Amazon Advances Cloud Security, Storage Tools at AWS Summit

Amazon held its AWS Summit in San Francisco on April 4, unveiling multiple new capabilities that enhance the company’s public cloud services. Security was a key theme of the event, with Amazon CTO Werner Vogels announcing a series of new services, including the AWS Secrets Manager for storing, distributing and rotating access and service credentials in a secure manner, and the AWS Firewall Manager, which helps organizations manage firewall policies. Also announced at the AWS Summit was the Amazon Private Certificate Authority, providing public cloud users with a way to use private Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) certificates. In this slide show, eWEEK looks at some of the new services that Amazon announced at the AWS Summit.

Amazon is extending its SageMaker artificial intelligence service, first announced at the AWS re:invent conference in November 2017, with a local mode. With the local option, developers can test AI models on a desktop system instead of in the cloud.

The AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) is being expanded with a new class of service known as One Zone Infrequent Access. The S3 One Zone offering is not as resilient as other S3 service levels and is being targeted for noncritical, infrequent storage use cases.

The S3 Select storage class is now generally available, Amazon announced at the AWS Summit. S3 Select enables users to pull “select” data from S3 using SQL queries.

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels emphasized the importance of security in his AWS Summit keynote address. To help boost security, he announced the AWS Secrets Manager, which is a cloud platform for storing, distributing and rotating credentials in a secure manner.

Amazon is expanding its AWS Config cloud configuration and settings service with new capabilities to view compliance across multiple accounts and regions.

Another new security service announced by Vogels at the AWS Summit is the AWS Firewall Manager, which enables organizations to centrally configure and manage web application firewall rules.

AWS has long offered its users a Certificate Manager capability for managing SSL/TLS certificates. At the AWS Summit, the service was expanded with the new Private Certificate Authority, which enables organizations to manage private certificates for non-public services.