Today we’re launching AWS re:Post Private, a fully managed knowledge service to accelerate cloud adoption, improve productivity, and drive innovation. re:Post Private allows organizations to increase collaboration and access knowledge resources built for your cloud community. It includes curated collections of technical content and training materials from AWS. The content is tailored specifically for your organization’s use cases, along with private discussion and collaboration forums for the members of your organization and your AWS account team.

As its name implies, you can think of it as a private version of AWS re:Post, with private content and access limited to people that belong to your organization and your AWS Account team.

Organizations of all sizes and verticals are increasingly moving their operations to the cloud. To ensure cloud adoption success, organizations must have the right skills and structure in place. The optimal way to achieve this is by setting up a centralized cloud center of excellence (CCOE). A CCOE is a centralized governance function for the organization and acts in a consultative role for central IT, business-unit IT, and cloud service consumers in the business. According to Gartner, a CCOE has three pillars: governance, brokerage, and community. The community pillar establishes the cloud community of practice (COP) that brings together stakeholders and facilitates cloud collaboration. It helps organizations adapt themselves for cloud adoption by promoting COP member interaction and facilitating cloud-related training and skills development.

AWS re:Post Private facilitates the creation, structure, and management of an internal cloud community of practice. It allows you to build a custom knowledge base that is searchable, reusable, and scalable. It allows community members to post private questions and answers and publish articles. It combines the benefits of traditional forums, such as community discussion and collaboration, with the benefits of an integrated information experience.

AWS re:Post Private is a fully managed service: there is no need to operate complex knowledge management and collaboration technologies or to develop custom solutions.

AWS re:Post Private also facilitates your interactions with AWS Support. You can create a support case directly from your private re:Post, and you can convert case resolution to reusable knowledge visible to all in your organization.

You choose in which AWS Region re:Post Private stores your data and who has access. All data at rest and in transit is encrypted using industry-standard algorithms. Your administrator chooses between using AWS-managed encryption keys or keys you manage and control.

Your organization’s Technical Account Managers are automatically added to your private re:Post. You can select other persons to invite among your organization and AWS teams, such as your AWS Solutions Architect. Only your private re:Post administrators need an AWS account. All other users can federate from your organization’s identity provider, such as Microsoft Active Directory.

Let’s see how to create a re:Post Private
To get started with AWS re:Post Private, as an administrator, I point my browser to the re:Post section of the AWS Management Console. I select Create private re:Post and enter the information needed to create a private re:Post for my organization, my team, or my project.

I can choose the Data encryption parameters and whether or not I enable Service access for Support case integration. When I’m ready, I select Create this re:Post.

Once the private re:Post is created, I can grant access to users and groups. User and group information comes from AWS IAM Identity Center and your identity provider. Invited users receive an email inviting them to connect to the private re:Post and create their profile.

That’s pretty much it for the administrator part. Once the private re:Post is created, I receive an endpoint name that I can share with the rest of my organization.

Let’s see how to use re:Post Private
As a member of the organization, I navigate to re:Post Private using the link I received from the administrator. I authenticate with the usual identity service of my organization, and I am redirected to the re:Post Private landing page.

On the top menu, I can select a tab to view the contents for Questions, Community Articles, Selections, Tags, Topics, Community Groups, or My Dashboard. This should be familiar if you already use the public knowledge service AWS re:Post that adopted a similar structure.

Further down on the page, I see the popular topics and the top contributors in my organization.I also have access to Questions and Community Groups. I can search the available content by keyword, tags, author, and so on.

Pricing and availability
You can create your organization’s AWS re:Post Private in the following AWS Regions: US West (Oregon) and Europe (Frankfurt).

AWS re:Post Private is available to customers having an AWS Enterprise or Enterprise On-Ramp support plan. re:Post Private offers a free tier that allows you to explore and try out standard capabilities for six months. There is no limit on the number of users in the free tier, and content storage is limited to 10 GB. When you reach the free storage limit, the plan is converted to the paid standard tier.

With AWS re:Post Private Standard tier, you only pay for what you use. We charge based on the number of users per month. Please visit the re:Post Private pricing page for more information.

Get started today and activate AWS re:Post Private for your organization.

