capacity when you create the rule group. See the Network Firewall Developer Guide to learn how to estimate the capacity that is needed for the stateless and stateful rule engines.

This post shows you how to configure DNS Firewall and Network Firewall to protect your workload. You will learn how to create rules that prevent DNS queries to unapproved DNS servers, and that block resources by protocol, domain, and IP address. For the purposes of this post, we’ll show you how to protect a workload consisting of two Microsoft Active Directory domain controllers, an application server running QuickBooks, and Amazon WorkSpaces to deliver the QuickBooks application to end users, as shown in Figure 1.
 

Figure 1: An example architecture that includes domain controllers and QuickBooks hosted on EC2 and Amazon WorkSpaces for user virtual desktops

Figure 1: An example architecture that includes domain controllers and QuickBooks hosted on EC2 and Amazon WorkSpaces for user virtual desktops

Configure DNS Firewall

DNS Firewall domain lists currently include two managed lists to block malware and botnet command-and-control networks, and you can also bring your own list. Your list can include any domain names that you have found to be malicious and any domains that you don’t want your workloads connecting to.

To configure DNS Firewall domain lists (console)

  1. Open the Amazon VPC console.
  2. In the navigation pane, under DNS Firewall, choose Domain lists.
  3. Choose Add domain list to configure a customer-owned domain list.
  4. In the domain list builder dialog box, do the following.
    1. Under Domain list name, enter a name.
    2. In the second dialog box, enter the list of domains you want to allow or block.
    3. Choose Add domain list.

When you create a domain list, you can enter a list of domains you want to block or allow. You also have the option to upload your domains by using a bulk upload. You can use wildcards when you add domains for DNS Firewall. Figure 2 shows an example of a custom domain list that matches the root domain and any subdomain of box.com, dropbox.com, and sharefile.com, to prevent users from using these file sharing platforms.
 

Figure 2: Domains added to a customer-owned domain list

Figure 2: Domains added to a customer-owned domain list

To configure DNS Firewall rule groups (console)

  1. Open the Amazon VPC console.
  2. In the navigation pane, under DNS Firewall, choose Rule group.
  3. Choose Create rule group to apply actions to domain lists.
  4. Enter a rule group name and optional description.
  5. Choose Add rule to add a managed or customer-owned domain list, and do the following.
    1. Enter a rule name and optional description.
    2. Choose Add my own domain list or Add AWS managed domain list.
    3. Select the desired domain list.
    4. Choose an action, and then choose Next.
  6. (Optional) Change the rule priority.
  7. (Optional) Add tags.
  8. Choose Create rule group.

When you create your rule group, you attach rules and set an action and priority for the rule. You can set rule actions to Allow, Block, or Alert. When you set the action to Block, you can return the following responses:

  • NODATA – Returns no response.
  • NXDOMAIN – Returns an unknown domain response.
  • OVERRIDE – Returns a custom CNAME response.

Figure 3 shows rules attached to the DNS firewall.
 

Figure 3: DNS Firewall rules

Figure 3: DNS Firewall rules

To associate your rule group to a VPC (console)

  1. Open the Amazon VPC console.
  2. In the navigation pane, under DNS Firewall, choose Rule group.
  3. Select the desired rule group.
  4. Choose Associated VPCs, and then choose Associate VPC.
  5. Select one or more VPCs, and then choose Associate.

The rule group will filter your DNS requests to Route 53 Resolver. Set your DNS servers forwarders to use your Route 53 Resolver.

To configure logging for your firewall’s activity, navigate to the Route 53 console and select your VPC under the Resolver section. You can configure multiple logging options, if required. You can choose to log to Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), or Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose. Select the VPC that you want to log queries for and add any tags that you require.

Configure Network Firewall

In this section, you’ll learn how to create Network Firewall rule groups, a firewall policy, and a network firewall.

Configure rule groups

Stateless rule groups are straightforward evaluations of a source and destination IP address, protocol, and port. It’s important to note that stateless rules don’t perform any deep inspection of network traffic.

Stateless rules have three options:

  • Pass – Pass the packet without further inspection.
  • Drop – Drop the packet.
  • Forward – Forward the packet to stateful rule groups.

Stateless rules inspect each packet in isolation in the order of priority and stop processing when a rule has been matched. This example doesn’t use a stateless rule, and simply uses the default firewall action to forward all traffic to stateful rule groups.

Stateful rule groups support deep packet inspection, traffic logging, and more complex rules. Stateful rule groups evaluate traffic based on standard rules, domain rules or Suricata rules. Depending on the type of rule that you use, you can pass, drop, or create alerts on the traffic that is inspected.

To create a rule group (console)

  1. Open the Amazon VPC console.
  2. In the navigation pane, under AWS Network Firewall, choose Network Firewall rule groups.
  3. Choose Create Network Firewall rule group.
  4. Choose Stateful rule group or Stateless rule group.
  5. Enter the desired settings.
  6. Choose Create stateful rule group.

The example in Figure 4 uses standard rules to block outbound and inbound Server Message Block (SMB), Secure Shell (SSH), Network Time Protocol (NTP), DNS, and Kerberos traffic, which are common protocols used in our example workload. Network Firewall doesn’t inspect traffic between subnets within the same VPC or over VPC peering, so these rules won’t block local traffic. You can add rules with the Pass action to allow traffic to and from trusted networks.
 

Figure 4: Standard rules created to block unauthorized SMB, SSH, NTP, DNS, and Kerberos traffic

Figure 4: Standard rules created to block unauthorized SMB, SSH, NTP, DNS, and Kerberos traffic

Blocking outbound DNS requests is a common strategy to verify that DNS traffic resolves only from local resolvers, such as your DNS server or the Route 53 Resolver. You can also use these rules to prevent inbound traffic to your VPC-hosted resources, as an additional layer of security beyond security groups. If a security group erroneously allows SMB access to a file server from external sources, Network Firewall will drop this traffic based on these rules.

Even though the DNS Firewall policy described in this blog post will block DNS queries for unauthorized sharing platforms, some users might attempt to bypass this block by modifying the HOSTS file on their Amazon WorkSpace. To counter this risk, you can add a domain rule to your firewall policy to block the box.com, dropbox.com, and sharefile.com domains, as shown in Figure 5.
 

Figure 5: A domain list rule to block box.com, dropbox.com, and sharefile.com

Figure 5: A domain list rule to block box.com, dropbox.com, and sharefile.com

Configure firewall policy

You can use firewall policies to attach stateless and stateful rule groups to a single policy that is used by one or more network firewalls. Attach your rule groups to this policy and set your preferred default stateless actions. The default stateless actions will apply to any packets that don’t match a stateless rule group within the policy. You can choose separate actions for full packets and fragmented packets, depending on your needs, as shown in Figure 6.
 

Figure 6: Stateful rule groups attached to a firewall policy

Figure 6: Stateful rule groups attached to a firewall policy

You can choose to forward the traffic to be processed by any stateful rule groups that you have attached to your firewall policy. To bypass any stateful rule groups, you can select the Pass option.

To create a firewall policy (console)

  1. Open the Amazon VPC console.
  2. In the navigation pane, under AWS Network Firewall, choose Firewall policies.
  3. Choose Create firewall policy.
  4. Enter a name and description for the policy.
  5. Choose Add rule groups.
    1. Select the stateless default actions you want to use.
    2. For any stateless or stateful rule groups, choose Add rule groups to add any rule groups that you want to use.
  6. (Optional) Add tags.
  7. Choose Create firewall policy.

Configure a network firewall

Configuring the network firewall requires you to attach the firewall to a VPC and select at least one subnet.

To create a network firewall (console)

  1. Open the Amazon VPC console.
  2. In the navigation pane, under AWS Network Firewall, choose Firewalls.
  3. Choose Create firewall.
  4. Under Firewall details, do the following:
    1. Enter a name for the firewall.
    2. Select the VPC.
    3. Select one or more Availability Zones and subnets, as needed.
  5. Under Associated firewall policy, do the following:
    1. Choose Associate an existing firewall policy.
    2. Select the firewall policy.
  6. (Optional) Add tags.
  7. Choose Create firewall.

Two subnets in separate Availability Zones are used for the network firewall example shown in Figure 7, to provide high availability.
 

Figure 7: A network firewall configuration that includes multiple subnets

Figure 7: A network firewall configuration that includes multiple subnets

After the firewall is in the ready state, you’ll be able to see the endpoint IDs of the firewall endpoints, as shown in Figure 8. The endpoint IDs are needed when you update VPC route tables.
 

Figure 8: Firewall endpoint IDs

Figure 8: Firewall endpoint IDs

You can configure alert logs, flow logs, or both to be sent to Amazon S3, CloudWatch log groups, or Kinesis Data Firehose. Administrators configure alert logging to build proactive alerting and flow logging to use in troubleshooting and analysis.

Finalize the setup

After the firewall is created and ready, the last step to complete setup is to update the VPC route tables. Update your routing in the VPC to route traffic through the new network firewall endpoints. Update the public subnets route table to direct traffic to the firewall endpoint in the same Availability Zone. Update the internet gateway route to direct traffic to the firewall endpoints in the matching Availability Zone for public subnets. These routes are shown in Figure 9.
 

Figure 9: Network diagram of the firewall solution

Figure 9: Network diagram of the firewall solution

In this example architecture, Amazon WorkSpaces users are able to connect directly between private subnet 1 and private subnet 2 to access local resources. Security groups and Windows authentication control access from WorkSpaces to EC2-hosted workloads such as Active Directory, file servers, and SQL applications. For example, Microsoft Active Directory domain controllers are added to a security group that allows inbound ports 53, 389, and 445, as shown in Figure 10.
 

Figure 10: Domain controller security group inbound rules

Figure 10: Domain controller security group inbound rules

Traffic from WorkSpaces will first resolve DNS requests by using the Active Directory domain controller. The domain controller uses the local Route 53 Resolver as a DNS forwarder, which DNS Firewall protects. Network traffic then flows from the private subnet to the NAT gateway, through the network firewall to the internet gateway. Response traffic flows back from the internet gateway to the network firewall, then to the NAT gateway, and finally to the user WorkSpace. This workflow is shown in Figure 11.
 

Figure 11: Traffic flow for allowed traffic

Figure 11: Traffic flow for allowed traffic

If a user attempts to connect to blocked internet resources, such as box.com, a botnet, or a malware domain, this will result in a NXDOMAIN response from DNS Firewall, and the connection will not proceed any further. This blocked traffic flow is shown in Figure 12.
  

Figure 12: Traffic flow when blocked by DNS Firewall

Figure 12: Traffic flow when blocked by DNS Firewall

If a user attempts to initiate a DNS request to a public DNS server or attempts to access a public file server, this will result in a dropped connection by Network Firewall. The traffic will flow as expected from the user WorkSpace to the NAT gateway and from the NAT gateway to the network firewall, which inspects the traffic. The network firewall then drops the traffic when it matches a rule with the drop or block action, as shown in Figure 13. This configuration helps to ensure that your private resources only use approved DNS servers and internet resources. Network Firewall will block unapproved domains and restricted protocols that use standard rules.
 

Figure 13: Traffic flow when blocked by Network Firewall

Figure 13: Traffic flow when blocked by Network Firewall

Take extra care to associate a route table with your internet gateway to route private subnet traffic to your firewall endpoints; otherwise, response traffic won’t make it back to your private subnets. Traffic will route from the private subnet up through the NAT gateway in its Availability Zone. The NAT gateway will pass the traffic to the network firewall endpoint in the same Availability Zone, which will process the rules and send allowed traffic to the internet gateway for the VPC. By using this method, you can block outbound network traffic with criteria that are more advanced than what is allowed by network ACLs.

