AWS Blog

Are you tired of hearing me talk about Amazon WorkSpaces yet? I hope not, because we have a lot of customer-driven additions on the roadmap! Our customers in the developer and analyst community have been asking for a workstation-class machine that will allow them to take advantage of the low cost and flexibility of WorkSpaces. Developers want to run Visual Studio, IntelliJ, Eclipse, and other IDEs. Analysts want to run complex simulations and statistical analysis using MatLab, GNU Octave, R, and Stata.

New Power Bundle
Today we are extending the current set of WorkSpaces bundles with a new Power bundle. With four vCPUs, 16 GiB of memory, and 275 GB of storage (175 GB on the system volume and another 100 GB on the user volume), this bundle is designed to make developers, analysts, (and me) smile. You can launch them in all of the usual ways: Console, CLI (create-workspaces), or API (CreateWorkSpaces):

One really interesting benefit to using a cloud-based virtual desktop for simulations and statistical analysis is the ease of access to data that’s already stored in the cloud. Analysts can mine and analyze petabytes of data stored in S3 that is effectively local (with respect to access time) to the WorkSpace. This low-latency access will boost productivity and also simplifies the use of other AWS data analysis tools such as Amazon Redshift, Amazon Redshift Spectrum, Amazon QuickSight, and Amazon Athena.

Like the existing bundles, the new Power bundle can be used in either billing configuration, AlwaysOn or AutoStop (read Amazon WorkSpaces Update – Hourly Usage and Expanded Root Volume to learn more). The bundle is available in all AWS Regions where WorkSpaces is available and you can launch one today! Visit the WorkSpaces Pricing page for pricing in your region.

— Jeff;

The AWS Developer Tools Team has been hard at work on the AWS SDK for Java and is launching a Developer Preview of version 2.0 today.

This version is a major rewrite of the older, 1.11.x codebase. Built on top of Java 8 with a focus on consistency, immutability and ease of use, the new SDK includes frequently requested features such as support for non-blocking I/O and the ability to choose the desired HTTP implementation at runtime. The new non-blocking I/O support is more efficient than the existing, thread-based implementation of the Async variants of the service clients. Each non-blocking request returns a CompletableFuture object.

The version 2.0 SDK includes a number of changes to the earlier APIs. For example, it replaces the existing mix of client constructors and mutable methods with a consistent model based on client builders and immutable clients. The SDK also collapses the disparate collection of classes used to configure regions into a single Region class, and provides a new set of APIs for streaming.

The SDK is available on GitHub. You can send public feedback by opening GitHub issues and you can also send pull requests in the usual way.

To learn more about this SDK, read AWS SDK for Java 2.0 – Developer Preview on the AWS Developer Blog.

— Jeff;

I’ve already told you about Amazon Rekognition and described how it uses deep neural network models to analyze images by detecting objects, scenes, and faces.

Today I am happy to tell you that Rekognition is now available in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region. To learn more, read the Amazon Rekognition FAQ, and the Amazon Rekognition Product Details, review the Amazon Rekognition Customer Use Cases, and then build your app using the information on the Amazon Rekognition for Developers page.

Motorola Solutions for Public Safety
While I have your attention, I would love to tell you how Motorola Solutions is exploring how Rekognition can enhance real-time intelligence for public safety personnel in the field and at the command center.

Motorola Solutions provides over 100,000 public safety and commercial customers in more than 100 countries with software, services, and tools for mobile intelligence and digital evidence management, many powered by images captured using body, dashboard, and stationary cameras. Due to the exceptionally sensitive nature of these images, they must be stored in an environment that meets stringent CJIS (Criminal Justice Information Systems) security standards defined by the FBI.

For several years, researchers at Motorola Solutions have been exploring the use of artificial intelligence. For example, they have built prototype applications that use Rekognition, Lex, and Polly in conjunction with their own software to scan images from a body-worn camera for missing persons and to raise alerts without requiring continuous human attention or interaction. With approximately 100,000 missing people in the US alone, law enforcement agencies need to bring powerful tools to bear. At re:Invent 2016, Dan Law (Chief Data Scientist for Motorola Solutions) described how they use AWS to aid in this effort. Here’s the video (Dan’s section is titled AI for Public Safety):

AWS and CJIS
The applications that Dan described can run in AWS GovCloud (US). This is an isolated cloud built to protect and preserve sensitive IT data while meeting the FBI’s CJIS requirements (and many others). AWS GovCloud (US) resides on US soil and is managed exclusively by US citizens. AWS routinely signs CJIS security agreements with our customers and can either perform or allow background checks on our employees, as needed.

