AWS Week in Review – December 19, 2022

We are half way between the re:Invent conference and the end-of-year holidays, and I did expect the cadence of releases and news to slow down a bit, but nothing is further away from reality. Our teams continue to listen to your feedback and release new capabilities and incremental improvements. This week, many items caught my attention. Here is my summary. The AWS Pricing Calculator for Amazon EC2 is getting a redesign to provide you with a simplified, consistent, and efficient calculator to estimate costs. It also added a way to bulk estimate costs for EC2 instances, EC2 Dedicated Hosts, and Amazon EBS services. Try it for yourself today. Amazon CloudWatch Metrics Insights alarms now enables you to trigger alarms on…

Step Functions Distributed Map – A Serverless Solution for Large-Scale Parallel Data Processing

I am excited to announce the availability of a distributed map for AWS Step Functions. This flow extends support for orchestrating large-scale parallel workloads such as the on-demand processing of semi-structured data. Step Function’s map state executes the same processing steps for multiple entries in a dataset. The existing map state is limited to 40 parallel iterations at a time. This limit makes it challenging to scale data processing workloads to process thousands of items (or even more) in parallel. In order to achieve higher parallel processing prior to today, you had to implement complex workarounds to the existing map state component. The new distributed map state allows you to write Step Functions to coordinate large-scale parallel workloads within your…

AWS Marketplace Vendor Insights – Simplify Third-Party Software Risk Assessments

AWS Marketplace Vendor Insights is a new capability of AWS Marketplace. It simplifies third-party software risk assessments when procuring solutions from the AWS Marketplace. It helps you to ensure that the third-party software continuously meets your industry standards by compiling security and compliance information, such as data privacy and residency, application security, and access control, in one consolidated dashboard. As a security engineer, you may now complete third-party software risk assessment in a few days instead of months. You can now: Quickly discover products in AWS Marketplace that meet your security and certification standards by searching for and accessing Vendor Insights profiles. Access and download current and validated information, with evidence gathered from the vendors’ security tools and audit reports.…

AWS Verified Access Preview — VPN-less Secure Network Access to Corporate Applications

Today, we announced the preview of AWS Verified Access, a new secure connectivity service that allows enterprises to enable local or remote secure access for their corporate applications without requiring a VPN. Traditionally, remote access to applications when on the road or working from home is granted by a VPN. Once the remote workforce is authenticated on the VPN, they have access to a broad range of applications depending on multiple policies defined in siloed systems, such as the VPN gateway, the firewalls, the identity provider, the enterprise device management solution, etc. These policies are typically managed by different teams, potentially creating overlaps, making it difficult to diagnose application access issues. Internal applications often rely on older authentication protocols, like…