Conclusion

Amazon Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall and AWS Network Firewall help you protect your VPC workloads by inspecting network traffic and applying deep packet inspection rules to block unwanted traffic. This post focused on implementing Network Firewall in a virtual desktop workload that spans multiple Availability Zones. You’ve seen how to deploy a network firewall and update your VPC route tables. This solution can help increase the security of your workloads in AWS. If you have multiple VPCs to protect, consider enforcing your policies at scale by using AWS Firewall Manager, as outlined in this blog post.

If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below. If you have questions about this post, start a new thread on the AWS Network Firewall forum or contact AWS Support.

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Author

Patrick Duffy

Patrick is a Solutions Architect in the Small Medium Business (SMB) segment at AWS. He is passionate about raising awareness and increasing security of AWS workloads. Outside work, he loves to travel and try new cuisines and enjoys a match in Magic Arena or Overwatch.

How Goldman Sachs builds cross-account connectivity to their Amazon MSK clusters with AWS PrivateLink

Post Syndicated from Robert L. Cossin original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/how-goldman-sachs-builds-cross-account-connectivity-to-their-amazon-msk-clusters-with-aws-privatelink/

This guest post presents patterns for accessing an Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka cluster across your AWS account or Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) boundaries using AWS PrivateLink. In addition, the post discusses the pattern that the Transaction Banking team at Goldman Sachs (TxB) chose for their cross-account access, the reasons behind their decision, and how TxB satisfies its security requirements with Amazon MSK. Using Goldman Sachs’s implementation as a use case, this post aims to provide you with general guidance that you can use when implementing an Amazon MSK environment.

Overview

Amazon MSK is a fully managed service that makes it easy for you to build and run applications that use Apache Kafka to process streaming data. When you create an MSK cluster, the cluster resources are available to participants within the same Amazon VPC. This allows you to launch the cluster within specific subnets of the VPC, associate it with security groups, and attach IP addresses from your VPC’s address space through elastic network interfaces (ENIs). Network traffic between clients and the cluster stays within the AWS network, with internet access to the cluster not possible by default.

You may need to allow clients access to an MSK cluster in a different VPC within the same or a different AWS account. You have options such as VPC peering or a transit gateway that allow for resources in either VPC to communicate with each other as if they’re within the same network. For more information about access options, see Accessing an Amazon MSK Cluster.

Although these options are valid, this post focuses on a different approach, which uses AWS PrivateLink. Therefore, before we dive deep into the actual patterns, let’s briefly discuss when AWS PrivateLink is a more appropriate strategy for cross-account and cross-VPC access.

VPC peering, illustrated below, is a bidirectional networking connection between two VPCs that enables you to route traffic between them using private IPv4 addresses or IPv6 addresses.

VPC peering is more suited for environments that have a high degree of trust between the parties that are peering their VPCs. This is because, after a VPC peering connection is established, the two VPCs can have broad access to each other, with resources in either VPC capable of initiating a connection. You’re responsible for implementing fine-grained network access controls with security groups to make sure that only specific resources intended to be reachable are accessible between the peered VPCs.

You can only establish VPC peering connections across VPCs that have non-overlapping CIDRs. This can pose a challenge when you need to peer VPCs with overlapping CIDRs, such as when peering across accounts from different organizations.

Additionally, if you’re running at scale, you can have hundreds of Amazon VPCs, and VPC peering has a limit of 125 peering connections to a single Amazon VPC. You can use a network hub like transit gateway, which, although highly scalable in enabling you to connect thousands of Amazon VPCs, requires similar bidirectional trust and non-overlapping CIDRs as VPC peering.

In contrast, AWS PrivateLink provides fine-grained network access control to specific resources in a VPC instead of all resources by default, and is therefore more suited for environments that want to follow a lower trust model approach, thus reducing their risk surface. The following diagram shows a service provider VPC that has a service running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, fronted by a Network Load Balancer (NLB). The service provider creates a configuration called a VPC endpoint service in the service provider VPC, pointing to the NLB. You can share this endpoint service with another Amazon VPC (service consumer VPC), which can use an interface VPC endpoint powered by AWS PrivateLink to connect to the service. The service consumers use this interface endpoint to reach the end application or service directly.

AWS PrivateLink makes sure that the connections initiated to a specific set of network resources are unidirectional—the connection can only originate from the service consumer VPC and flow into the service provider VPC and not the other way around. Outside of the network resources backed by the interface endpoint, no other resources in the service provider VPC get exposed. AWS PrivateLink allows for VPC CIDR ranges to overlap, and it can relatively scale better because thousands of Amazon VPCs can consume each service.

VPC peering and AWS PrivateLink are therefore two connectivity options suited for different trust models and use cases.

Transaction Banking’s micro-account strategy

An AWS account is a strong isolation boundary that provides both access control and reduced blast radius for issues that may occur due to deployment and configuration errors. This strong isolation is possible because you need to deliberately and proactively configure flows that cross an account boundary. TxB designed a strategy that moves each of their systems into its own AWS account, each of which is called a TxB micro-account. This strategy allows TxB to minimize the chances of a misconfiguration exposing multiple systems. For more information about TxB micro-accounts, see the video AWS re:Invent 2018: Policy Verification and Enforcement at Scale with AWS on YouTube.

To further complement the strong gains realized due to a TxB micro-account segmentation, TxB chose AWS PrivateLink for cross-account and cross-VPC access of their systems. AWS PrivateLink allows TxB service providers to expose their services as an endpoint service and use whitelisting to explicitly configure which other AWS accounts can create interface endpoints to these services. This also allows for fine-grained control of the access patterns for each service. The endpoint service definition only allows access to resources attached to the NLBs and thereby makes it easy to understand the scope of access overall. The one-way initiation of connection from a service consumer to a service provider makes sure that all connectivity is controlled on a point-to-point basis.  Furthermore, AWS PrivateLink allows the CIDR blocks of VPCs to overlap between the TxB micro-accounts. Thus the use of AWS PrivateLink sets TxB up for future growth as a part of their default setup, because thousands of TxB micro-account VPCs can consume each service if needed.

MSK broker access patterns using AWS PrivateLink

As a part of their micro-account strategy, TxB runs an MSK cluster in its own dedicated AWS account, and clients that interact with this cluster are in their respective micro-accounts. Considering this setup and the preference to use AWS PrivateLink for cross-account connectivity, TxB evaluated the following two patterns for broker access across accounts.

Pattern 1: Front each MSK broker with a unique dedicated interface endpoint

In this pattern, each MSK broker is fronted with a unique dedicated NLB in the TxB MSK account hosting the MSK cluster. The TxB MSK account contains an endpoint service for every NLB and is shared with the client account. The client account contains interface endpoints corresponding to the endpoint services. Finally, DNS entries identical to the broker DNS names point to the respective interface endpoint. The following diagram illustrates this pattern in the US East (Ohio) Region.

High-level flow

After setup, clients from their own accounts talk to the brokers using their provisioned default DNS names as follows:

  1. The client resolves the broker DNS name to the interface endpoint IP address inside the client VPC.
  2. The client initiates a TCP connection to the interface endpoint IP over port 9094.
  3. With AWS PrivateLink technology, this TCP connection is routed to the dedicated NLB setup for the respective broker listening on the same port within the TxB MSK account.
  4. The NLB routes the connection to the single broker IP registered behind it on TCP port 9094.

High-level setup

The setup steps in this section are shown for the US East (Ohio) Region, please modify if using another region. In the TxB MSK account, complete the following:

  1. Create a target group with target type as IP, protocol TCP, port 9094, and in the same VPC as the MSK cluster.
    • Register the MSK broker as a target by its IP address.
  2. Create an NLB with a listener of TCP port 9094 and forwarding to the target group created in the previous step.
    • Enable the NLB for the same AZ and subnet as the MSK broker it fronts.
  3. Create an endpoint service configuration for each NLB that requires acceptance and grant permissions to the client account so it can create a connection to this endpoint service.

In the client account, complete the following:

  1. Create an interface endpoint in the same VPC the client is in (this connection request needs to be accepted within the TxB MSK account).
  2. Create a Route 53 private hosted zone, with the domain name kafka.us-east-2.amazonaws.com, and associate it with the same VPC as the clients are in.
  3. Create A-Alias records identical to the broker DNS names to avoid any TLS handshake failures and point it to the interface endpoints of the respective brokers.

Pattern 2: Front all MSK brokers with a single shared interface endpoint

In this second pattern, all brokers in the cluster are fronted with a single unique NLB that has cross-zone load balancing enabled. You make this possible by modifying each MSK broker’s advertised.listeners config to advertise a unique port. You create a unique NLB listener-target group pair for each broker and a single shared listener-target group pair for all brokers. You create an endpoint service configuration for this single NLB and share it with the client account. In the client account, you create an interface endpoint corresponding to the endpoint service. Finally, you create DNS entries identical to the broker DNS names that point to the single interface. The following diagram illustrates this pattern in the US East (Ohio) Region.

High-level flow

After setup, clients from their own accounts talk to the brokers using their provisioned default DNS names as follows:

  1. The client resolves the broker DNS name to the interface endpoint IP address inside the client VPC.
  2. The client initiates a TCP connection to the interface endpoint over port 9094.
  3. The NLB listener within the TxB MSK account on port 9094 receives the connection.
  4. The NLB listener’s corresponding target group load balances the request to one of the brokers registered to it (Broker 1). In response, Broker 1 sends back the advertised DNS name and port (9001) to the client.
  5. The client resolves the broker endpoint address again to the interface endpoint IP and initiates a connection to the same interface endpoint over TCP port 9001.
  6. This connection is routed to the NLB listener for TCP port 9001.
  7. This NLB listener’s corresponding target group is configured to receive the traffic on TCP port 9094, and forwards the request on the same port to the only registered target, Broker 1.

High-level setup

The setup steps in this section are shown for the US East (Ohio) Region, please modify if using another region. In the TxB MSK account, complete the following:

  1. Modify the port that the MSK broker is advertising by running the following command against each running broker. The following example command shows changing the advertised port on a specific broker b-1 to 9001. For each broker you run the below command against, you must change the values of bootstrap-server, entity-name, CLIENT_SECURE, REPLICATION and REPLICATION_SECURE. Please note that while modifying the REPLICATION and REPLICATION_SECURE values, -internal has to be appended to the broker name and the ports 9093 and 9095 shown below should not be changed. 
    ./kafka-configs.sh \
--bootstrap-server b-1.exampleClusterName.abcde.c2.kafka.us-east-2.amazonaws.com:9094 \
--entity-type brokers \
--entity-name 1 \
--alter \
--command-config kafka_2.12-2.2.1/bin/client.properties \
--add-config advertised.listeners=[\
CLIENT_SECURE://b-1.exampleClusterName.abcde.c2.kafka.us-east-2.amazonaws.com:9001,\
REPLICATION://b-1-internal.exampleClusterName.abcde.c2.kafka.us-east-2.amazonaws.com:9093,\
REPLICATION_SECURE://b-1-internal.exampleClusterName.abcde.c2.kafka.us-east-2.amazonaws.com:9095]

  2. Create a target group with target type as IP, protocol TCP, port 9094, and in the same VPC as the MSK cluster. The preceding diagram represents this as B-ALL.
    • Register all MSK brokers to B-ALL as a target by its IP address.
  3. Create target groups dedicated for each broker (B1, B2) with the same properties as B-ALL.
    • Register the respective MSK broker to each target group by its IP address.
  4. Perform the same steps for additional brokers if needed and create unique listener-target group corresponding to the advertised port for each broker.
  5. Create an NLB that is enabled for the same subnets that the MSK brokers are in and with cross-zone load balancing enabled.
    • Create a TCP listener for every broker’s advertised port (9001, 9002) that forwards to the corresponding target group you created (B1, B2).
    • Create a special TCP listener 9094 that forwards to the B-ALL target group.
  6. Create an endpoint service configuration for the NLB that requires acceptance and grant permissions to the client account to create a connection to this endpoint service.

