A decade of re:Invent for AWS Cloud Solutions Architects & Tech Enthusiasts
The pandemic was almost non-existent for tech devotees, investors, commoners, and other stakeholders as the pioneers of the AWS Certification Training Course, i.e., AWS Certification Course for Solutions Architect, i.e., Amazon Inc. successfully organized the 10th edition of their annual event, “re: Invent 2021’ from November 29th to December 3rd 2021, in Las Vegas, United States of America, where new launches were showcased. This year’s edition was back to being an in-person one, apart from being streamed live, a welcome upgrade from last year when it was only online due to the prevailing circumstances.
As a cybersecurity and or information security professional, it is important to be updated about your sector’s latest developments and these events help you and your company understand and plan for upskilling and future upgrades respectively.
With AWS having a wide variety of platforms with more than 200 products and services, it is reasonable to expect that there would’ve been a wide variety of launches.
For the area of cloud, there were many products and developments:
- Amazon CloudWatch Insights- Coming from the house of AWS CloudWatch, which is a monitoring and observability service for Information Technology managers, product owners, Cloud Solutions Architects, DevOps engineers, developers, and site reliability engineers, Amazon CloudWatch Insights has been launched. It has been described as a fast, flexible SQL-based query engine. For instance, it can be used by those with the above titles to analyze thousands of EC2 instances by CPU Utilization to troubleshoot an underperforming application. Using flexible query and spontaneous metric aggregations, other CloudWatch features, millions of operational metrics, and the trends and patterns in them can be identified and used in real-time to reduce the resolution time.
Metrics Insights can also be used by using a visual query builder, apart from the usual SQL language. Instances can be used to focus on analysis and identify falling instances rapidly. By rebooting problematic instances, applications can be recovered using queries. Powerful visualizations can be curated using innovative queries and chart types.
- Amazon CloudWatch RUM- Continuing the expansion of Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon CloudWatch RUM, short for Real-User Monitoring has been introduced. This product is a part of the trio of Amazon CloudWatch Digital Experience. Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics and Amazon CloudWatch Evidently complete the triangle. As the name suggests, CloudWatch RUM allows developers to view their applications’ performance across geographies, browsers, and devices in real-time so that measures for improvement can be taken as soon as they are needed. It also empowers Application Developers and DevOps Engineers in making sure that the Mean Time to Resolve [MTTR] is lower, which results in faster resolution every time. Page load times, client-side errors, and user behavior can be visualized, and deconstructed live in both aggregated and detailed forms. A part of this is finding pertinent debugging data like error messages, stack traces, and user sessions.
The CloudWatch RUM web client is loaded into your web application asynchronously from a content delivery network (CDN). Options can be activated or deactivated to collect performance telemetry events, JavaScript errors, HTTP errors, and X-Ray traces. From backend infrastructure nodes to client-side nodes, traces of everything can be smoothly tallied on the CloudWatch RUM console via integration with CloudWatch Service Lens and AWS X-Ray. With the addition of client-side performance data under CloudWatch RUM, developers can now use it for end-to-end monitoring.
- Amazon CloudWatch Evidently- The Amazon CloudWatch family has got a metaphorical twin in Amazon CloudWatch Evidently along with Amazon CloudWatch RUM. This offering is for application developers to help them safely validate new features across the application stack. Its data points. Evidently has a granular scheduling capability to dial-up traffic in a controlled manner. This capability allows the developer to monitor and performance metrics of the new feature. A/B experiments, testing five variations at the same time can be conducted to make feature designs using experiments data, which can also be analyzed here using statistical methods. While the application improvement professional is running an experiment, Evidently’s anytime p-value and confidence intervals allow them to see when a statistical significance so that the experiment may be ended. In the event of issues with the launch, alarms can be rolled back. The biggest advantage of using this offering is the facility to integrate with CloudWatch RUM and use its metrics. In conclusion, it may not be wrong to term AWS CloudWatch Evidently a laboratory of applications.
- Amazon VPC IP Address Manager- Using AWS and worried about Internet Protocol [IP] address management? Amazon Virtual Private Cloud Management has released Amazon VPC IP Address Manager (IPAM).
Network administrators, using its automated workflows, can intelligently manage IP addresses. This product can be created, accessed, and managed with various methods. Some of these are: AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), AWS SDKs, and Query API. Its features include private and public scope, collectively called Scope, collection of contiguous IP address ranges [CIDRs] called Pool and Allocation, which is nothing but CIDR assignment from an IPAM pool to another one of it or another resource. In the scenario of a VPC’s creation and an IPAM pool, its CIDR has been chosen, the CIDR is assigned from the CIDR provisioned to the IPAM pool. Allocations can be monitored and managed via IPAM. This automation product is programmed to retain your IP address data for up to 3 years, which is a handful for doing retrospective analysis and audits for your organization’s network security and routing policies. That routine IP address management tasks like tracking IP utilization, troubleshooting, auditing can be done speedily is a given from this new launch.
- Amazon VPC Network Access Analyzer- One of the things that have enthused tech enthusiasts, investors, reviewers and professionals, and other well-wishers of this company alike is the product range among existing brands has been expanded. Under the domain of Amazon VPC, Network Access Analyzer has also been added to the range. This is a security feature so that helps you check whether your organization’s Virtual Private Cloud [VPC] assets meet the security and compliance guidelines.
Some of those include Databases that should never be accessible from the Internet, Application servers can only send TCP traffic on port 443 to a trusted on-premises IP range, and Production VPCs should not be accessible from Development VPCs. This service uses automated reasoning algorithms to analyze the network paths. We and customers may not, but there is something called Network Access Scope for which findings are produced by them. By using IP address ranges, port ranges, traffic protocols, AWS resource IDs, AWS Resource Groups, Internet Gateways or NAT Gateways sources and destinations for your network access requirements can be easily governed as can be the network access across your AWS environment, independent of how your network is configured. AWS CLI, AWS SDK, or AWS Management Console can also be used in assisting you in your tasks.
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