IT Modernization & DevOps News Week in Review
Happy Data Privacy Day! An international effort to promote privacy, data protection best practices, and to empower individuals and business to safeguard data, the day is celebrated across the United States, 47 European countries, Canada, and India. It marks the signing in 1981 of the first legally binding, international treaty to deal with data protection and privacy. Technology has only served to underscore the importance of this decades-old treaty.
In today’s news we see several organizations who are actively promoting enhanced data security, monitoring and compliance. For ongoing news and analysis in your inbox, subscribe to the Flux7 blog here:
- GitHub has shared its evolving approach to SSO, prioritizing enterprise features for 2019. We look forward to these as SSO offers strong opportunities for IT monitoring and security control.
- Amazon introduced a newly updated version of its AWS Config Rule Development Kit (RDK) which helps operators rapidly deploy custom AWS Config rules at scale across multiple AWS accounts and Regions. AWS Config is a powerful tool for maintaining and enforcing configuration compliance and security best practices across AWS resources.
- Amazon has issued a new paper on aligning to the NIST Cybersecurity Framework in the AWS Cloud. Designed for Version 1.1, which was released in 2018, the paper addresses how organizations can align with the NIST CSF framework to help improve an organization’s security, risk management, and resilience with AWS services and resources.
- As more and more enterprises adopt Kubernetes for container orchestration, we’ll undoubtedly see more demand for solutions like LogicMonitor’s new Kubernetes tool that provides event-based Kubernetes monitoring. As an enterprise orchestrates microservices with Kubernetes, its tool automatically adds and removes cluster resources from the monitoring platform.
- In other monitoring news, AppDynamics announced a new platform called the Central Nervous System. Comprised of three pillars to support AIOps, the platform uses third-party systems to consume, correlate and analyze data across domains, automatically remediating issues, and optimizing performance. AppDynamics launched three new products in support of the new platform: a serverless agent for AWS Lambda environments, an application monitoring tool for Cisco ACI and a machine learning engine.
- And in a potential game changer for disaster recovery and audit, Amazon announced AWS Backup, a fully managed backup service. Designed to centralize and automate the backup of data across cloud-based and on-prem AWS services, AWS Backup allows operators to configure and audit the AWS resources they want to back up, automate backup scheduling, set retention policies, and monitor all recent backup and restore activity.
AWS News
- Amazon announced TLS Termination for Network Load Balancers. According to AWS, this new offering simplifies the process of building secure web applications by giving operators the ability to make use of Transport Layer Security connections that terminate at a Network Load Balancer. Thus freeing backend servers from the compute-intensive work of encrypting and decrypting traffic.
- AWS Service Catalog for self-serve IT is a goal of many of our customers. As a result, our AWS consulting group enjoyed this recent article on how to Automate account creation, and resource provisioning using AWS Service Catalog, AWS Organizations, and AWS Lambda. Using automation to set up guardrails, the author illustrates how to set up tasks such as create default users, configure custom networks, and provision products with a curated set of AWS services.
- Our DevOps consulting team also liked this AWS blog on How to automate SAML federation to multiple AWS accounts from Microsoft Azure Active Directory. In it author Sepehr Samiei explains how to automate federation between AWS IAM in multiple AWS accounts and Microsoft Azure AD. (For additional depth on this topic, read our blog, Azure AD SAML Authentication Configuration for AWS Console.)
Flux7 News
- Check out the latest article by our CEO, Dr. Suleman, in Forbes on the Common Assumptions To Avoid When Starting With Kubernetes. Kubernetes has many benefits. From the ability to move from test to production with a single click to load balancing and service healing, it is a powerful tool that organizations are understandably eager to adopt. However, increasing the speed of development and deployment should not be an end goal in and of itself but rather a means to achieve specific business goals. Plan for the common skill, agility and cost assumptions that Dr. Suleman outlines in his article, and you’ll avoid the missteps of those who have gone before you, starting out on the right foot with a solid plan for success.
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