In the client account, complete the following:

  1. Create an interface endpoint in the same VPC the client is in (this connection request needs to be accepted within the TxB MSK account).
  2. Create a Route 53 private hosted zone, with the domain name kafka.us-east-2.amazonaws.com and associate it with the same VPC as the client is in.
  3. Under this hosted zone, create A-Alias records identical to the broker DNS names to avoid any TLS handshake failures and point it to the interface endpoint.

This post shows both of these patterns to be using TLS on TCP port 9094 to talk to the MSK brokers. If your security posture allows the use of plaintext communication between the clients and brokers, these patterns apply in that scenario as well, using TCP port 9092.

With both of these patterns, if Amazon MSK detects a broker failure, it mitigates the failure by replacing the unhealthy broker with a new one. In addition, the new MSK broker retains the same IP address and has the same Kafka properties, such as any modified advertised.listener configuration.

Amazon MSK allows clients to communicate with the service on TCP ports 9092, 9094, and 2181. As a byproduct of modifying the advertised.listener in Pattern 2, clients are automatically asked to speak with the brokers on the advertised port. If there is a need for clients in the same account as Amazon MSK to access the brokers, you should create a new Route53 hosted zone in the Amazon MSK account with identical broker DNS names pointing to the NLB DNS name. The Route53 record sets override the MSK broker DNS and allow for all traffic to the brokers to go via the NLB.

Transaction Banking’s MSK broker access pattern

For broker access across TxB micro-accounts, TxB chose Pattern 1, where one interface endpoint per broker is exposed to the client account. TxB streamlined this overall process by automating the creation of the endpoint service within the TxB MSK account and the interface endpoints within the client accounts without any manual intervention.

At the time of cluster creation, the bootstrap broker configuration is retrieved by calling the Amazon MSK APIs and stored in AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store in the client account so that they can be retrieved on application startup. This enables clients to be agnostic of the Kafka broker’s DNS names being launched in a completely different account.

A key driver for TxB choosing Pattern 1 is that it avoids having to modify a broker property like the advertised port. Pattern 2 creates the need for TxB to track which broker is advertising which port and make sure new brokers aren’t reusing the same port. This adds the overhead of having to modify and track the advertised port of new brokers being launched live and having to create a corresponding listener-target group pair for these brokers. TxB avoided this additional overhead by choosing Pattern 1.

On the other hand, Pattern 1 requires the creation of additional dedicated NLBs and interface endpoint connections when more brokers are added to the cluster. TxB limits this management overhead through automation, which requires additional engineering effort.

Also, using Pattern 1 costs more compared to Pattern 2, because each broker in the cluster has a dedicated NLB and an interface endpoint. For a single broker, it costs $37.80 per month to keep the end-to-end connectivity infrastructure up. The breakdown of the monthly connectivity costs is as follows:

  • NLB running cost – 1 NLB x $0.0225 x 720 hours/month = $16.20/month
  • 1 VPC endpoint spread across three AZs – 1 VPCE x 3 ENIs x $0.01 x 720 hours/month = $21.60/month

Additional charges for NLB capacity used and AWS PrivateLink data processed apply. For more information about pricing, see Elastic Load Balancing pricing and AWS PrivateLink pricing.

To summarize, Pattern 1 is best applicable when:

  • You want to minimize the management overhead associated with modifying broker properties, such as advertised port
  • You have automation that takes care of adding and removing infrastructure when new brokers are created or destroyed
  • Simplified and uniform deployments are primary drivers, with cost as a secondary concern

Transaction Banking’s security requirements for Amazon MSK

The TxB micro-account provides a strong application isolation boundary, and accessing MSK brokers using AWS PrivateLink using Pattern 1 allows for tightly controlled connection flows between these TxB micro-accounts. TxB further builds on this foundation through additional infrastructure and data protection controls available in Amazon MSK. For more information, see Security in Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka.

The following are the core security tenets that TxB’s internal security team require for using Amazon MSK:

  • Encryption at rest using Customer Master Key (CMK) – TxB uses the Amazon MSK managed offering of encryption at rest. Amazon MSK integrates with AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) to offer transparent server-side encryption to always encrypt your data at rest. When you create an MSK cluster, you can specify the AWS KMS CMK that AWS KMS uses to generate data keys that encrypt your data at rest. For more information, see Using CMKs and data keys.
  • Encryption in transit – Amazon MSK uses TLS 1.2 for encryption in transit. TxB makes client-broker encryption and encryption between the MSK brokers mandatory.
  • Client authentication with TLS – Amazon MSK uses AWS Certificate Manager Private Certificate Authority (ACM PCA) for client authentication. The ACM PCA can either be a root Certificate Authority (CA) or a subordinate CA. If it’s a root CA, you need to install a self-signed certificate. If it’s a subordinate CA, you can choose its parent to be an ACM PCA root, a subordinate CA, or an external CA. This external CA can be your own CA that issues the certificate and becomes part of the certificate chain when installed as the ACM PCA certificate. TxB takes advantage of this capability and uses certificates signed by ACM PCA that are distributed to the client accounts.
  • Authorization using Kafka Access Control Lists (ACLs) – Amazon MSK allows you to use the Distinguished Name of a client’s TLS certificates as the principal of the Kafka ACL to authorize client requests. To enable Kafka ACLs, you must first have client authentication using TLS enabled. TxB uses the Kafka Admin API to create Kafka ACLs for each topic using the certificate names of the certificates deployed on the consumer and producer client instances. For more information, see Apache Kafka ACLs.

Conclusion

This post illustrated how the Transaction Banking team at Goldman Sachs approaches an application isolation boundary through the TxB micro-account strategy and how AWS PrivateLink complements this strategy.  Additionally, this post discussed how the TxB team builds connectivity to their MSK clusters across TxB micro-accounts and how Amazon MSK takes the undifferentiated heavy lifting away from TxB by allowing them to achieve their core security requirements. You can leverage this post as a reference to build a similar approach when implementing an Amazon MSK environment.

 

About the Authors

Robert L. Cossin is a Vice President at Goldman Sachs in New York. Rob joined Goldman Sachs in 2004 and has worked on many projects within the firm’s cash and securities flows. Most recently, Rob is a technical architect on the Transaction Banking team, focusing on cloud enablement and security.

 

 

 

Harsha W. Sharma is a Solutions Architect with AWS in New York. Harsha joined AWS in 2016 and works with Global Financial Services customers to design and develop architectures on AWS, and support their journey on the cloud.

 

 

New Zealand Internet Connectivity to AWS

Post Syndicated from Cameron Tod original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/new-zealand-internet-connectivity-to-aws/

Amazon Web Services (AWS) serves more than a million private and public sector organizations all over the world from its extensive and expanding global infrastructure.

Like other countries, organizations all around New Zealand are using AWS to change the way they operate. For example, Xero, a Wellington-based online accountancy software vendor, now serves customers in more than 100 countries, while the Department of Conservation provides its end users with virtual desktops running in Amazon Workspaces.

New Zealand doesn’t currently have a dedicated AWS Region. Geographically, the closest is Asia Pacific (Sydney), which is 2,000 kilometers (km) away, across a deep sea. While customers rely on AWS for business-critical workloads, they are well-served by New Zealand’s international connectivity.

To connect to Amazon’s network, our New Zealand customers have a range of options:

  • Public internet endpoints
  • Managed or software Virtual Private Networks (VPN)
  • AWS Direct Connect (DX).

All rely on the extensive internet infrastructure connecting New Zealand to the world.

International Connectivity

The vast majority of internet traffic is carried over physical cables, while the percentage of traffic moving over satellite or wireless links is small by comparison.

Historically, cables were funded and managed by consortia of telecommunication providers. More recently, large infrastructure and service providers like AWS have contributed to or are building their own cable networks.

There are currently about 400 submarine cables in service globally. Modern submarine cables are fiber-optic, run for thousands of kilometers, and are protected by steel strands, plastic sheathing, copper, and a chemical water barrier. Over that distance, the signal can weaken—or attenuate—so signal repeaters are installed approximately every 50km to mitigate attenuation. Repeaters are powered by a charge running over the copper sheathing in the cable.

An example of submarine cable composition.. S

An example of submarine cable composition.. Source: WikiMedia Commons

For most of their run, these cables are about as thick as a standard garden hose. They are thicker, however, closer to shore and in areas where there’s a greater risk of damage by fishing nets, boat anchors, etc.

Cables can—and do—break, but redundancy is built into the network. According to Telegeography, there are 100 submarine cable faults globally every year. However, most faults don’t impact users meaningfully.

New Zealand is served by four main cables:

  1. Hawaiki : Sydney -> Mangawhai (Northland, NZ) -> Kapolei (Hawaii, USA) -> Hilsboro, Oregon (USA) – 44 Terabits per second (Tbps)
  2. Tasman Global Access: Raglan (Auckland, New Zealand) -> Narabeen (NSW, Australia) – 20 Tbps
  3. Southern Cross A: Whenuapai (Auckland, New Zealand) -> Alexandria (NSW, Australia) – 1.2 Tbps
  4. Southern Cross B: Takapuna (Auckland, New Zealand) -> Spencer Beach (Hawaii, USA) – 1.2 Tbps
A map of major submarine cables connecting to New Zealand.

A map of major submarine cables connecting to New Zealand. Source submarinecablemap.com

The four cables combined currently deliver 66 Tbps of available capacity. The Southern Cross NEXT cable is due to come online in 2020, which will add another 72 Tbps. These are, of course, potential capacities; it’s likely the “lit” capacity—the proportion of the cables’ overall capacity that is actually in use—is much lower.

Connecting to AWS from New Zealand

While understanding the physical infrastructure is important in practice, these details are not shared with customers. Connectivity options are evaluated on the basis of partner and AWS offerings, which include connectivity.

Customers connect to AWS in three main ways: over public endpoints, via site-to-site VPNs, and via Direct Connect (DX), all typically provided by partners.

Public Internet Endpoints

Customers can connect to public endpoints for AWS services over the public internet. Some services, like Amazon CloudFront, Amazon API Gateway, and Amazon WorkSpaces are generally used in this way.

Network-level access can be controlled via various means depending on the service, whether that is Endpoint Policies for API Gateway, Security Groups, and Network Access Control Lists for Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), or Resource Policies for services such as Amazon S3, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), or Amazon Key Management Service (KMS).

All services offer TLS or IPsec connectivity for secure encryption-in-motion.

Site-to-Site Virtual Private Network

Many organizations use a VPN to connect to AWS. It’s the simplest and lowest cost entry point to expose resources deployed in private ranges in an Amazon VPC. Amazon VPC allows customers to provision a logically isolated network segment, with fine-grained control of IP ranges, filtering rules, and routing.

AWS offers a managed site-to-site VPN service, which creates secure, redundant Internet Protocol Security (IPSec) VPNs, and also handles maintenance and high-availability while integrating with Amazon CloudWatch for robust monitoring.

If using an AWS managed VPN, the AWS endpoints have publicly routable IPs. They can be connected to over the public internet or via a Public Virtual Interface over DX (outlined below).

Customers can also deploy VPN appliances onto Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances running in their VPC. These may be self-managed or provided by Amazon Marketplace sellers.

AWS also offers AWS Client VPN, for direct user access to AWS resources.

AWS Direct Connect

While connectivity over the internet is secure and flexible, it has one major disadvantage: it’s unpredictable. By design, traffic traversing the internet can take any path to reach its destination. Most of the time it works but occasionally routing conditions may reduce capacity or increase latency.

