New – Amazon RDS Optimized Reads and Optimized Writes

Way back in 2009 I wrote Introducing Amazon RDS – The Amazon Relational Database Service and told you that: RDS makes it easier for you to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. You get direct database access without worrying about infrastructure provisioning, software maintenance, or common database management tasks. Since that launch we have continued to do our best to help you to avoid all of those items, while also working to make RDS ever-more cost effective. For example, we recently launched Graviton2 DB Instances that deliver up to 52% better price/performance and a new Multi-AZ Deployment Option that delivers up to 33% better price/performance along with 2x faster transaction commit latency. Today I would…

Classifying and Extracting Mortgage Loan Data with Amazon Textract

Mortgage loan applications, at least in the United States, comprise around 500 or more pages of diverse documents. In order for applications to be reviewed, all these documents need to be classified, and the data on each form extracted. This isn’t as easy as it might sound! Besides different data structures in each document, the same data element may have different names on different documents—for example, SSN, or Social Security Number, or Tax ID. These three all refer to the same data. Today, a new Analyze Lending API, for analyzing and classifying the documents contained in mortgage loan application packages, and extracting the data they contain, is available for Amazon Textract. The new API was created in response to requests…

Protect Sensitive Data with Amazon CloudWatch Logs

Today we are announcing Amazon CloudWatch Logs data protection, a new set of capabilities for Amazon CloudWatch Logs that leverage pattern matching and machine learning (ML) to detect and protect sensitive log data in transit. While developers try to prevent logging sensitive information such as Social Security numbers, credit card details, email addresses, and passwords, sometimes it gets logged. Until today, customers relied on manual investigation or third-party solutions to detect and mitigate sensitive information from being logged. If sensitive data is not redacted during ingestion, it will be visible in plain text in the logs and in any downstream system that consumed those logs. Enforcing prevention across the organization is challenging, which is why quick detection and prevention of…

New – Amazon CloudWatch Cross-Account Observability

Deploying applications using multiple AWS accounts is a good practice to establish security and billing boundaries between teams and reduce the impact of operational events. When you adopt a multi-account strategy, you have to analyze telemetry data that is scattered across several accounts. To give you the flexibility to monitor all the components of your applications from a centralized view, we are introducing today Amazon CloudWatch cross-account observability, a new capability to search, analyze, and correlate cross-account telemetry data stored in CloudWatch such as metrics, logs, and traces. You can now set up a central monitoring AWS account and connect your other accounts as sources. Then, you can search, audit, and analyze logs across your applications to drill down into…