Here are some resources that you can use to learn more about AWS and CJIS:

• AWS GovCloud (US) FAQ
• AWS CJIS Compliance
• AWS CJIS Compliance White Paper
• AWS CJIS Addendums for US States and Cities
• AWS CJIS Workbook (Excel spreadsheet)

— Jeff;

The bill that you receive for your use of AWS in July will include a change in the way that Amazon CloudWatch charges are presented. The CloudWatch team made this change in order to make your bill simpler and easier to understand.

Consolidating Charges
In the past, charges for your usage of CloudWatch were split between two sections of your bill. For historical reasons, the charges for CloudWatch Alarms, CloudWatch Metrics, and calls to the CloudWatch API were reported in the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) detail section, while charges for CloudWatch Logs and CloudWatch Dashboards were reported in the CloudWatch detail section, like this:

We have received feedback that splitting the charges across two sections of the bill made it difficult to locate and understand the entire set of monitoring charges. In order to address this issue, we are moving the charges that were formerly listed in the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) detail section to the CloudWatch detail section. We are making the same change to the detailed billing report, moving the affected charges from the AmazonEC2 product code to the AmazonCloudWatch product code and changing to the AmazonCloudWatch product name. This change does not affect your overall bill; it simply consolidates all of the charges for the use of CloudWatch in one section.

Billing Metric
The CloudWatch billing metric named Estimated Charges can be viewed as a Total Estimated Charge, or broken down By Service:

The total will not change. However, as noted above, the charges that formerly had AmazonEC2 as the ServiceName dimension will now have it set to AmazonCloudWatch:

You may need to adjust thresholds on your billing alarms as a result:

Once again, your total AWS bill will not change. You will begin to see the consolidated charges for CloudWatch in your AWS bill for July 2017.

— Jeff;

Earlier this year I told you about Amazon DynamoDB Accelerator (DAX), a fully-managed caching service that sits in front of (logically speaking) your Amazon DynamoDB tables. DAX returns cached responses in microseconds, making it a great fit for eventually-consistent read-intensive workloads. DAX supports the DynamoDB API, and is seamless and easy to use. As a managed service, you simply create your DAX cluster and use it as the target for your existing reads and writes. You don’t have to worry about patching, cluster maintenance, replication, or fault management.

Now Generally Available
Today I am pleased to announce that DAX is now generally available. We have expanded DAX into additional AWS Regions and used the preview time to fine-tune performance and availability:

Now in Five Regions – DAX is now available in the US East (Northern Virginia), EU (Ireland), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and US West (Northern California) Regions.

In Production – Our preview customers are reporting that they are using DAX in production, that they loved how easy it was to add DAX to their application, and have told us that their apps are now running 10x faster.

Getting Started with DAX
As I outlined in my earlier post, it is easy to use DAX to accelerate your existing DynamoDB applications. You simply create a DAX cluster in the desired region, update your application to reference the DAX SDK for Java (the calls are the same; this is a drop-in replacement), and configure the SDK to use the endpoint to your cluster. As a read-through/write-through cache, DAX seamlessly handles all of the DynamoDB read/write APIs.

We are working on SDK support for other languages, and I will share additional information as it becomes available.

DAX Pricing
You pay for each node in the cluster (see the DynamoDB Pricing page for more information) on a per-hour basis, with prices starting at $0.269 per hour in the US East (Northern Virginia) and US West (Oregon) regions. With DAX, each of the nodes in your cluster serves as a read target and as a failover target for high availability. The DAX SDK is cluster aware and will issue round-robin requests to all nodes in the cluster so that you get to make full use of the cluster’s cache resources.

Because DAX can easily handle sudden spikes in read traffic, you may be able to reduce the amount of provisioned throughput for your tables, resulting in an overall cost savings while still returning results in microseconds.