DX connections are either 1 or 10 Gigabits per second (Gbps). This capacity is dedicated to the customer; it isn’t shared, as other network users are never routed over the connection. This means customers can rely on consistent latency and bandwidth. The DX per-Gigabit transfer cost is lower than other egress mechanisms. For customers transferring large volumes of data, DX may be more cost effective than other means of connectivity.

Customers may publish their own 802.11q Virtual Local Area Network (VLAN) tags across the DX, and advertise routes via Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). A dedicated connection supports up to 50 private or public virtual interfaces. New Zealand does not have a physical point-of-presence for DX—users must procure connectivity to our Sydney Region. Many AWS Partner Network (APN) members in New Zealand offer this connectivity.

For customers who don’t want or need to manage VLANs to AWS—or prefer 1 Gbps or smaller links —APN partners offer hosted connections or hosted virtual interfaces.  For more detail, please review our AWS Direct Connect Partners page.

Performance

There are physical limits to latency dictated by the speed of light, and the medium through which optical signals travel. Southern Cross publishes latency statistics, and it sees one-way latency of approximately 11 milliseconds (ms) over the 2,276km Alexandria to Whenuapai link. Double that for a round-trip to 22 ms.

In practice, we see customers achieving round-trip times from user workstations to Sydney in approximately 30-50 ms, assuming fair-weather internet conditions or DX links. Latency in Auckland (the largest city) tends to be on the lower end of that spectrum, while the rest of the country tends towards the higher end.

Bandwidth constraints are more often dictated by client hardware, but AWS and our partners offer up to 10 Gbps links, or smaller as required. For customers that require more than 10 Gbps over a single link, AWS supports Link Aggregation Groups (LAG).

As outlined above, there are a range of ways for customers to adopt AWS via secure, reliable, and performant networks. To discuss your use case, please contact an AWS Solutions Architect.

 

One to Many: Evolving VPC Design

Post Syndicated from Androski Spicer original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/one-to-many-evolving-vpc-design/

Since its inception, the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) has acted as the embodiment of security and privacy for customers who are looking to run their applications in a controlled, private, secure, and isolated environment.

This logically isolated space has evolved, and in its evolution has increased the avenues that customers can take to create and manage multi-tenant environments with multiple integration points for access to resources on-premises.

This blog is a two-part series that begins with a look at the Amazon VPC as a single unit of networking in the AWS Cloud but eventually takes you to a world in which simplified architectures for establishing a global network of VPCs are possible.

From One VPC: Single Unit of Networking

To be successful with the AWS Virtual Private Cloud you first have to define success for today and what success might look like as your organization’s adoption of the AWS cloud increases and matures. In essence, your VPCs should be designed to satisfy the needs of your applications today and must be scalable to accommodate future needs.

Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) notations are used to denote the size of your VPC. AWS allows you specify a CIDR block between /16 and /28. The largest, /16, provides you with 65,536 IP addresses and the smallest possible allowed CIDR block, /28, provides you with 16 IP addresses. Note, the first four IP addresses and the last IP address in each subnet CIDR block are not available for you to use, and cannot be assigned to an instance.

AWS VPC supports both IPv4 and IPv6. It is required that you specify an IPv4 CIDR range when creating a VPC. Specifying an IPv6 range is optional.

Customers can specify ANY IPv4 address space for their VPC. This includes but is not limited to RFC 1918 addresses.

After creating your VPC, you divide it into subnets. In an AWS VPC, subnets are not isolation boundaries around your application. Rather, they are containers for routing policies.

Isolation is achieved by attaching an AWS Security Group (SG) to the EC2 instances that host your application. SGs are stateful firewalls, meaning that connections are tracked to ensure return traffic is allowed. They control inbound and outbound access to the elastic network interfaces that are attached to an EC2 instance. These should be tightly configured, only allowing access as needed.

It is our best practice that subnets should be created in categories. There two main categories; public subnets and private subnets. At minimum they should be designed as outlined in the below diagrams for IPv4 and IPv6 subnet design.

Recommended IPv4 subnet design pattern

Recommended IPv6 subnet design pattern

Subnet types are denoted by the ability and inability for applications and users on the internet to directly initiate access to infrastructure within a subnet.

Public Subnets

Public subnets are attached to a route table that has a default route to the Internet via an Internet gateway.

Resources in a public subnet can have a public IP or Elastic IP (EIP) that has a NAT to the Elastic Network Interface (ENI) of the virtual machines or containers that hosts your application(s). This is a one-to-one NAT that is performed by the Internet gateway.

Illustration of public subnet access path to the Internet through the Internet Gateway (IGW)

Private Subnets

A private subnet contains infrastructure that isn’t directly accessible from the Internet. Unlike the public subnet, this infrastructure only has private IPs.

Infrastructure in a private subnet gain access to resources or users on the Internet through a NAT infrastructure of sorts.

AWS natively provides NAT capability through the use of the NAT Gateway service. Customers can also create NAT instances that they manage or leverage third-party NAT appliances from the AWS Marketplace.

In most scenarios, it is recommended to use the AWS NAT Gateway as it is highly available (in a single Availability Zone) and is provided as a managed service by AWS. It supports 5 Gbps of bandwidth per NAT gateway and automatically scales up to 45 Gbps.

An AWS NAT gateway’s high availability is confined to a single Availability Zone. For high availability across AZs, it is recommended to have a minimum of two NAT gateways (in different AZs). This allows you to switch to an available NAT gateway in the event that one should become unavailable.

This approach allows you to zone your Internet traffic, reducing cross Availability Zone connections to the Internet. More details on NAT gateway are available here.

Illustration of an environment with a single NAT Gateway (NAT-GW)

Illustration of high availability with a multiple NAT Gateways (NAT-GW) attached to their own route table

Illustration of the failure of one NAT Gateway and the fail over to an available NAT Gateway by the manual changing of the default route next hop in private subnet A route table

AWS allocated IPv6 addresses are Global Unicast Addresses by default. That said, you can privatize these subnets by using an Egress-Only Internet Gateway (E-IGW), instead of a regular Internet gateway. E-IGWs are purposely built to prevents users and applications on the Internet from initiating access to infrastructure in your IPv6 subnet(s).

Illustration of internet access for hybrid IPv6 subnets through an Egress-Only Internet Gateway (E-IGW)

Applications hosted on instances living within a private subnet can have different access needs. Some require access to the Internet while others require access to databases, applications, and users that are on-premises. For this type of access, AWS provides two avenues: the Virtual Gateway and the Transit Gateway. The Virtual Gateway can only support a single VPC at a time, while the Transit Gateway is built to simplify the interconnectivity of tens to hundreds of VPCs and then aggregating their connectivity to resources on-premises. Given that we are looking at the VPC as a single unit of networking, all diagrams below contain illustrations of the Virtual Gateway which acts a WAN concentrator for your VPC.

Illustration of private subnets connecting to data center via a Virtual Gateway (VGW)

 

Illustration of private subnets connecting to Data Center via a VGW

 

Illustration of private subnets connecting to Data Center using AWS Direct Connect as primary and IPsec as backup

The above diagram illustrates a WAN connection between a VGW attached to a VPC and a customer’s data center.

AWS provides two options for establishing a private connectivity between your VPC and on-premises network: AWS Direct Connect and AWS Site-to-Site VPN.

AWS Site-to-Site VPN configuration leverages IPSec with each connection providing two redundant IPSec tunnels. AWS support both static routing and dynamic routing (through the use of BGP).

BGP is recommended, as it allows dynamic route advertisement, high availability through failure detection, and fail over between tunnels in addition to decreased management complexity.

VPC Endpoints: Gateway & Interface Endpoints

Applications running inside your subnet(s) may need to connect to AWS public services (like Amazon S3, Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Amazon API Gateway, etc.) or applications in another VPC that lives in another account. For example, you may have a database in another account that you would like to expose applications that lives in a completely different account and subnet.

For these scenarios you have the option to leverage an Amazon VPC Endpoint.

There are two types of VPC Endpoints: Gateway Endpoints and Interface Endpoints.

Gateway Endpoints only support Amazon S3 and Amazon DynamoDB. Upon creation, a gateway is added to your specified route table(s) and acts as the destination for all requests to the service it is created for.

Interface Endpoints differ significantly and can only be created for services that are powered by AWS PrivateLink.

Upon creation, AWS creates an interface endpoint consisting of one or more Elastic Network Interfaces (ENIs). Each AZ can support one interface endpoint ENI. This acts as a point of entry for all traffic destined to a specific PrivateLink service.

When an interface endpoint is created, associated DNS entries are created that point to the endpoint and each ENI that the endpoint contains. To access the PrivateLink service you must send your request to one of these hostnames.

As illustrated below, ensure the Private DNS feature is enabled for AWS public and Marketplace services:

Since interface endpoints leverage ENIs, customers can use cloud techniques they are already familiar with. The interface endpoint can be configured with a restrictive security group. These endpoints can also be easily accessed from both inside and outside the VPC. Access from outside a VPC can be accomplished through Direct Connect and VPN.

Illustration of a solution that leverages an interface and gateway endpoint

Customers can also create AWS Endpoint services for their applications or services running on-premises. This allows access to these services via an interface endpoint which can be extended to other VPCs (even if the VPCs themselves do not have Direct Connect configured).

VPC Sharing

At re:Invent 2018, AWS launched the feature VPC sharing, which helps customers control VPC sprawl by decoupling the boundary of an AWS account from the underlying VPC network that supports its infrastructure.

VPC sharing uses Amazon Resource Access Manager (RAM) to share subnets across accounts within the same AWS organization.

VPC sharing is defined as:

VPC sharing allows customers to centralize the management of network, its IP space and the access paths to resources external to the VPC. This method of centralization and reuse (of VPC components such as NAT Gateway and Direct Connect connections) results in a reduction of cost to manage and maintain this environment.

Great, but there are times when a customer needs to build networks with multiple VPCs in and across AWS regions. How should this be done and what are the best practices?

This will be answered in part two of this blog.

 

 

Learn about AWS Services & Solutions – September AWS Online Tech Talks

Post Syndicated from Jenny Hang original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/learn-about-aws-services-solutions-september-aws-online-tech-talks/

Learn about AWS Services & Solutions – September AWS Online Tech Talks

AWS Tech Talks

Join us this September to learn about AWS services and solutions. The AWS Online Tech Talks are live, online presentations that cover a broad range of topics at varying technical levels. These tech talks, led by AWS solutions architects and engineers, feature technical deep dives, live demonstrations, customer examples, and Q&A with AWS experts. Register Now!

Note – All sessions are free and in Pacific Time.

Tech talks this month:

 

Compute:

September 23, 2019 | 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM PT – Build Your Hybrid Cloud Architecture with AWS – Learn about the extensive range of services AWS offers to help you build a hybrid cloud architecture best suited for your use case.

September 26, 2019 | 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM PT – Self-Hosted WordPress: It’s Easier Than You Think – Learn how you can easily build a fault-tolerant WordPress site using Amazon Lightsail.

October 3, 2019 | 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM PT – Lower Costs by Right Sizing Your Instance with Amazon EC2 T3 General Purpose Burstable Instances – Get an overview of T3 instances, understand what workloads are ideal for them, and understand how the T3 credit system works so that you can lower your EC2 instance costs today.

 

Containers:

September 26, 2019 | 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM PT – Develop a Web App Using Amazon ECS and AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) – Learn how to build your first app using CDK and AWS container services.

 

Data Lakes & Analytics:

September 26, 2019 | 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM PT – Best Practices for Provisioning Amazon MSK Clusters and Using Popular Apache Kafka-Compatible Tooling – Learn best practices on running Apache Kafka production workloads at a lower cost on Amazon MSK.

