re:Invent Highlights — Day Three
As re:Invent continues, so to does the string of announcements promising to change the face of cloud computing. Many of the major announcements today came from Amazon itself — amongst other items, AWS announced two new containerized cloud offerings.
The first of these announced services, the Elastic Container Service for Kuernetes (EKS) promises to allow developers the ability to utilize the Google Kubernetes software to reduce the complexity of interlinking container-constrained systems, making them easier to spin up, easier to maintain, and most importantly, more effective at collaborative tasks like load balancing and data structuring.
The second of these announced services, Fargate, is essentially an application-on-request offering that allows for the creation of top-level applications, but offloads the actual management of the infrastructure to Amazon. It is, in essence, an IaaS offering merged with a PaaS-type management offering.
In addition to these new offerings, Amazon announced a trio of AWS security systems designed specifically for Internet of Things devices. The IoT Device Defender is a service that monitors edge devices registered with AWS and continuously audits their configuration, politics, and behavior. The IoT Device Management service is primarily a management system by which IoT devices can be created, organized, retired, and remotely managed. Finally, AWS rounded off these announced services with AWS IoT Analytics, an analytic solution for IoT devices that allow more powerful analytic leveraging.
Continuing their focus on IoT security and management, AWS announced a variation on the FreeRTOS operating system which drive the majority of low-power microcontroller-based IoT devices. Amazon FreeRTOS is designed to be a modernized and more secure version of the IoT operating system that connects devices to the cloud through either a direct connection or through AWS Greengrass. AWS promises increased security and ease of implementation, though the offering is still in its very earliest stages.
AWS also announced that Amazon Lightsail would be receiving a new module. This module, which supports load balancing and integrated certificate management, is designed to scale from small developers all the way up to the enterprise, and is positioned as a strong solution for both.
Amazon continued to announced Amazon Neptune, a relationship graph database server that allows for social graphs and other connected data points. In many cases, having a traditional database collate this information and link resources can be risky — making the database useful can expose too much, and exposing too little makes the service less useful. Neptune promises to be a strong solution that fits right in the middle.
Rounding the list off was the announcement of Aurora Serverless, an event-driven compute database. Aurora Serverless is essentially a space-rental, where the database is only chargeable when its in use. This allows developers to have an on-demand relational database — this is important for many reasons, but in terms of security, it does also allow for scaling without the need for additional machines and clusters that might expand the attack surface and make for an easier breaking of security.
Informatica, an enterprise cloud data management leader, announced an Enterprise Data Catalog which uses machine learning methodologies to track and catalog enterprise data for warehousing and management applications. While not directly valuable in an active-security sense, one of the major threats to data security is the presence of forensic data and exposed data that owners aren’t even aware of. This kind of process is key to assuring security.
While more announcements and discussions were held, the Amazon announcements were perhaps the most important and impactful for the current security landscape. As more devices shift into the Internet of Things, ensuring their security while also allowing the collation of the data in a useful, complex way will be important to the industry as a whole. Amazon seems to be approaching this issue from all directions, and while whether or not these services deliver all they’ve promised is yet to be seen, the fact that this is even part of the conversation is promising.