— Jeff;

AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall) helps to protect your application from many different types of application-layer attacks that involve requests that are malicious or malformed. As I showed you when I first wrote about this service (New – AWS WAF), you can define rules that match cross-site scripting, IP address, SQL injection, size, or content constraints:

When incoming requests match rules, actions are invoked. Actions can either allow, block, or simply count matches.

The existing rule model is powerful and gives you the ability to detect and respond to many different types of attacks. It does not, however, allow you to respond to attacks that simply consist of a large number of otherwise valid requests from a particular IP address. These requests might be a web-layer DDoS attack, a brute-force login attempt, or even a partner integration gone awry.

New Rate-Based Rules
Today we are adding Rate-based Rules to WAF, giving you control of when IP addresses are added to and removed from a blacklist, along with the flexibility to handle exceptions and special cases:

Blacklisting IP Addresses – You can blacklist IP addresses that make requests at a rate that exceeds a configured threshold rate.

IP Address Tracking– You can see which IP addresses are currently blacklisted.

IP Address Removal – IP addresses that have been blacklisted are automatically removed when they no longer make requests at a rate above the configured threshold.

IP Address Exemption – You can exempt certain IP addresses from blacklisting by using an IP address whitelist inside of the a rate-based rule. For example, you might want to allow trusted partners to access your site at a higher rate.

Monitoring & Alarming – You can watch and alarm on CloudWatch metrics that are published for each rule.

You can combine new Rate-based Rules with WAF Conditions to implement sophisticated rate-limiting strategies. For example, you could use a Rate-based Rule and a WAF Condition that matches your login pages. This would allow you to impose a modest threshold on your login pages (to avoid brute-force password attacks) and allow a more generous one on your marketing or system status pages.

Thresholds are defined in terms of the number of incoming requests from a single IP address within a 5 minute period. Once this threshold is breached, additional requests from the IP address are blocked until the request rate falls below the threshold.

Using Rate-Based Rules
Here’s how you would define a Rate-based Rule that protects the /login portion of your site. Start by defining a WAF condition that matches the desired string in the URI of the page:

Then use this condition to define a Rate-based Rule (the rate limit is expressed in terms of requests within a 5 minute interval, but the blacklisting goes in to effect as soon as the limit is breached):

With the condition and the rule in place, create a Web ACL (ProtectLoginACL) to bring it all together and to attach it to the AWS resource (a CloudFront distribution in this case):

Then attach the rule (ProtectLogin) to the Web ACL:

The resource is now protected in accord with the rule and the web ACL. You can monitor the associated CloudWatch metrics (ProtectLogin and ProtectLoginACL in this case). You could even create CloudWatch Alarms and use them to fire Lambda functions when a protection threshold is breached. The code could examine the offending IP address and make a complex, business-driven decision, perhaps adding a whitelisting rule that gives an extra-generous allowance to a trusted partner or to a user with a special payment plan.

Available Now
The new, Rate-based Rules are available now and you can start using them today! Rate-based rules are priced the same as Regular rules; see the WAF Pricing page for more info.

— Jeff;

Last year we launched new AWS Regions in Canada, India, Korea, the UK (London), and the United States (Ohio), and announced that new regions are coming to France (Paris), China (Ningxia), and Sweden (Stockholm).

Coming to Hong Kong in 2018
Today, I am happy to be able to tell you that we are planning to open up an AWS Region in Hong Kong, in 2018. Hong Kong is a leading international financial center, well known for its service oriented economy. It is rated highly on innovation and for ease of doing business. As an evangelist, I get to visit many great cities in the world, and was lucky to have spent some time in Hong Kong back in 2014 and met a number of awesome customers there. Many of these customers have given us feedback that they wanted a local AWS Region.

This will be the eighth AWS Region in Asia Pacific joining six other Regions there — Singapore, Tokyo, Sydney, Beijing, Seoul, and Mumbai, and an additional Region in China (Ningxia) expected to launch in the coming months. Together, these Regions will provide our customers with a total of 19 Availability Zones (AZs) and allow them to architect highly fault tolerant applications.

Today, our infrastructure comprises 43 Availability Zones across 16 geographic regions worldwide, with another three AWS Regions (and eight Availability Zones) in France, China, and Sweden coming online throughout 2017 and 2018, (see the AWS Global Infrastructure page for more info).

