AWS Weekly Roundup: Passkey MFA, Malware Protection on Amazon S3, and more (June 17, 2024)

Last week, my alma mater Standard Bank Group (SBG) hosted a Software Engineering Conference and invited me to be one of the keynote speakers. SBG has presence throughout Africa and this hybrid conference was attended by almost 2,000 engineers from across the continent. It was amazing to reconnect with long-time friends and former colleagues, and to make new friends. Last week’s launches Here are some launches that got my attention during the previous week. Passkey multi-factor authentication (MFA) for root and IAM users – We’ve added passkeys to the list of supported multi-factor authentication (MFA) for your root and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users, to give you the convenience of use and easy recoverability. A passkey is a…

In the Works – AWS Region in Taiwan

Today, we’re announcing that a new AWS Region will be coming to Taiwan by early 2025. The new AWS Asia Pacific (Taipei) Region will consist of three Availability Zones at launch, and will give AWS customers in Taiwan the ability to run workloads and store data that must remain in Taiwan. Each of the Availability Zones will be physically independent of the others in the Region – close enough to support applications that need low latency, yet sufficiently distant to significantly reduce the risk that an event at an Availability Zone level might impact business continuity. The Availability Zones in this Region will be connected together through high-bandwidth, low-latency network connections over dedicated, fully redundant fiber. This connectivity supports applications…

AWS Audit Manager extends generative AI best practices framework to Amazon SageMaker

Sometimes I hear from tech leads that they would like to improve visibility and governance over their generative artificial intelligence applications. How do you monitor and govern the usage and generation of data to address issues regarding security, resilience, privacy, and accuracy or to validate against best practices of responsible AI, among other things? Beyond simply taking these into account during the implementation phase, how do you maintain long-term observability and carry out compliance checks throughout the software’s lifecycle? Today, we are launching an update to the AWS Audit Manager generative AI best practice framework on AWS Audit Manager. This framework simplifies evidence collection and enables you to continually audit and monitor the compliance posture of your generative AI workloads…

Simplify AWS CloudTrail log analysis with natural language query generation in CloudTrail Lake (preview)

Today, I am happy to announce in preview the generative artificial intelligence (generative AI)–powered natural language query generation in AWS CloudTrail Lake, which is a managed data lake for capturing, storing, accessing, and analyzing AWS CloudTrail activity logs to meet compliance, security, and operational needs. You can ask a question using natural language about these activity logs (management and data events) stored in CloudTrail Lake without having the technical expertise to write a SQL query or spend time to decode the exact structure of activity events. For example, you might ask, “Tell me how many database instances are deleted without a snapshot”, and the feature will convert that question to a CloudTrail Lake query, which you can run as-is or…