— seb

We are launching a preview of a new AWS Glue Data Quality feature that will help to improve your data quality by using machine learning to detect statistical anomalies and unusual patterns. You get deep insights into data quality issues, data quality scores, and recommendations for rules that you can use to continuously monitor for anomalies, all without having to write any code.

Data quality counts
AWS customers already build data integration pipelines to extract and transform data. They set up data quality rules to ensure that the resulting data is of high quality and can be used to make accurate business decisions. In many cases, these rules assess the data based on criteria that were chosen and locked in at a specific point in time, reflecting the current state of the business. However, as the business environment changes and the properties of the data shift, the rules are not always reviewed and updated.

For example, a rule could be set to verify that daily sales are at least ten thousand dollars for an early-stage business. As the business succeeds and grows, the rule should be checked and updated from time to time, but in practice this rarely happens. As a result, if there’s an unexpected drop in sales, the outdated rule does not activate, and no one is happy.

Anomaly detection in action
To detect unusual patterns and to gain deeper insights into data, organizations try to create their own adaptive systems or turn to costly commercial solutions that require specific technical skills and specialized business knowledge.

To address this widespread challenge, Glue Data Quality now makes use of machine learning (ML).

Once activated, this cool new addition to Glue Data Quality gathers statistics as fresh data arrives, using ML and dynamic thresholds to learn from past patterns while looking outliers and unusual data patterns. This process produces observations and also visualizes trends so that you can quickly gain a better understanding of the anomaly.

You will also get rule recommendations as part of the Observations, and you can easily and progressively add them to your data pipelines. Rules can enforce an action such as stopping your data pipelines. In the past, you could only write static rules. Now, you can write Dynamic rules that have auto-adjusting thresholds and AnomalyDetection Rules that grasp recurring patterns and spot deviations. When you use rules as part of data pipelines, they can stop the data flow so that a data engineer can review, fix and resume.

To use anomaly detection, I add an Evaluate Data Quality node to my job:

I select the node and click Add analyzer to choose a statistic and the columns:

Glue Data Quality learns from the data to recognize patterns and then generates observations that will be shown in the Data quality tab:

And a visualization:

After I review the observations I add new rules. The first one sets adaptive thresholds that check the row count is between the smallest of the last 10 runs and the largest of the last 20 runs. The second one looks for unusual patters, for example RowCount being abnormally high on weekends:

Join the preview
We are launching this new feature in preview form today and it is available to AWS Glue users in the US East (Ohio, N. Virginia), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Europe (Ireland), and AWS GovCloud (US-West) Regions. To learn more, read Data Quality Anomaly Detection]].

Stay tuned for a detailed blog post when this feature launches!

— Jeff;

Today, we are announcing support for mutually authenticating clients that present X509 certificates to Application Load Balancer. With this new feature, you can now offload client authentication to the load balancer, ensuring only trusted clients communicate with their backend applications. This new capability is built on S2N, AWS’s open source Transport Layer Security (TLS) implementation that provides strong encryption and protections against zero-day vulnerabilities, which developers can trust.

Mutual authentication (mTLS) is commonly used for business-to-business (B2B) applications such as online banking, automobile, or gaming devices to authenticate devices using digital certificates. Companies typically use it with a private certificate authority (CA) to authenticate their clients before granting access to data and services.

Customers have implemented mutual authentication using self-created or third-party solutions that require additional time and management overhead. These customers spend their engineering resources to build the functionality into their backend, update their code to keep up with the latest security patches, and invest heavily in infrastructure to create and rotate certificates.

With mutual authentication on Application Load Balancer, you have a fully managed, scalable, and cost-effective solution that enables you to use your developer resources to focus on other critical projects. Your ALB will authenticate clients with revocation checks and pass client certificate information to the target, which can be used for authorization by applications.

Getting started with mutual authentication on ALB
To enable mutual authentication on ALB, choose Create Application Load Balancer by the ALB wizard on Amazon EC2 console. When you select HTTPS in the Listeners and routing section, you can see more settings such as security policy, default server certificate, and a new client certificate handling option to support mutual authentication.

With Mutual authentication (mTLS) enabled, you can configure how listeners handle requests that present client certificates. This includes how your Application Load Balancer authenticates certificates and the amount of certificate metadata that is sent to your backend targets.