 

Databases:

September 25, 2019 | 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM PT – What’s New in Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) – Learn what’s new in Amazon DocumentDB, a fully managed MongoDB compatible database service designed from the ground up to be fast, scalable, and highly available.

October 3, 2019 | 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM PT – Best Practices for Enterprise-Class Security, High-Availability, and Scalability with Amazon ElastiCache – Learn about new enterprise-friendly Amazon ElastiCache enhancements like customer managed key and online scaling up or down to make your critical workloads more secure, scalable and available.

 

DevOps:

October 1, 2019 | 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM PT – CI/CD for Containers: A Way Forward for Your DevOps Pipeline – Learn how to build CI/CD pipelines using AWS services to get the most out of the agility afforded by containers.

 

Enterprise & Hybrid:

September 24, 2019 | 1:00 PM – 2:30 PM PT – Virtual Workshop: How to Monitor and Manage Your AWS Costs – Learn how to visualize and manage your AWS cost and usage in this virtual hands-on workshop.

October 2, 2019 | 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM PT – Accelerate Cloud Adoption and Reduce Operational Risk with AWS Managed Services – Learn how AMS accelerates your migration to AWS, reduces your operating costs, improves security and compliance, and enables you to focus on your differentiating business priorities.

 

IoT:

September 25, 2019 | 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM PT – Complex Monitoring for Industrial with AWS IoT Data Services – Learn how to solve your complex event monitoring challenges with AWS IoT Data Services.

 

Machine Learning:

September 23, 2019 | 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM PT – Training Machine Learning Models Faster – Learn how to train machine learning models quickly and with a single click using Amazon SageMaker.

September 30, 2019 | 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM PT – Using Containers for Deep Learning Workflows – Learn how containers can help address challenges in deploying deep learning environments.

October 3, 2019 | 1:00 PM – 2:30 PM PT – Virtual Workshop: Getting Hands-On with Machine Learning and Ready to Race in the AWS DeepRacer League – Join DeClercq Wentzel, Senior Product Manager for AWS DeepRacer, for a presentation on the basics of machine learning and how to build a reinforcement learning model that you can use to join the AWS DeepRacer League.

 

AWS Marketplace:

September 30, 2019 | 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM PT – Advancing Software Procurement in a Containerized World – Learn how to deploy applications faster with third-party container products.

 

Migration:

September 24, 2019 | 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM PT – Application Migrations Using AWS Server Migration Service (SMS) – Learn how to use AWS Server Migration Service (SMS) for automating application migration and scheduling continuous replication, from your on-premises data centers or Microsoft Azure to AWS.

 

Networking & Content Delivery:

September 25, 2019 | 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM PT – Building Highly Available and Performant Applications using AWS Global Accelerator – Learn how to build highly available and performant architectures for your applications with AWS Global Accelerator, now with source IP preservation.

September 30, 2019 | 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM PT – AWS Office Hours: Amazon CloudFront – Just getting started with Amazon CloudFront and [email protected]? Get answers directly from our experts during AWS Office Hours.

 

Robotics:

October 1, 2019 | 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM PT – Robots and STEM: AWS RoboMaker and AWS Educate Unite! – Come join members of the AWS RoboMaker and AWS Educate teams as we provide an overview of our education initiatives and walk you through the newly launched RoboMaker Badge.

 

Security, Identity & Compliance:

October 1, 2019 | 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM PT – Deep Dive on Running Active Directory on AWS – Learn how to deploy Active Directory on AWS and start migrating your windows workloads.

 

Serverless:

October 2, 2019 | 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM PT – Deep Dive on Amazon EventBridge – Learn how to optimize event-driven applications, and use rules and policies to route, transform, and control access to these events that react to data from SaaS apps.

 

Storage:

September 24, 2019 | 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM PT – Optimize Your Amazon S3 Data Lake with S3 Storage Classes and Management Tools – Learn how to use the Amazon S3 Storage Classes and management tools to better manage your data lake at scale and to optimize storage costs and resources.

October 2, 2019 | 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM PT – The Great Migration to Cloud Storage: Choosing the Right Storage Solution for Your Workload – Learn more about AWS storage services and identify which service is the right fit for your business.

 

 

Optimizing Amazon ECS task density using awsvpc network mode

Post Syndicated from Ignacio Riesgo original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/optimizing-amazon-ecs-task-density-using-awsvpc-network-mode/

This post is contributed by Tony Pujals | Senior Developer Advocate, AWS

 

AWS recently increased the number of elastic network interfaces available when you run tasks on Amazon ECS. Use the account setting called awsvpcTrunking. If you use the Amazon EC2 launch type and task networking (awsvpc network mode), you can now run more tasks on an instance—5 to 17 times as many—as you did before.

As more of you embrace microservices architectures, you deploy increasing numbers of smaller tasks. AWS now offers you the option of more efficient packing per instance, potentially resulting in smaller clusters and associated savings.

 

Overview

To manage your own cluster of EC2 instances, use the EC2 launch type. Use task networking to run ECS tasks using the same networking properties as if tasks were distinct EC2 instances.

Task networking offers several benefits. Every task launched with awsvpc network mode has its own attached network interface, a primary private IP address, and an internal DNS hostname. This simplifies container networking and gives you more control over how tasks communicate, both with each other and with other services within their virtual private clouds (VPCs).

Task networking also lets you take advantage of other EC2 networking features like VPC Flow Logs. This feature lets you monitor traffic to and from tasks. It also provides greater security control for containers, allowing you to use security groups and network monitoring tools at a more granular level within tasks. For more information, see Introducing Cloud Native Networking for Amazon ECS Containers.

However, if you run container tasks on EC2 instances with task networking, you can face a networking limit. This might surprise you, particularly when an instance has plenty of free CPU and memory. The limit reflects the number of network interfaces available to support awsvpc network mode per container instance.

 

Raise network interface density limits with trunking

The good news is that AWS raised network interface density limits by implementing a networking feature on ECS called “trunking.” This is a technique for multiplexing data over a shared communication link.

If you’re migrating to microservices using AWS App Mesh, you should optimize network interface density. App Mesh requires awsvpc networking to provide routing control and visibility over an ever-expanding array of running tasks. In this context, increased network interface density might save money.

By opting for network interface trunking, you should see a significant increase in capacity—from 5 to 17 times more than the previous limit. For more information on the new task limits per container instance, see Supported Amazon EC2 Instance Types.

Applications with tasks not hitting CPU or memory limits also benefit from this feature through the more cost-effective “bin packing” of container instances.

 

Trunking is an opt-in feature

AWS chose to make the trunking feature opt-in due to the following factors:

  • Instance registration: While normal instance registration is straightforward with trunking, this feature increases the number of asynchronous instance registration steps that can potentially fail. Any such failures might add extra seconds to launch time.
  • Available IP addresses: The “trunk” belongs to the same subnet in which the instance’s primary network interface originates. This effectively reduces the available IP addresses and potentially the ability to scale out on other EC2 instances sharing the same subnet. The trunk consumes an IP address. With a trunk attached, there are two assigned IP addresses per instance, one for the primary interface and one for the trunk.
  • Differing customer preferences and infrastructure: If you have high CPU or memory workloads, you might not benefit from trunking. Or, you may not want awsvpc networking.

Consequently, AWS leaves it to you to decide if you want to use this feature. AWS might revisit this decision in the future, based on customer feedback. For now, your account roles or users must opt in to the awsvpcTrunking account setting to gain the benefits of increased task density per container instance.

 

Enable trunking

Enable the ECS elastic network interface trunking feature to increase the number of network interfaces that can be attached to supported EC2 container instance types. You must meet the following prerequisites before you can launch a container instance with the increased network interface limits:

  • Your account must have the AWSServiceRoleForECS service-linked role for ECS.
  • You must opt into the awsvpcTrunking  account setting.

 

Make sure that a service-linked role exists for ECS

A service-linked role is a unique type of IAM role linked to an AWS service (such as ECS). This role lets you delegate the permissions necessary to call other AWS services on your behalf. Because ECS is a service that manages resources on your behalf, you need this role to proceed.

In most cases, you won’t have to create a service-linked role. If you created or updated an ECS cluster, ECS likely created the service-linked role for you.

You can confirm that your service-linked role exists using the AWS CLI, as shown in the following code example:

$ aws iam get-role --role-name AWSServiceRoleForECS
{
    "Role": {
        "Path": "/aws-service-role/ecs.amazonaws.com/",
        "RoleName": "AWSServiceRoleForECS",
        "RoleId": "AROAJRUPKI7I2FGUZMJJY",
        "Arn": "arn:aws:iam::226767807331:role/aws-service-role/ecs.amazonaws.com/AWSServiceRoleForECS",
        "CreateDate": "2018-11-09T21:27:17Z",
        "AssumeRolePolicyDocument": {
            "Version": "2012-10-17",
            "Statement": [
                {
                    "Effect": "Allow",
                    "Principal": {
                        "Service": "ecs.amazonaws.com"
                    },
                    "Action": "sts:AssumeRole"
                }
            ]
        },
        "Description": "Role to enable Amazon ECS to manage your cluster.",
        "MaxSessionDuration": 3600
    }
}

If the service-linked role does not exist, create it manually with the following command:

aws iam create-service-linked-role --aws-service-name ecs.amazonaws.com

For more information, see Using Service-Linked Roles for Amazon ECS.

 

Opt in to the awsvpcTrunking account setting

Your account, IAM user, or role must opt in to the awsvpcTrunking account setting. Select this setting using the AWS CLI or the ECS console. You can opt in for an account by making awsvpcTrunking  its default setting. Or, you can enable this setting for the role associated with the instance profile with which the instance launches. For instructions, see Account Settings.

 

Other considerations

After completing the prerequisites described in the preceding sections, launch a new container instance with increased network interface limits using one of the supported EC2 instance types.

Keep the following in mind:

  • It’s available with the latest variant of the ECS-optimized AMI.
  • It only affects creation of new container instances after opting into awsvpcTrunking.
  • It only affects tasks created with awsvpc network mode and EC2 launch type. Tasks created with the AWS Fargate launch type always have a dedicated network interface, no matter how many you launch.

For details, see ENI Trunking Considerations.

 

Summary

If you seek to optimize the usage of your EC2 container instances for clusters that you manage, enable the increased network interface density feature with awsvpcTrunking. By following the steps outlined in this post, you can launch tasks using significantly fewer EC2 instances. This is especially useful if you embrace a microservices architecture, with its increasing numbers of lighter tasks.

Hopefully, you found this post informative and the proposed solution intriguing. As always, AWS welcomes all feedback or comment.

Integrating AWS X-Ray with AWS App Mesh

Post Syndicated from Ignacio Riesgo original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/integrating-aws-x-ray-with-aws-app-mesh/

This post is contributed by Lulu Zhao | Software Development Engineer II, AWS

 

AWS X-Ray helps developers and DevOps engineers quickly understand how an application and its underlying services are performing. When it’s integrated with AWS App Mesh, the combination makes for a powerful analytical tool.

X-Ray helps to identify and troubleshoot the root causes of errors and performance issues. It’s capable of analyzing and debugging distributed applications, including those based on a microservices architecture. It offers insights into the impact and reach of errors and performance problems.

In this post, I demonstrate how to integrate it with App Mesh.

Overview

App Mesh is a service mesh based on the Envoy proxy that makes it easy to monitor and control microservices. App Mesh standardizes how your microservices communicate, giving you end-to-end visibility and helping to ensure high application availability.

With App Mesh, it’s easy to maintain consistent visibility and network traffic control for services built across multiple types of compute infrastructure. App Mesh configures each service to export monitoring data and implements consistent communications control logic across your application.

A service mesh is like a communication layer for microservices. All communication between services happens through the mesh. Customers use App Mesh to configure a service mesh that contains virtual services, virtual nodes, virtual routes, and corresponding routes.

