Innovation
Amazon Web Services adds new security pipeline: CloudTrail
AWS execs boast that keeping a close eye on security has been the cloud platform's golden ticket all these years.
LAS VEGAS---Not pulling too many surprises from its playbook, Amazon Web Services is doubling down on security.
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Introduced first at the Internet giant's second annual developer conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday morning, the new AWS CloudTrail is a service that logs API calls to all AWS resources, providing further real-time visibility into which resources are being changed.
All data is stored in the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) or can be archived to Amazon Glacier.
CloudTrail is designed to work with all third-party reporting dashboards and alert systems, such as Splunk and SumoLogic.
The service is free, albeit techinically folded into costs already paid for S3 and Amazon's SNS simple notifications service.
Perhaps hoping to differentiate it from Salesforce.com's annual Dreamforce expo next week, Andy Jassy, senior vice president of Amazon Web Services, started out by framing AWS re:Invent as a "learning conference" rather than a sales and marketing -- or even purely technical -- summit.
Nevertheless, the theme of the keynote was conveying to keynote attendees as to why Amazon appears to be leading the way in this field, touting strengths around business agility, cutting costs frequently, and yes, security.
This year's show has grown to register more than 9,000 attendees from 57 countries. AWS was proud to boast an even audience distribution, with Jassy citing that a third of attendees come from startups, another third from mid-size businesses and the remaining third made up by enterprises.
However, it might be worth considering that some of the notable startup names highlighted by AWS include some familiar names that have arguably outgrown that title, such as LinkedIn and Workday.
Demonstrating how the AWS platform itself has grown, Jassy asserted that Amazon's cloud has undergone 235 updates as of November 13. That number stood at 24 back in 2008. RedShift alone saw 26 releases since January of this year. Jassy promised "a lot more coming in the next few weeks."
Along with 38 price reductions since 2006, Jassy outlined a number of reasons as to why AWS, and the cloud movement overall, has grown in the last several years.
Ultimately, and unsurprisingly, it all boils down to security.
"It should be their first priority," Jassy argued, "If you have customer data that matters, your number one priority as a company is to make sure it's secure. That's our number one priority as a platform."