Corporate Solidarity

Corey: This is the AWS Morning Brief: Security Edition. AWS is fond of saying security is job zero. That means it’s nobody in particular’s job, which means it falls to the rest of us. Just the news you need to know, none of the fluff.

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Corey: We begin with a yikes because suddenly the world is aflame and of course there are cybersecurity considerations to that. I’m going to have more on that to come in future weeks because my goal with this podcast is to have considered takes, not the rapid-response, alarmist, the-world-is-ending ones. There are lots of other places to find those. So, more to come on that.

In happier news, your favorite Cloud Economist was quoted in the Wall Street Journal last week, talking about how staggering Microsoft’s security surface really is. And credit where due, it’s hard to imagine a better person for the role than Charlie Bell. He’s going to either fix a number of systemic problems at Azure or else carve his resignation letter into Satya Nadella’s door with an axe. I really have a hard time envisioning a third outcome.

A relatively light week aside from that. The Register has a decent roundup of how various companies are responding to Russia’s invasion of a sovereign country. Honestly, the solidarity among those companies is kind of breathtaking. I didn’t have that on my bingo card for the year.

Corey: You know the drill: You’re just barely falling asleep and you’re jolted awake by an emergency page. That’s right, it’s your night on call, and this is the bad kind of Call of Duty. The good news is, is that you’ve got New Relic, so you can quickly run down the incident checklist and find the problem. You have an errors inbox that tells you that Lambdas are good, RUM is good, but something’s up in APM. So, you click the error and find the deployment marker where it all began. Dig deeper, there’s another set of errors. What is it? Of course, it’s Kubernetes, starting after an update. You ask that team to roll back and bam, problem solved. That’s the value of combining 16 different monitoring products into a single platform: You can pinpoint issues down to the line of code quickly. That’s why the Dev and Ops teams at DoorDash, GitHub, Epic Games, and more than 14,000 other companies use New Relic. The next late-night call is just waiting to happen, so get New Relic before it starts. And you can get access to the whole New Relic platform at 100 gigabytes of data free, forever, with no credit card. Visit newrelic.com/morningbrief that’s newrelic.com/morningbrief.

Corey: If you expose 200GB of data it’s bad. If that data belongs to customers, it’s worse. If a lot of those customers are themselves children, it’s awful. But if you ignore reports about the issue, leave the bucket open, and only secure it after your government investigates you for ignoring it under the GDPR, you are this week’s S3 Bucket Negligence Awardwinner and should probably be fired immediately.

AWS had a single announcement of note last week. “Fine-tune and optimize AWS WAF Bot Control mitigation capability”, and it’s super important because, with WAF and Bot Control, the failure mode in one direction of a service like this is that bots overwhelm your site. The failure mode in the other direction is that you start blocking legitimate traffic. And the worst failure mode is that both of these happen at the same time.

And a new tool I’m kicking the tires on, Granted. It’s apparently another way of logging into a bunch of different AWS accounts, so it’s time for me to kick the tires on that because I consistently have problems with that exact thing. And that’s what happened last week in AWS security which, let’s be clear, is not the most important area of the world to be focusing on right now. Thanks for listening; I’ll talk to you next week.

Corey: Thank you for listening to the AWS Morning Brief: Security Edition with the latest in AWS security that actually matters. Please follow AWS Morning Brief on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Overcast—or wherever the hell it is you find the dulcet tones of my voice—and be sure to sign up for the Last Week in AWS newsletter at lastweekinaws.com.

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