However, it’s challenging to visualize the way that request traffic flows through the service mesh while attempting to identify latency and other types of performance issues. This is particularly true as the number of microservices increases.

It’s in exactly this area where X-Ray excels. To show a detailed workflow inside a service mesh, I implemented a tracing extension called X-Ray tracer inside Envoy. With it, I ensure that I’m tracing all inbound and outbound calls that are routed through Envoy.

Traffic routing with color app

The following example shows how X-Ray works with App Mesh. I used the Color App, a simple demo application, to showcase traffic routing.

This app has two Go applications that are included in the AWS X-Ray Go SDK: color-gateway and color-teller. The color-gateway application is exposed to external clients and responds to http://service-name:port/color, which retrieves color from color-teller. I deployed color-app using Amazon ECS. This image illustrates how color-gateway routes traffic into a virtual router and then into separate nodes using color-teller.

 

The following image shows client interactions with App Mesh in an X-Ray service map after requests have been made to the color-gateway and to color-teller.

Integration

There are two types of service nodes:

  • AWS::AppMesh::Proxy is generated by the X-Ray tracing extension inside Envoy.
  • AWS::ECS::Container is generated by the AWS X-Ray Go SDK.

The service graph arrows show the request workflow, which you may find helpful as you try to understand the relationships between services.

To send Envoy-generated segments into X-Ray, install the X-Ray daemon. The following code example shows the ECS task definition used to install the daemon into the container.

{
    "name": "xray-daemon",

    "image": "amazon/aws-xray-daemon",

    "user": "1337",

    "essential": true,

    "cpu": 32,

    "memoryReservation": 256,

    "portMappings": [

        {

            "hostPort": 2000,

            "containerPort": 2000,

            "protocol": "udp"

         }

After the Color app successfully launched, I made a request to color-gateway to fetch a color.

  • First, the Envoy proxy appmesh/colorgateway-vn in front of default-gateway received the request and routed it to the server default-gateway.
  • Then, default-gateway made a request to server default-colorteller-white to retrieve the color.
  • Instead of directly calling the color-teller server, the request went to the default-gateway Envoy proxy and the proxy routed the call to color-teller.

That’s the advantage of using the Envoy proxy. Envoy is a self-contained process that is designed to run in parallel with all application servers. All of the Envoy proxies form a transparent communication mesh through which each application sends and receives messages to and from localhost while remaining unaware of the broader network topology.

For App Mesh integration, the X-Ray tracer records the mesh name and virtual node name values and injects them into the segment JSON document. Here is an example:

“aws”: {
	“app_mesh”: {
		“mesh_name”: “appmesh”,
		“virtual_node_name”: “colorgateway-vn”
	}
},

To enable X-Ray tracing through App Mesh inside Envoy, you must set two environment variable configurations:

  • ENABLE_ENVOY_XRAY_TRACING
  • XRAY_DAEMON_PORT

The first one enables X-Ray tracing using 127.0.0.1:2000 as the default daemon endpoint to which generated segments are sent. If the daemon you installed listens on a different port, you can specify a port value to override the default X-Ray daemon port by using the second configuration.

Conclusion

Currently, AWS X-Ray supports SDKs written in multiple languages (including Java, Python, Go, .NET, and .NET Core, Node.js, and Ruby) to help you implement your services. For more information, see Getting Started with AWS X-Ray.

Introducing AWS App Mesh – service mesh for microservices on AWS

Post Syndicated from Nathan Taber original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/introducing-aws-app-mesh-service-mesh-for-microservices-on-aws/

AWS App Mesh is a service mesh that allows you to easily monitor and control communications across microservices applications on AWS. You can use App Mesh with microservices running on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS), and Kubernetes running on Amazon EC2.

Today, App Mesh is available as a public preview. In the coming months, we plan to add new functionality and integrations.

Why App Mesh?

Many of our customers are building applications with microservices architectures, breaking applications into many separate, smaller pieces of software that are independently deployed and operated. Microservices help to increase the availability and scalability of an application by allowing each component to scale independently based on demand. Each microservice interacts with the other microservices through an API.

When you start building more than a few microservices within an application, it becomes difficult to identify and isolate issues. These can include high latencies, error rates, or error codes across the application. There is no dynamic way to route network traffic when there are failures or when new containers need to be deployed.

You can address these problems by adding custom code and libraries into each microservice and using open source tools that manage communications for each microservice. However, these solutions can be hard to install, difficult to update across teams, and complex to manage for availability and resiliency.

AWS App Mesh implements a new architectural pattern that helps solve many of these challenges and provides a consistent, dynamic way to manage the communications between microservices. With App Mesh, the logic for monitoring and controlling communications between microservices is implemented as a proxy that runs alongside each microservice, instead of being built into the microservice code. The proxy handles all of the network traffic into and out of the microservice and provides consistency for visibility, traffic control, and security capabilities to all of your microservices.

Use App Mesh to model how all of your microservices connect. App Mesh automatically computes and sends the appropriate configuration information to each microservice proxy. This gives you standardized, easy-to-use visibility and traffic controls across your entire application.  App Mesh uses Envoy, an open source proxy. That makes it compatible with a wide range of AWS partner and open source tools for monitoring microservices.

Using App Mesh, you can export observability data to multiple AWS and third-party tools, including Amazon CloudWatch, AWS X-Ray, or any third-party monitoring and tracing tool that integrates with Envoy. You can configure new traffic routing controls to enable dynamic blue/green canary deployments for your services.

Getting started

Here’s a sample application with two services, where service A receives traffic from the internet and uses service B for some backend processing. You want to route traffic dynamically between services B and B’, a new version of B deployed to act as the canary.

First, create a mesh, a namespace that groups related microservices that must interact.

Next, create virtual nodes to represent services in the mesh. A virtual node can represent a microservice or a specific microservice version. In this example, service A and B participate in the mesh and you manage the traffic to service B using App Mesh.

Now, deploy your services with the required Envoy proxy and with a mapping to the node in the mesh.

After you have defined your virtual nodes, you can define how the traffic flows between your microservices. To do this, define a virtual router and routes for communications between microservices.

A virtual router handles traffic for your microservices. After you create a virtual router, you create routes to direct traffic appropriately. These routes include the connection requests that the route should accept, where they should go, and the weighted amount of traffic to send. All of these changes to adjust traffic between services is computed and sent dynamically to the appropriate proxies by App Mesh to execute your deployment.

You now have a virtual router set up that accepts all traffic from virtual node A sending to the existing version of service B, as well some traffic to the new version, B’.

Exporting metrics, logs, and traces

One of benefits about placing a proxy in front of every microservice is that you can automatically capture metrics, logs, and traces about the communication between your services. App Mesh enables you to easily collect and export this data to the tools of your choice. Envoy is already integrated with several tools like Prometheus and Datadog.

During the preview, we are adding support for AWS services such as Amazon CloudWatch and AWS X-Ray. We have a lot more integrations planned as well.

Available now

AWS App Mesh is available as a public preview and you can start using it today in the North Virginia, Ohio, Oregon, and Ireland AWS Regions. During the preview, we plan to add new features and want to hear your feedback. You can check out our GitHub repository for examples and our roadmap.

— Nate

A simpler way to assess the network exposure of EC2 instances: AWS releases new network reachability assessments in Amazon Inspector

Post Syndicated from Catherine Dodge original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/amazon-inspector-assess-network-exposure-ec2-instances-aws-network-reachability-assessments/

Performing network security assessments allows you to understand your cloud infrastructure and identify risks, but this process traditionally takes a lot of time and effort. You might need to run network port-scanning tools to test routing and firewall configurations, then validate what processes are listening on your instance network ports, before finally mapping the IPs identified in the port scan back to the host’s owner. To make this process simpler for our customers, AWS recently released the Network Reachability rules package in Amazon Inspector, our automated security assessment service that enables you to understand and improve the security and compliance of applications deployed on AWS. The existing Amazon Inspector host assessment rules packages check the software and configurations on your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances for vulnerabilities and deviations from best practices.

The new Network Reachability rules package analyzes your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) network configuration to determine whether your EC2 instances can be reached from external networks such as the Internet, a virtual private gateway, AWS Direct Connect, or from a peered VPC. In other words, it informs you of potential external access to your hosts. It does this by analyzing all of your network configurations—like security groups, network access control lists (ACLs), route tables, and internet gateways (IGWs)—together to infer reachability. No packets need to be sent across the VPC network, nor must attempts be made to connect to EC2 instance network ports—it’s like packet-less network mapping and reconnaissance!

This new rules package is the first Amazon Inspector rules package that doesn’t require an Amazon Inspector agent to be installed on your Amazon EC2 instances. If you do optionally install the Amazon Inspector agent on your EC2 instances, the network reachability assessment will also report on the processes listening on those ports. In addition, installing the agent allows you to use Amazon Inspector host rules packages to check for vulnerabilities and security exposures in your EC2 instances.

To determine what is reachable, the Network Reachability rules package uses the latest technology from the AWS Provable Security initiative, referring to a suite of AWS technology powered by automated reasoning. It analyzes your AWS network configurations such as Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs), security groups, network access control lists (ACLs), and route tables to prove reachability of ports. What is automated reasoning, you ask? It’s fancy math that proves things are working as expected. In more technical terms, it’s a method of formal verification that automatically generates and checks mathematical proofs, which help to prove systems are functioning correctly. Note that Network Reachability only analyzes network configurations, so any other network controls, like on-instance IP filters or external firewalls, are not accounted for in the assessment. See documentation for more details.

Tim Kropp, Technology & Security Lead at Bridgewater Associates talked about how Bridgewater benefitted from Network Reachability Rules. “AWS provides tools for organizations to know if all their compliance, security, and availability requirements are being met. Technology created by the AWS Automated Reasoning Group, such as the Network Reachability Rules, allow us to continuously evaluate our live networks against these requirements. This grants us peace of mind that our most sensitive workloads exist on a network that we deeply understand.”

Network reachability assessments are priced per instance per assessment (instance-assessment). The free trial offers the first 250 instance-assessments for free within your first 90 days of usage. After the free trial, pricing is tiered based on your monthly volume. You can see pricing details here.

Using the Network Reachability rules package

Amazon Inspector makes it easy for you to run agentless network reachability assessments on all of your EC2 instances. You can do this with just a couple of clicks on the Welcome page of the Amazon Inspector console. First, use the check box to Enable network assessments, then select Run Once to run a single assessment or Run Weekly to run a weekly recurring assessment.
 

Figure 1: Assessment setup

Figure 1: Assessment setup

Customizing the Network Reachability rules package

If you want to target a subset of your instances or modify the recurrence of assessments, you can select Advanced setup for guided steps to set up and run a custom assessment. For full customization options including getting notifications for findings, select Cancel and use the following steps.

  1. Navigate to the Assessment targets page of the Amazon Inspector console to create an assessment target. You can select the option to include all instances within your account and AWS region, or you can assess a subset of your instances by adding tags to them in the EC2 console and inputting those tags when you create the assessment target. Give your target a name and select Save.
     
    Figure 2: Assessment target

    Figure 2: Assessment target

    Optional agent installation: To get information about the processes listening on reachable ports, you’ll need to install the Amazon Inspector agent on your EC2 instances. If your instances allow the Systems Manager Run command, you can select the Install Agents option while creating your assessment target. Otherwise, you can follow the instructions here to install the Amazon Inspector agent on your instances before setting up and running the Amazon Inspector assessments using the steps above. In addition, installing the agent allows you to use Amazon Inspector host rules packages to check for vulnerabilities and security exposures in your EC2 instances.

