150: The Cloud Pod Exfiltrates Jonathan’s Credentials

On The Cloud Pod this week, Jonathan is still AWOL. Also Amazon is on GuardDuty with credential exfiltration, Google Cloud Deploy is generally available, and Azure is suffering from more serious DDoS attacks. 

A big thanks to this week’s sponsors:

• Foghorn Consulting, which provides full-stack cloud solutions with a focus on strategy, planning and execution for enterprises seeking to take advantage of the transformative capabilities of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure.

• Amazon’s been on GuardDuty with enhanced detection of EC2 instance credential exfiltration. 
• Google Cloud Deploy (GCD) is now generally available, making continuous delivery on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) easier.
• Azure reports that it spent the last half of 2021 dealing with distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that are increasing in both severity and frequency. 

Top Quotes  

• “The biggest risk to cloud infrastructure is that you’re one secret access key away from a big booboo.”
• “Last November, [Azure] had just mitigated a pretty large attack — at the time the largest in history, at least from ones that have been reported to the world. … Things have gotten worse in Q3 and Q4 — not only the levels [of attacks], but the complexity has gotten worse.”

• ️  The threat detection service Amazon GuardDuty — which monitors your accounts for malicious activity and unauthorized behavior — is pretty great already. In the aftermath of the Superglue issue, however, AWS is ramping things up with enhanced detection of EC2 instance credential exfiltration.
• ⚕️ AWS Security Hub has been integrating with AWS Health and with AWS Trusted Advisor (TA). Does this mean everything annoying gets reflagged? Thanks, TA!
• In a move that makes a lot of sense, Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) now supports ECS Exec and Amazon Linux 2 for workloads running on-premises with Amazon ECS Anywhere. No more yum and Red Hat-based Fedora deployment sounds great, although it would be nice to have a few more implementation details ahead of rolling it out.
•   Replication is now possible for Amazon Elastic File System (EFS), but watch out for those pesky inter-region transfer fees — which do rack up — before enabling this.

• Google Cloud Deploy (GCD) is now generally available, making it easier to do continuous delivery to GKE. We’ve also done the math on this and it seems to be cheaper than Ryan: GCD customers get their first active delivery pipeline per account free, and pay a $15/month management fee for each additional pipeline. Whereas Ryan is, frankly, expensive.

• In an announcement that isn’t really an announcement, you can now leverage elastic integrations for your observability of Spring Boot apps on Azure.
• Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) now offers ultra disks support, which, combined with Kubernetes support for upgrade events and VMs support, means shelling out more money. Excellent!
• Azure’s new NetApp Files features are both generally available and greatly appreciated, making all your disaster recovery dreams real. Someone in security definitely cheered at this news.
• Azure’s DDoS team faced some serious attacks in the second half of 2021, but at least they announced it. They reported that DDoS activity has increased in both complexity and frequency, which is pretty scary.

⚡ Justin’s been doing his homework this week and wins the point, making the scores in  Jonathan’s absence Justin (1), Ryan (1), Jonathan (0), Peter (0).

• AWS Migration Hub Strategy Recommendations adds support for Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL
• AWS Client VPN now supports banner text and maximum session duration
• Amazon EC2 customers can now use ED25519 keys for authentication with EC2 Instance Connect
• Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP now provides performance and capacity metrics in Amazon CloudWatch  
• Amazon Fsx for NetApp ONTAP now enables you to grow your SSD storage capacity 
• Generally available: Kibana dashboards and visualizations on top of Azure Data Explorer 
• AWS Panorama Appliances now available for purchase on Amazon.com and Amazon Business 
• Amazon Chime SDK now supports video background replacement  
• Amazon S3 File Gateway adds schedule-based network bandwidth throttling 
• Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) now offers a free trial 

• 7 reasons to attend Azure Open Source Day — February 15th
• SQL Server & Azure SQL Conference – April 5-7th
• IBM Think – May 9-13th
• Kubecon EU – May 16-20
• RSA Conference – June 6-9th
• Blackhat USA – August 6th-11th
• VMWorld – US – August 29th-September 1st
• Kubecon US – October 24-28th