Mutual authentication has two options. The Passthrough option sends all the client certificate chains received from the client to your backend application using HTTP headers. The mTLS-enabled Application Load Balancer gets the client certificate in the handshake, establishes a TLS connection, and then sends whatever it gets in HTTPS headers to the target application. The application will need to verify the client certificate chain to authenticate the client.

With the Verify with trust store option, Application Load Balancer and client verify each other’s identity and establish a TLS connection to encrypt communication between them. We introduce a new trust store feature, and you can upload any CA bundle with roots and/or intermediate certificates generated by AWS Private Certificate Authority or any other third party CA as the source of trust to validate your client certificates.

It requires selecting an existing trust store or creating a new one. Trust stores contain your CAs, trusted certificates, and, optionally, certificate revocation lists (CRLs). The load balancer uses a trust store to perform mutual authentication with clients.

To use this option and create a new trust store, choose Trust Stores in the left menu of the Amazon EC2 console and choose Create trust store.

You can choose a CA certificate bundle in PEM format and, optionally, CRLs from your Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket. A CA certificate bundle is a group of CA certificates (root or intermediate) used by a trust store. CRLs can be used when a CA revokes client certificates that have been compromised, and you need to reject those revoked certificates. You can replace a CA bundle, and add or remove CRLs from the trust store after creation.

You can use the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) with new APIs such as create-trust-store to upload CA information, configure the mutual-authentication-mode on the Application Load Balancer listener, and send user certificate information to targets.

$ aws elbv2 create-trust-store --name my-tls-name 
    --ca-certificates-bundle-s3-bucket channy-certs 
    --ca-certificates-bundle-s3-key Certificates.pem 
    --ca-certificates-bundle-s3-object-version <version>
>> arn:aws:elasticloadbalancing:root:file1
$ aws elbv2 create-listener --load balancer-arn <value> 
    --protocol HTTPS 
    --port 443 
    --mutual-authentication Mode=verify,
      TrustStoreArn=<arn:aws:elasticloadbalancing:root:file1>

If you already have your own private CA, such as AWS Private CA, third-party CA, or self-signed CA, you can upload their CA bundle or CRLs to the Application Load Balancer trust store to enable mutual authentication.

To test the mutual authentication on Application Load Balancer, follow the step-by-step instructions to make a self-signed CA bundle and client certificate using OpenSSL, upload them to the Amazon S3 bucket, and use them with an ELB trust store.

You can use curl with the --key and --cert parameters to send the client certificate as part of the request:

$ curl --key my_client.key --cert my_client.pem https://api.yourdomain.com

Mutual authentication can fail if a client presents an invalid or expired certificate, fails to present a certificate, cannot find a trust chain, or if any links in the trust chain have expired, or the certificate is on the revocation list.

Application Load Balancer will close the connections whenever it fails to authenticate a client and will record new connection logs that capture detailed information about requests sent to your load balancer. Each log contains information such as the client’s IP address, handshake latency, TLS cipher used, and client certificate details. You can use these connection logs to analyze request patterns and troubleshoot issues.

To learn more, see Mutual authentication on Application Load Balancer in the AWS documentation.

Now available
Mutual authentication on Application Load Balancer is now available in all commercial AWS Regions where Application Load Balancer is available, except China. With no upfront costs or commitments required, you only pay for what you use. To learn more, see the Elastic Load Balancing pricing page.

Give it a try now and send feedback to AWS re:Post for Amazon EC2 or through your usual AWS Support contacts.

Learn more:
Application Load Balancer product page

— Channy

To make it easy to interact with your operational data, Amazon CloudWatch is introducing today natural language query generation for Logs and Metrics Insights. With this capability, powered by generative artificial intelligence (AI), you can describe in English the insights you are looking for, and a Logs or Metrics Insights query will be automatically generated.

This feature provides three main capabilities for CloudWatch Logs and Metrics Insights:

• Generate new queries from a description or a question to help you get started easily.
• Query explanation to help you learn the language including more advanced features.
• Refine existing queries using guided iterations.

Let’s see how these work in practice with a few examples. I’ll cover logs first and then metrics.

Generate CloudWatch Logs Insights queries with natural language
In the CloudWatch console, I select Log Insights in the Logs section. I then select the log group of an AWS Lambda function that I want to investigate.