  2. Go to the Assessment templates page of the Amazon Inspector console. In the Target name field, select the assessment target that you created in step 1. From the Rules packages drop-down, select the Network Reachability-1.1 rules package. You can also set up a recurring schedule and notifications to your Amazon Simple Notification Service topic. (Learn more about Amazon SNS topics here). Now, select Create and Run. That’s it!

    Alternately, you can run the assessment by selecting the template you just created from the Assessment templates page and then selecting Run, or by using the Amazon Inspector API.

You can view your findings on the Findings page in the Amazon Inspector console. You can also download a CSV of the findings from Amazon Inspector by using the Download button on the page, or you can use the AWS application programming interface (API) to retrieve findings in another application.

Note: You can create any CloudWatch Events rule and add your Amazon Inspector assessment as the target using the assessment template’s Amazon Resource Name (ARN), which is available in the console. You can use CloudWatch Events rules to automatically trigger assessment runs on a schedule or based on any other event. For example, you can trigger a network reachability assessment whenever there is a change to a security group or another VPC configuration, allowing you to automatically be alerted about insecure network exposure.

Understanding your EC2 instance network exposure

You can use this new rules package to analyze the accessibility of critical ports, as well as all other network ports. For critical ports, Amazon Inspector will show the exposure of each and will offer findings per port. When critical, well-known ports (based on Amazon’s standard guidance) are reachable, findings will be created with higher severities. When the Amazon Inspector agent is installed on the instance, each reachable port with a listener will also be reported. The following examples show network exposure from the Internet. There are analogous findings for network exposure via VPN, Direct Connect, or VPC peering. Read more about the finding types here.

Example finding for a well-known port open to the Internet, without installation of the Amazon Inspector Agent:
 

Figure 3: Finding for a well-known port open to the Internet

Figure 3: Finding for a well-known port open to the Internet

Example finding for a well-known port open to the Internet, with the Amazon Inspector Agent installed and a listening process (SSH):
 

Figure 4: Finding for a well-known port open to the Internet, with the Amazon Inspector Agent installed and a listening process (SSH)

Figure 4: Finding for a well-known port open to the Internet, with the Amazon Inspector Agent installed and a listening process (SSH)

Note that the findings provide the details on exactly how network access is allowed, including which VPC and subnet the instance is in. This makes tracking down the root cause of the network access straightforward. The recommendation includes information about exactly which Security Group you can edit to remove the access. And like all Amazon Inspector findings, these can be published to an SNS topic for additional processing, whether that’s to a ticketing system or to a custom AWS Lambda function. (See our blog post on automatic remediation of findings for guidance on how to do this.) For example, you could use Lambda to automatically remove ingress rules in the Security Group to address a network reachability finding.

Summary

With this new functionality from Amazon Inspector, you now have an easy way of assessing the network exposure of your EC2 instances and identifying and resolving unwanted exposure. We’ll continue to tailor findings to align with customer feedback. We encourage you to try out the Network Reachability Rules Package yourself and post any questions in the Amazon Inspector forum.

Want more AWS Security news? Follow us on Twitter.

Author

Catherine Dodge

Catherine is a Senior Technical Program Manager in AWS Security. She helps teams use cutting edge AI technology to build security products to delight customers. She has over 15 years of experience in the cybersecurity field, mostly spent at the assembly level, either pulling apart malware or piecing together shellcode. In her spare time, she’s always tearing something down around the house, preferably ivy or drywall.

Author

Stephen Quigg

Stephen — known as “Squigg,” internally — is a Principal Security Solutions Architect at AWS. His job is helping customers understand AWS security and how they can meet their most demanding security requirements when using the AWS platform. It’s not all about solving hard problems though, he gets just as much delight when an AWS customer creates their first VPC! When he’s not with his customers, you can find him up in his loft making bleeping noises on a bunch of old synthesizers.

AWS Online Tech Talks – June 2018

Post Syndicated from Devin Watson original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-online-tech-talks-june-2018/

AWS Online Tech Talks – June 2018

Join us this month to learn about AWS services and solutions. New this month, we have a fireside chat with the GM of Amazon WorkSpaces and our 2nd episode of the “How to re:Invent” series. We’ll also cover best practices, deep dives, use cases and more! Join us and register today!

Note – All sessions are free and in Pacific Time.

Tech talks featured this month:

 

Analytics & Big Data

June 18, 2018 | 11:00 AM – 11:45 AM PT – Get Started with Real-Time Streaming Data in Under 5 Minutes – Learn how to use Amazon Kinesis to capture, store, and analyze streaming data in real-time including IoT device data, VPC flow logs, and clickstream data.
June 20, 2018 | 11:00 AM – 11:45 AM PT – Insights For Everyone – Deploying Data across your Organization – Learn how to deploy data at scale using AWS Analytics and QuickSight’s new reader role and usage based pricing.

 

AWS re:Invent
June 13, 2018 | 05:00 PM – 05:30 PM PT – Episode 2: AWS re:Invent Breakout Content Secret Sauce – Hear from one of our own AWS content experts as we dive deep into the re:Invent content strategy and how we maintain a high bar.
Compute

June 25, 2018 | 01:00 PM – 01:45 PM PT – Accelerating Containerized Workloads with Amazon EC2 Spot Instances – Learn how to efficiently deploy containerized workloads and easily manage clusters at any scale at a fraction of the cost with Spot Instances.

June 26, 2018 | 01:00 PM – 01:45 PM PT – Ensuring Your Windows Server Workloads Are Well-Architected – Get the benefits, best practices and tools on running your Microsoft Workloads on AWS leveraging a well-architected approach.

 

Containers
June 25, 2018 | 09:00 AM – 09:45 AM PT – Running Kubernetes on AWS – Learn about the basics of running Kubernetes on AWS including how setup masters, networking, security, and add auto-scaling to your cluster.

 

Databases

June 18, 2018 | 01:00 PM – 01:45 PM PT – Oracle to Amazon Aurora Migration, Step by Step – Learn how to migrate your Oracle database to Amazon Aurora.
DevOps

June 20, 2018 | 09:00 AM – 09:45 AM PT – Set Up a CI/CD Pipeline for Deploying Containers Using the AWS Developer Tools – Learn how to set up a CI/CD pipeline for deploying containers using the AWS Developer Tools.

 

Enterprise & Hybrid
June 18, 2018 | 09:00 AM – 09:45 AM PT – De-risking Enterprise Migration with AWS Managed Services – Learn how enterprise customers are de-risking cloud adoption with AWS Managed Services.

June 19, 2018 | 11:00 AM – 11:45 AM PT – Launch AWS Faster using Automated Landing Zones – Learn how the AWS Landing Zone can automate the set up of best practice baselines when setting up new

 

AWS Environments

June 21, 2018 | 11:00 AM – 11:45 AM PT – Leading Your Team Through a Cloud Transformation – Learn how you can help lead your organization through a cloud transformation.

June 21, 2018 | 01:00 PM – 01:45 PM PT – Enabling New Retail Customer Experiences with Big Data – Learn how AWS can help retailers realize actual value from their big data and deliver on differentiated retail customer experiences.

June 28, 2018 | 01:00 PM – 01:45 PM PT – Fireside Chat: End User Collaboration on AWS – Learn how End User Compute services can help you deliver access to desktops and applications anywhere, anytime, using any device.
IoT

June 27, 2018 | 11:00 AM – 11:45 AM PT – AWS IoT in the Connected Home – Learn how to use AWS IoT to build innovative Connected Home products.

 

Machine Learning

June 19, 2018 | 09:00 AM – 09:45 AM PT – Integrating Amazon SageMaker into your Enterprise – Learn how to integrate Amazon SageMaker and other AWS Services within an Enterprise environment.

June 21, 2018 | 09:00 AM – 09:45 AM PT – Building Text Analytics Applications on AWS using Amazon Comprehend – Learn how you can unlock the value of your unstructured data with NLP-based text analytics.

 

Management Tools

June 20, 2018 | 01:00 PM – 01:45 PM PT – Optimizing Application Performance and Costs with Auto Scaling – Learn how selecting the right scaling option can help optimize application performance and costs.

 

Mobile
June 25, 2018 | 11:00 AM – 11:45 AM PT – Drive User Engagement with Amazon Pinpoint – Learn how Amazon Pinpoint simplifies and streamlines effective user engagement.

 

Security, Identity & Compliance

June 26, 2018 | 09:00 AM – 09:45 AM PT – Understanding AWS Secrets Manager – Learn how AWS Secrets Manager helps you rotate and manage access to secrets centrally.
June 28, 2018 | 09:00 AM – 09:45 AM PT – Using Amazon Inspector to Discover Potential Security Issues – See how Amazon Inspector can be used to discover security issues of your instances.

 

Serverless

June 19, 2018 | 01:00 PM – 01:45 PM PT – Productionize Serverless Application Building and Deployments with AWS SAM – Learn expert tips and techniques for building and deploying serverless applications at scale with AWS SAM.

 

Storage

June 26, 2018 | 11:00 AM – 11:45 AM PT – Deep Dive: Hybrid Cloud Storage with AWS Storage Gateway – Learn how you can reduce your on-premises infrastructure by using the AWS Storage Gateway to connecting your applications to the scalable and reliable AWS storage services.
June 27, 2018 | 01:00 PM – 01:45 PM PT – Changing the Game: Extending Compute Capabilities to the Edge – Discover how to change the game for IIoT and edge analytics applications with AWS Snowball Edge plus enhanced Compute instances.
June 28, 2018 | 11:00 AM – 11:45 AM PT – Big Data and Analytics Workloads on Amazon EFS – Get best practices and deployment advice for running big data and analytics workloads on Amazon EFS.

DNS over HTTPS in Firefox

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/756262/rss

The Mozilla blog has an
article describing the addition of DNS over HTTPS (DoH) as an optional
feature in the Firefox browser. “DoH support has been added to
Firefox 62 to improve the way Firefox interacts with DNS. DoH uses
encrypted networking to obtain DNS information from a server that is
configured within Firefox. This means that DNS requests sent to the DoH
cloud server are encrypted while old style DNS requests are not
protected.” The configured server is hosted by Cloudflare, which
has posted this
privacy agreement about the service.

Replacing macOS Server with Synology NAS

Post Syndicated from Roderick Bauer original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/replacing-macos-server-with-synology-nas/

Synology NAS boxes backed up to the cloud

Businesses and organizations that rely on macOS server for essential office and data services are facing some decisions about the future of their IT services.

Apple recently announced that it is deprecating a significant portion of essential network services in macOS Server, as they described in a support statement posted on April 24, 2018, “Prepare for changes to macOS Server.” Apple’s note includes:

macOS Server is changing to focus more on management of computers, devices, and storage on your network. As a result, some changes are coming in how Server works. A number of services will be deprecated, and will be hidden on new installations of an update to macOS Server coming in spring 2018.

The note lists the services that will be removed in a future release of macOS Server, including calendar and contact support, Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), Domain Name Services (DNS), mail, instant messages, virtual private networking (VPN), NetInstall, Web server, and the Wiki.

Apple assures users who have already configured any of the listed services that they will be able to use them in the spring 2018 macOS Server update, but the statement ends with links to a number of alternative services, including hosted services, that macOS Server users should consider as viable replacements to the features it is removing. These alternative services are all FOSS (Free and Open-Source Software).

As difficult as this could be for organizations that use macOS server, this is not unexpected. Apple left the server hardware space back in 2010, when Steve Jobs announced the company was ending its line of Xserve rackmount servers, which were introduced in May, 2002. Since then, macOS Server has hardly been a prominent part of Apple’s product lineup. It’s not just the product itself that has lost some luster, but the entire category of SMB office and business servers, which has been undergoing a gradual change in recent years.

