AWS Week In Review – July 25, 2022

A few weeks ago, we hosted the first EMEA AWS Heroes Summit in Milan, Italy. This past week, I had the privilege to join the Americas AWS Heroes Summit in Seattle, Washington, USA. Meeting with our community experts is always inspiring and a great opportunity to learn from each other. During the Summit, AWS Heroes from North America and Latin America shared their thoughts with AWS developer advocates and product teams on topics such as serverless, containers, machine learning, data, and DevTools. You can learn more about the AWS Heroes program here.

Last Week’s Launches
Here are some launches that got my attention during the previous week:

Cloudscape Design System – Cloudscape is an open source design system for creating web applications. It was built for and is used by AWS products and services. We created it in 2016 to improve the user experience across web applications owned by AWS services and also to help teams implement those applications faster. If you’ve ever used the AWS Management Console, you’ve seen Cloudscape in action. If you are building a product that extends the AWS Management Console, designing a user interface for a hybrid cloud management system, or setting up an on-premises solution that uses AWS, have a look at Cloudscape Design System.

AWS re:Post introduces community-generated articles – AWS re:Post gives you access to a vibrant community that helps you become even more successful on AWS. Expert community members can now share technical guidance and knowledge beyond answering questions through the Articles feature. Using this feature, community members can share best practices and troubleshooting processes and address customer needs around AWS technology in greater depth. The Articles feature is unlocked for community members who have achieved Rising Star status on re:Post or subject matter experts who built their reputation in the community based on their contributions and certifications. If you have a Rising Star status on re:Post, start writing articles now! All other members can unlock Rising Star status through community contributions or simply browse available articles today on re:Post.

AWS Lambda announces support for attribute-based access control (ABAC) and new IAM condition key – You can now use attribute-based access control (ABAC) with AWS Lambda to control access to functions within AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) using tags. ABAC is an authorization strategy that defines access permissions based on attributes. In AWS, these attributes are called tags. With ABAC, you can scale an access control strategy by setting granular permissions with tags without requiring permissions updates for every new user or resource as your organization scales. Read this blog post by Julian Wood and Chris McPeek to learn more.

AWS Lambda also announced support for lambda:SourceFunctionArn, a new IAM condition key that can be used for IAM policy conditions that specify the Amazon Resource Name (ARN) of the function from which a request is made. You can use the Condition element in your IAM policy to compare the lambda:SourceFunctionArn condition key in the request context with values that you specify in your policy. This allows you to implement advanced security controls for the AWS API calls taken by your Lambda function code. For more details, have a look at the Lambda Developer Guide.

Amazon Fraud Detector launches Account Takeover Insights (ATI) – Amazon Fraud Detector now supports an Account Takeover Insights (ATI) model, a low-latency fraud detection machine learning model specifically designed to detect accounts that have been compromised through stolen credentials, phishing, social engineering, or other forms of account takeover. The ATI model is designed to detect up to four times more ATI fraud than traditional rules-based account takeover solutions while minimizing the level of friction for legitimate users. To learn more, have a look at the Amazon Fraud Detector documentation.

Amazon EMR on EC2 clusters (EMR Clusters) introduces more fine-grained access controls – Previously, all jobs running on an EMR cluster used the IAM role associated with the EMR cluster’s EC2 instances to access resources. This role is called the EMR EC2 instance profile. With the new runtime roles for Amazon EMR Steps, you can now specify a different IAM role for your Apache Spark and Hive jobs, scoping down access at a job level. This simplifies access controls on a single EMR cluster that is shared between multiple tenants, wherein each tenant is isolated using IAM roles. You can now also enforce table and column permissions based on your Amazon EMR runtime role to manage your access to data lakes with AWS Lake Formation. For more details, read the What’s New post.

Other AWS News
Here are some additional news and customer stories you may find interesting:

AWS open-source news and updates – My colleague Ricardo Sueiras writes this weekly open-source newsletter in which he highlights new open-source projects, tools, and demos from the AWS Community. Read edition #121 here.

AI Use Case Explorer – If you are interested in AI use cases, have a look at the new AI Use Case Explorer. You can search over 100 use cases and 400 customer success stories by industry, business function, and the business outcome you want to achieve.

Bayer centralizes and standardizes data from the carbon program using AWS – To help Brazilian farmers adopt climate-smart agricultural practices and reduce carbon emissions in their activities, Bayer created the Carbon Program, which aims to build carbon-neutral agriculture practices. Learn how Bayer uses AWS to centralize and standardize the data received from the different partners involved in the project in this Bayer case study.

Upcoming AWS Events
Check your calendars and sign up for these AWS events:

AWS re:Inforce 2022 – The event will be held this week in person on July 26 and 27 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. You can watch the keynote and leadership sessions online for free. AWS On Air will also stream live from re:Inforce.

AWS Global Summits – AWS Global Summits are free events that bring the cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. Registrations are open for the following AWS Summits in August:

• AWS Summit São Paulo, August 3–4, at Transamerica Expo Center, São Paulo, Brazil.
• AWS Summit Taiwan, August 10–11, at Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center, Taipei City, Taiwan.
• AWS Summit Anaheim, August 18, at Anaheim Convention Center, Anaheim, California, USA.
• AWS Summit Chicago, August 25, at McCormick Place, Chicago, Illinois, USA.
• AWS Summit Canberra, August 31, at the National Convention Center, Canberra, Australia.

IMAGINE 2022 – The IMAGINE 2022 conference will take place on August 3 at the Seattle Convention Center, Washington, USA. It’s a no-cost event that brings together education, state, and local leaders to learn about the latest innovations and best practices in the cloud. You can register here.

I’ll be speaking at Data Con LA on August 13–14 in Los Angeles, California, USA. Feel free to say “Hi!” if you’re around. And if you happen to be at Ray Summit on August 23–24 in San Francisco, California, USA, stop by the AWS booth. I’ll be there to discuss all things Ray on AWS.

That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Week in Review!

– Antje