I choose the Query generator button to open a new Prompt field where I enter what I need using natural language:

Tell me the duration of the 10 slowest invocations

Then, I choose Generate new query. The following Log Insights query is automatically generated:

fields @timestamp, @requestId, @message, @logStream, @duration 
| filter @type = "REPORT" and @duration > 1000
| sort @duration desc
| limit 10

I choose Run query to see the results.

I find that now there’s too much information in the output. I prefer to see only the data I need, so I enter the following sentence in the Prompt and choose Update query.

Show only timestamps and latency

The query is updated based on my input and only the timestamp and duration are returned:

fields @timestamp, @duration 
| filter @type = "REPORT" and @duration > 1000
| sort @duration desc
| limit 10

I run the updated query and get a result that is easier for me to read.

Now, I want to know if there are any errors in the log. I enter this sentence in the Prompt and generate a new query:

Count the number of ERROR messages

As requested, the generated query is counting the messages that contain the ERROR string:

fields @message
| filter @message like /ERROR/
| stats count()

I run the query and find out that there are more errors than I expected. I need more information.

I use this prompt to update the query and get a better distribution of the errors:

Show the errors per hour

The updated query uses the bin() function to group the result in one hour intervals.

fields @timestamp, @message
| filter @message like /ERROR/
| stats count(*) by bin(1h)

Let’s see a more advanced query about memory usage. I select the log groups of a few Lambda functions and type:

Show invocations with the most over-provisioned memory grouped by log stream

Before generating the query, I choose the gear icon to toggle the options to include my prompt and an explanation as comment. Here’s the result (I split the explanation over multiple lines for readability):

# Show invocations with the most over-provisioned memory grouped by log stream

fields @logStream, @memorySize/1000/1000 as memoryMB, @maxMemoryUsed/1000/1000 as maxMemoryUsedMB, (@memorySize/1000/1000 - @maxMemoryUsed/1000/1000) as overProvisionedMB 
| stats max(overProvisionedMB) as maxOverProvisionedMB by @logStream 
| sort maxOverProvisionedMB desc

# This query finds the amount of over-provisioned memory for each log stream by
# calculating the difference between the provisioned and maximum memory used.
# It then groups the results by log stream and calculates the maximum
# over-provisioned memory for each log stream. Finally, it sorts the results
# in descending order by the maximum over-provisioned memory to show
# the log streams with the most over-provisioned memory.

Now, I have the information I need to understand these errors. On the other side, I also have EC2 workloads. How are those instances running? Let’s look at some metrics.

Generate CloudWatch Metrics Insights queries with natural language
In the CloudWatch console, I select All metrics in the Metrics section. Then, in the Query tab, I use the Editor. If you prefer, the Query generator is available also in the Builder.

I choose Query generator like before. Then, I enter what I need using plain English:

Which 10 EC2 instances have the highest CPU utilization?

I choose Generate new query and get a result using the Metrics Insights syntax.

SELECT AVG("CPUUtilization")
FROM SCHEMA("AWS/EC2", InstanceId)
GROUP BY InstanceId
ORDER BY AVG() DESC
LIMIT 10

To see the graph, I choose Run.

Well, it looks like my EC2 instances are not doing much. This result shows how those instances are using the CPU, but what about storage? I enter this in the prompt and choose Update query:

How about the most EBS writes?

The updated query replaces the average CPU utilization with the sum of bytes written to all EBS volumes attached to the instance. It keeps the limit to only show the top 10 results.

SELECT SUM("EBSWriteBytes")
FROM SCHEMA("AWS/EC2", InstanceId)
GROUP BY InstanceId
ORDER BY SUM() DESC
LIMIT 10

I run the query and, by looking at the result, I have a better understanding of how storage is being used by my EC2 instances.

Try entering some requests and run the generated queries over your logs and metrics to see how this works with your data.

Things to know
Amazon CloudWatch natural language query generation for logs and metrics is available in preview in the US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon) AWS Regions.

There is no additional cost for using natural language query generation during the preview. You only pay for the cost of running the queries according to CloudWatch pricing.

When generating a query, you can include your original request and an explanation of the query as comments. To do so, choose the gear icon in the bottom right corner of the query edit window and toggle those options.

This new capability can help you generate and update queries for logs and metrics, saving you time and effort. This approach allows engineering teams to scale their operations without worrying about specific data knowledge or query expertise.

Use natural language to analyze your logs and metrics with Amazon CloudWatch.

— Danilo