Some might wonder how important the news about macOS Server is, given that macOS Server represents a pretty small share of the server market. macOS Server has been important to design shops, agencies, education users, and small businesses that likely have been on Macs for ages, but it’s not a significant part of the IT infrastructure of larger organizations and businesses.

What Comes After macOS Server?

Lovers of macOS Server don’t have to fear having their Mac minis pried from their cold, dead hands quite yet. Installed services will continue to be available. In the fall of 2018, new installations and upgrades of macOS Server will require users to migrate most services to other software. Since many of the services of macOS Server were already open-source, this means that a change in software might not be required. It does mean more configuration and management required from those who continue with macOS Server, however.

Users can continue with macOS Server if they wish, but many will see the writing on the wall and look for a suitable substitute.

The Times They Are A-Changin’

For many people working in organizations, what is significant about this announcement is how it reflects the move away from the once ubiquitous server-based IT infrastructure. Services that used to be centrally managed and office-based, such as storage, file sharing, communications, and computing, have moved to the cloud.

In selecting the next office IT platforms, there’s an opportunity to move to solutions that reflect and support how people are working and the applications they are using both in the office and remotely. For many, this means including cloud-based services in office automation, backup, and business continuity/disaster recovery planning. This includes Software as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Infrastructure as a Service (Saas, PaaS, IaaS) options.

IT solutions that integrate well with the cloud are worth strong consideration for what comes after a macOS Server-based environment.

Synology NAS as a macOS Server Alternative

One solution that is becoming popular is to replace macOS Server with a device that has the ability to provide important office services, but also bridges the office and cloud environments. Using Network-Attached Storage (NAS) to take up the server slack makes a lot of sense. Many customers are already using NAS for file sharing, local data backup, automatic cloud backup, and other uses. In the case of Synology, their operating system, Synology DiskStation Manager (DSM), is Linux based, and integrates the basic functions of file sharing, centralized backup, RAID storage, multimedia streaming, virtual storage, and other common functions.

Synology NAS box

Synology NAS

Since DSM is based on Linux, there are numerous server applications available, including many of the same ones that are available for macOS Server, which shares conceptual roots with Linux as it comes from BSD Unix.

Synology DiskStation Manager Package Center screenshot

Synology DiskStation Manager Package Center

According to Ed Lukacs, COO at 2FIFTEEN Systems Management in Salt Lake City, their customers have found the move from macOS Server to Synology NAS not only painless, but positive. DSM works seamlessly with macOS and has been faster for their customers, as well. Many of their customers are running Adobe Creative Suite and Google G Suite applications, so a workflow that combines local storage, remote access, and the cloud, is already well known to them. Remote users are supported by Synology’s QuickConnect or VPN.

Business continuity and backup are simplified by the flexible storage capacity of the NAS. Synology has built-in backup to Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage with Synology’s Cloud Sync, as well as a choice of a number of other B2-compatible applications, such as Cloudberry, Comet, and Arq.

Customers have been able to get up and running quickly, with only initial data transfers requiring some time to complete. After that, management of the NAS can be handled in-house or with the support of a Managed Service Provider (MSP).

Are You Sticking with macOS Server or Moving to Another Platform?

If you’re affected by this change in macOS Server, please let us know in the comments how you’re planning to cope. Are you using Synology NAS for server services? Please tell us how that’s working for you.

The post Replacing macOS Server with Synology NAS appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

All Systems Go! 2018 CfP Open

Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original http://0pointer.net/blog/all-systems-go-2018-cfp-open.html

The All Systems Go! 2018 Call for Participation is Now Open!

The Call for Participation (CFP) for All Systems Go!
2018 is now open. We’d like to invite you
to submit your proposals for consideration to the CFP submission
site.

ASG image

The CFP will close on July 30th. Notification of acceptance and
non-acceptance will go out within 7 days of the closing of the CFP.

All topics relevant to foundational open-source Linux technologies are
welcome. In particular, however, we are looking for proposals
including, but not limited to, the following topics:

  • Low-level container executors and infrastructure
  • IoT and embedded OS infrastructure
  • BPF and eBPF filtering
  • OS, container, IoT image delivery and updating
  • Building Linux devices and applications
  • Low-level desktop technologies
  • Networking
  • System and service management
  • Tracing and performance measuring
  • IPC and RPC systems
  • Security and Sandboxing

While our focus is definitely more on the user-space side of things,
talks about kernel projects are welcome, as long as they have a clear
and direct relevance for user-space.

For more information please visit our conference
website!

Connect, collaborate, and learn at AWS Global Summits in 2018

Post Syndicated from Tina Kelleher original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/connect-collaborate-and-learn-at-aws-global-summits-in-2018/

Regardless of your career path, there’s no denying that attending industry events can provide helpful career development opportunities — not only for improving and expanding your skill sets, but for networking as well. According to this article from PayScale.com, experts estimate that somewhere between 70-85% of new positions are landed through networking.

Narrowing our focus to networking opportunities with cloud computing professionals who’re working on tackling some of today’s most innovative and exciting big data solutions, attending big data-focused sessions at an AWS Global Summit is a great place to start.

AWS Global Summits are free events that bring the cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. As the name suggests, these summits are held in major cities around the world, and attract technologists from all industries and skill levels who’re interested in hearing from AWS leaders, experts, partners, and customers.

In addition to networking opportunities with top cloud technology providers, consultants and your peers in our Partner and Solutions Expo, you’ll also hone your AWS skills by attending and participating in a multitude of education and training opportunities.

Here’s a brief sampling of some of the upcoming sessions relevant to big data professionals:

May 31st : Big Data Architectural Patterns and Best Practices on AWS | AWS Summit – Mexico City

June 6th-7th: Various (click on the “Big Data & Analytics” header) | AWS Summit – Berlin

June 20-21st : [email protected] | Public Sector Summit – Washington DC

June 21st: Enabling Self Service for Data Scientists with AWS Service Catalog | AWS Summit – Sao Paulo

Be sure to check out the main page for AWS Global Summits, where you can see which cities have AWS Summits planned for 2018, register to attend an upcoming event, or provide your information to be notified when registration opens for a future event.

[$] An introduction to MQTT

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/753705/rss

I was sure that somewhere there must be
physically-lightweight sensors with simple power, simple networking, and
a lightweight protocol that allowed them to squirt their data down the
network with a minimum of overhead. So my interest was piqued when Jan-Piet Mens spoke at FLOSS
UK’s Spring
Conference on “Small Things for Monitoring”. Once he started passing
working demonstration systems around the room without interrupting the
demonstration, it was clear that MQTT was what I’d been looking for.

AWS Online Tech Talks – May and Early June 2018

Post Syndicated from Devin Watson original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-online-tech-talks-may-and-early-june-2018/

AWS Online Tech Talks – May and Early June 2018  

Join us this month to learn about some of the exciting new services and solution best practices at AWS. We also have our first re:Invent 2018 webinar series, “How to re:Invent”. Sign up now to learn more, we look forward to seeing you.

Note – All sessions are free and in Pacific Time.

Tech talks featured this month:

Analytics & Big Data

May 21, 2018 | 11:00 AM – 11:45 AM PT – Integrating Amazon Elasticsearch with your DevOps Tooling – Learn how you can easily integrate Amazon Elasticsearch Service into your DevOps tooling and gain valuable insight from your log data.

May 23, 2018 | 11:00 AM – 11:45 AM PT – Data Warehousing and Data Lake Analytics, Together – Learn how to query data across your data warehouse and data lake without moving data.

May 24, 2018 | 11:00 AM – 11:45 AM PT – Data Transformation Patterns in AWS – Discover how to perform common data transformations on the AWS Data Lake.

Compute

May 29, 2018 | 01:00 PM – 01:45 PM PT – Creating and Managing a WordPress Website with Amazon Lightsail – Learn about Amazon Lightsail and how you can create, run and manage your WordPress websites with Amazon’s simple compute platform.

May 30, 2018 | 01:00 PM – 01:45 PM PT – Accelerating Life Sciences with HPC on AWS – Learn how you can accelerate your Life Sciences research workloads by harnessing the power of high performance computing on AWS.

Containers

May 24, 2018 | 01:00 PM – 01:45 PM PT – Building Microservices with the 12 Factor App Pattern on AWS – Learn best practices for building containerized microservices on AWS, and how traditional software design patterns evolve in the context of containers.

Databases

May 21, 2018 | 01:00 PM – 01:45 PM PT – How to Migrate from Cassandra to Amazon DynamoDB – Get the benefits, best practices and guides on how to migrate your Cassandra databases to Amazon DynamoDB.

May 23, 2018 | 01:00 PM – 01:45 PM PT – 5 Hacks for Optimizing MySQL in the Cloud – Learn how to optimize your MySQL databases for high availability, performance, and disaster resilience using RDS.

DevOps

May 23, 2018 | 09:00 AM – 09:45 AM PT – .NET Serverless Development on AWS – Learn how to build a modern serverless application in .NET Core 2.0.

Enterprise & Hybrid

May 22, 2018 | 11:00 AM – 11:45 AM PT – Hybrid Cloud Customer Use Cases on AWS – Learn how customers are leveraging AWS hybrid cloud capabilities to easily extend their datacenter capacity, deliver new services and applications, and ensure business continuity and disaster recovery.

IoT

May 31, 2018 | 11:00 AM – 11:45 AM PT – Using AWS IoT for Industrial Applications – Discover how you can quickly onboard your fleet of connected devices, keep them secure, and build predictive analytics with AWS IoT.

Machine Learning

May 22, 2018 | 09:00 AM – 09:45 AM PT – Using Apache Spark with Amazon SageMaker – Discover how to use Apache Spark with Amazon SageMaker for training jobs and application integration.

May 24, 2018 | 09:00 AM – 09:45 AM PT – Introducing AWS DeepLens – Learn how AWS DeepLens provides a new way for developers to learn machine learning by pairing the physical device with a broad set of tutorials, examples, source code, and integration with familiar AWS services.

Management Tools

May 21, 2018 | 09:00 AM – 09:45 AM PT – Gaining Better Observability of Your VMs with Amazon CloudWatch – Learn how CloudWatch Agent makes it easy for customers like Rackspace to monitor their VMs.

Mobile

May 29, 2018 | 11:00 AM – 11:45 AM PT – Deep Dive on Amazon Pinpoint Segmentation and Endpoint Management – See how segmentation and endpoint management with Amazon Pinpoint can help you target the right audience.

Networking

May 31, 2018 | 09:00 AM – 09:45 AM PT – Making Private Connectivity the New Norm via AWS PrivateLink – See how PrivateLink enables service owners to offer private endpoints to customers outside their company.

Security, Identity, & Compliance

May 30, 2018 | 09:00 AM – 09:45 AM PT – Introducing AWS Certificate Manager Private Certificate Authority (CA) – Learn how AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) Private Certificate Authority (CA), a managed private CA service, helps you easily and securely manage the lifecycle of your private certificates.

June 1, 2018 | 09:00 AM – 09:45 AM PT – Introducing AWS Firewall Manager – Centrally configure and manage AWS WAF rules across your accounts and applications.

Serverless

May 22, 2018 | 01:00 PM – 01:45 PM PT – Building API-Driven Microservices with Amazon API Gateway – Learn how to build a secure, scalable API for your application in our tech talk about API-driven microservices.

Storage

May 30, 2018 | 11:00 AM – 11:45 AM PT – Accelerate Productivity by Computing at the Edge – Learn how AWS Snowball Edge support for compute instances helps accelerate data transfers, execute custom applications, and reduce overall storage costs.

June 1, 2018 | 11:00 AM – 11:45 AM PT – Learn to Build a Cloud-Scale Website Powered by Amazon EFS – Technical deep dive where you’ll learn tips and tricks for integrating WordPress, Drupal and Magento with Amazon EFS.