This week, I’ll meet you at AWS partner’s Jamf Nation Live in Amsterdam where we’re showing how to use Amazon EC2 Mac to deploy your remote developer workstations or configure your iOS CI/CD pipelines in the cloud.
Last Week’s Launches
While I was traveling last week, I kept an eye on the AWS News. Here are some launches that got my attention.
Amazon EC2 Instance Connect Endpoint. Endpoint for EC2 Instance Connect allows you to securely access Amazon EC2 instances using their private IP addresses, making the use of bastion hosts obsolete. Endpoint for EC2 Instance Connect is by far my favorite launch from last week. With EC2 Instance Connect, you use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies and principals to control SSH access to your instances. This removes the need to share and manage SSH keys. We also updated the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) to allow you to easily connect or open a secured tunnel to an instance using only its instance ID. I read and contributed to a couple of threads on social media where you pointed out that AWS Systems Manager Session Manager already offered similar capabilities. You’re right. But the extra advantage of EC2 Instance Connect Endpoint is that it allows you to use your existing SSH-based tools and libraries, such as the scp command.
Amazon Inspector now supports code scanning of AWS Lambda functions. This expands the existing capability to scan Lambda functions and associated layers for software vulnerabilities in application package dependencies. Amazon Detective also extends finding groups to Amazon Inspector. Detective automatically collects findings from Amazon Inspector, GuardDuty, and other AWS security services, such as AWS Security Hub, to help increase situational awareness of related security events.
Amazon Verified Permissions is generally available. If you’re designing or developing business applications that need to enforce user-based permissions, you have a new option to centrally manage application permissions. Verified Permissions is a fine-grained permissions management and authorization service for your applications that can be used at any scale. Verified Permissions centralizes permissions in a policy store and helps developers use those permissions to authorize user actions within their applications. Similarly to the way an identity provider simplifies authentication, a policy store lets you manage authorization in a consistent and scalable way. Read Danilo’s post to discover the details.
Amazon S3 Dual-Layer Server-Side Encryption with keys stored in AWS Key Management Service (DSSE-KMS). Some heavily regulated industries require double encryption to store some type of data at rest. Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) offers DSSE-KMS, a new free encryption option that provides two layers of data encryption, using different keys and different implementation of the 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard with Galois Counter Mode (AES-GCM) algorithm. My colleague Irshad’s post has all the details.
AWS CloudTrail Lake Dashboards provide out-of-the-box visibility and top insights from your audit and security data directly within the CloudTrail Lake console. CloudTrail Lake features a number of AWS curated dashboards so you can get started right away – with no required detailed dashboard setup or SQL experience.
AWS IAM Identity Center now supports automated user provisioning from Google Workspace. You can now connect your Google Workspace to AWS IAM Identity Center (successor to AWS Single Sign-On) once and manage access to AWS accounts and applications centrally in IAM Identity Center.
AWS CloudShell is now available in 12 additional regions. AWS CloudShell is a browser-based shell that makes it easier to securely manage, explore, and interact with your AWS resources. The list of the 12 new Regions is detailed in the launch announcement.
For a full list of AWS announcements, be sure to keep an eye on the What’s New at AWS page.
Other AWS News
Here are some other updates and news that you might have missed:
Upcoming AWS Events
Check your calendars and sign up for these AWS events:
That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Week in Review!
This post is part of our Week in Review series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS! — seb
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