VSHN.timer #132: AWS In The Spotlight

Welcome to another VSHN.timer! Every Monday, 5 links related to Kubernetes, OpenShift, CI / CD, and DevOps; all stuff coming out of our own chat system, making us think, laugh, or simply work better.

This week we’re going to talk about the latest news around Amazon Web Services, as we wait for the new Swiss region to open.

But before we start, we’d like to ask you to participate in our DevOps in Switzerland Study 2022; we’re interested in knowing how DevOps is contributing to the digital transformation of our country, and besides the good karma, you’ll have the chance to win a prize!

1. How reliable is the AWS status page nowadays? With the current ongoing invasion of Ukraine by Russia, it is more and more likely that online services experience cyber warfare attacks. Can we really trust service status reports, in particular AWS’ own ones, in such a context?

https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/24/cloud_service_status_pages_fail/

2. Microsoft Azure has experienced tremendous growth in the past few years, and many reports currently point to its net leadership in the hyperscaler market. Our own DevOps 2020 report indicated a surge of popularity of Azure over AWS in Switzerland, and that’s what the Flexera 2022 Status of the Cloud Report has seen as well.

https://www.infoworld.com/article/3652330/in-an-evolving-cloud-world-azure-passes-aws.html

3. How good is AWS’ Elastic Kubernetes Service? It certainly is a very popular way to bootstrap a managed Kubernetes cluster. Mathew Duggan has written a comprehensive report highlighting the features, advantages, drawbacks, flaws, and the history of EKS.

https://matduggan.com/aws-eks/

4. It is unfortunately all too easy to leave misconfigured databases and services on AWS; Avi Lumelsky found lots of them and wrote a chilling report about it.

https://infosecwriteups.com/how-i-discovered-thousands-of-open-databases-on-aws-764729aa7f32

5. The AWS team constantly publishes guides for DevOps engineers, with recommendations and best practices. Here’s one with the top 10 security best practices for securing backups in the AWS Backup service.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/top-10-security-best-practices-for-securing-backups-in-aws/

Are you running Kubernetes clusters on AWS EKS? What other AWS services do you currently use? Would you like to share some AWS security tips and tricks with the community? Get in touch with us, and see you next week for another edition of VSHN.timer.

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PS³: check out our previous VSHN.timer editions about AWS: #61 and #87.