Last updated at Wed, 20 Dec 2023 16:00:00 GMT

It seems like it was just yesterday that we were in Las Vegas for AWS Re:Invent, but it’s already been almost two weeks since the conference wrapped up. As is always the case, AWS unveiled a host of new services throughout the week, including advancements around serverless, artificial intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), security and more.

There were a ton of really exciting announcements, but a few stood out to me. Before we dive into the new and updated services we now support in InsightCloudSec, let’s take a second to highlight a few of them and why they’re of note.

Highlights from AWS’ New Service Announcements during Re:Invent

Amazon Bedrock general availability was announced back in October, re:Invent brought with it announcements of new capabilities including customized models, GenAI applications to execute multi-step tasks, and Guardrails announced in preview. New Security Hub functionalities were introduced, including centralized governance, custom controls and a refresh of the dashboard.

Serverless innovations include updates to Amazon Aurora Limitless Database, Amazon ElasticCache Serverless, and AI-driven Amazon Redshift Serverless adding greater scaling and efficiency to their database and analytics offerings. Serverless architectures bring scalability and flexibility, however security and risk considerations shift away from traditional network traffic inspection and access control lists, towards IAM hygiene, system identity behavioral analysis along with code integrity and validation.

Amazon Datazone general availability, like Bedrock, was originally announced in October and got some new innovations showcased during Re:Invent including business driven domains and data catalog, projects and environments, and the ability for data workers to publish and data consumers to subscribe to workflows. Available in open preview for Datazone are automated, AI-driven recommendations for metadata-driven business descriptions and specific columns and analytical applications based on business units.

One of the most exciting announcements from Re:Invent this year was Amazon Q, Amazon’s new GenAI-powered Virtual Assistant. Q was also integrated into Amazon’s Business Intelligence (BI) service, QuickSight, which has been supported in InsightCloudSec for some time now.

Having released our support for Amazon OpenSearch last year, this year’s re:Invent brought some exciting updates that are worth mentioning here. Now generally available is Vector Engine for OpenSearch Serverless, which enables users to store and quickly search vector embeddings for GenAI applications. AWS also announced the OR1 Instance family, which is compute optimized specifically for OpenSearch and also a new zero-ETL integration with S3.

Expanded Resource Coverage in InsightCloudSec

It’s very important to us here at Rapid7 that we provide our customers with the peace of mind to know when their teams leave these events and begin implementing new innovations from AWS that they’re doing so securely. To that end, the days and weeks following Re:Invent is always a bit of a sprint, and this year was no exception.

The Coverage and Analysis team loves a challenge though, and in my totally unbiased opinion — we’ve delivered something special. Our latest release featured new support for a variety of the new services announced during Re:Invent, as well as, a number of existing services we’ve expanded support for in relation to updates announced by AWS. We’ve added support for 6 new services that were either announced or updated during the show. We’ve also added 25 new Insights, all of which have been applied to our existing AWS Foundational Security Best Practices pack, AWS Center for Internet Security (CIS) 2.0 compliance pack, as well as new AWS relevant updates to NIST SP800-53 (Rev 5).

The newly supported services are:

  • Bedrock, a fully managed service that allows users to build generative AI applications in the cloud by providing a set of foundational models both from AWS and 3rd party vendors.
  • Clean Rooms, which enables customers to collaborate and analyze data securely in ‘clean rooms’ in minutes with any other company on joint initiatives without sharing real raw data.
  • AWS Control Tower (January 2024 Release), a management service that can be used to create and orchestrate a multi-account AWS environment in accordance with AWS best practices including the Well-Architected Framework.

Along with support for newly-added services, we’ve also expanded our coverage around the host of existing services as well. We’ve added or expanded support for the following security and serverless solutions:

  • Network Firewall, which provides fine-grained control over network traffic.
  • Security Hub, an AWS’ native service that provides CSPM functionality, aggregating security and compliance checks.
  • Glue, a serverless data integration service that makes it easy for analytics users to discover, prepare, move, and integrate data from multiple sources, empowering your analytics and ML projects.

Helping Teams Securely Build AI/ML Applications in the Cloud

One of the most exciting elements to come out of the past few weeks with the addition of AWS Bedrock, is our extended coverage for AI and ML solutions that we are now able to provide across cloud providers for our customers. Supporting AWS Bedrock, along with GCP Vertex and Azure OpenAI Service has enabled us to build a very exciting new feature as part of our Compliance Packs.

Machine learning, artificial intelligence, and analytics were driving themes of this year's conference, so it makes me very happy to announce that we now offer a dedicated Rapid7 AI/ML Security Best Practices compliance pack. If interested, I highly recommend you keep an eye out in the coming days for my colleague Kathryn Lynas-Blunt’s blog discussing how Rapid7 enables teams to securely build AI applications in the cloud.

As a cloud enthusiast, AWS re:Invent never fails to deliver on innovation, excitement and shared learning experiences. As we continue our partnership with AWS, I’m very excited for all that 2024 holds in store. Until next year!