We are looking forward to serving new and existing customers in Hong Kong and working with partners across Asia-Pacific. Of course, the new region will also be open to existing AWS customers who would like to process and store data in Hong Kong. Public sector organizations such as government agencies, educational institutions, and nonprofits in Hong Kong will be able to use this region to store sensitive data locally (the AWS in the Public Sector page has plenty of success stories drawn from our worldwide customer base).

If you are a customer or a partner and have specific questions about this Region, you can contact our Hong Kong team.

Help Wanted
If you are interested in learning more about AWS positions in Hong Kong, please visit the Amazon Jobs site and set the location to Hong Kong.

— Jeff;

AWS Marketplace lets AWS customers find and use products and services offered by members of the AWS Partner Network (APN). Some marketplace offerings are billed on an hourly basis, many with a cost-saving annual option designed to line up with the procurement cycles of our enterprise customers. Other offerings are available in SaaS (Software as a Service) form and are billed based on consumption units specified by the seller. The SaaS model (described in New – SaaS subscriptions on AWS Marketplace) give sellers the flexibility to bill for actual usage: number of active hosts, number of requests, GB of log files processed, and so forth.

Recently we extended the SaaS model with the addition of SaaS contracts, which my colleague Brad Lyman introduced in his post, Announcing SaaS Contracts, a Feature to Simplify SaaS Procurement on AWS Marketplace. The contracts give our customers the opportunity save money by setting up monthly subscriptions that can be expanded to cover a one, two, or three year contract term, with automatic, configurable renewals. Sellers can provide services that require up-front payment or that offer discounts in exchange for a usage commitment.

Since Brad has already covered the seller side of this powerful and flexible new model, I would like to show you what it is like to purchase a SaaS contract. Let’s say that I want to use Splunk Cloud. I simply search for it as usual:

I click on Splunk Cloud and see that it is available in SaaS Contract form:

I can also see and review the pricing options, noting that pricing varies by location, index volume, and subscription duration:

I click on Continue. Since I do not have a contract with Splunk for this software, I’ll be redirected to the vendor’s site to create one as part of the process. I choose my location, index volume, and contract duration, and opt for automatic renewal, and then click on Create Contract:

This sets up my subscription, and I need only set up my account with Splunk:

I click on Set Up Your Account and I am ready to move forward by setting up my custom URL on the Splunk site:

This feature is available now and you can start using it today.

— Jeff;

Amazon WorkSpaces allows you to access a virtual desktop in the cloud from the web and from a wide variety of desktop and mobile devices. This flexibility makes WorkSpaces ideal for environments where users have the ability to use their existing devices (often known as BYOD, or Bring Your Own Device). In these environments, organizations sometimes need the ability to manage the devices which can access WorkSpaces. For example, they may have to regulate access based on the client device operating system, version, or patch level in order to help meet compliance or security policy requirements.

Managed Device Authentication
Today we are launching device authentication for WorkSpaces. You can now use digital certificates to manage client access from Apple OSX and Microsoft Windows. You can also choose to allow or block access from iOS, Android, Chrome OS, web, and zero client devices. You can implement policies to control which device types you want to allow and which ones you want to block, with control all the way down to the patch level. Access policies are set for each WorkSpaces directory. After you have set the policies, requests to connect to WorkSpaces from a client device are assessed and either blocked or allowed. In order to make use of this feature, you will need to distribute certificates to your client devices using Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager or a mobile device management (MDM) tool.

Here’s how you set your access control options from the WorkSpaces Console:

Here’s what happens if a client is not authorized to connect:

Available Today
This feature is now available in all Regions where WorkSpaces is available.

— Jeff;

Every product planning session at AWS revolves around customers. We do our best to listen and to learn, and to use what we hear to build the roadmaps for future development. Approximately 90% of the items on the roadmap originate with customer requests and are designed to meet specific needs and requirements that they share with us.

I strongly believe that this customer-driven innovation has helped us to secure the top-right corner of the Leaders quadrant in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) for the 7th consecutive year, earning highest placement for ability to execute and furthest for completeness of vision:

To learn more, read the full report. It contains a lot of detail and is a great summary of the features and factors that our customers examine when choosing a cloud provider.

— Jeff;