Certified Azure Engineer

As committed in Multi Cloud blog, now I'm Microsoft Certified Azure engineer.

This exam is an opportunity to prove knowledge of cloud concepts, Azure services, Azure workloads, security and privacy in Azure, as well as Azure pricing and support. It makes to be familiar with the general technology concepts, including concepts of networking, storage, compute, application support, and application development.

With the earlier couple of AWS certifications & work experiences, it is making a clear road map to contribute in my home ground Microsoft technology.

Side note: 2022 industry certification goal is fulfilled earlier, with consistent 15 years mark since 2008. 

Stay tuned for continuous learning & sharing !

AWS Private 5G

 

AWS Private 5G is a managed service that makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale your own private cellular network, with all required hardware and software provided by AWS.

With AWS Private 5G, you can build private cellular networks to take advantage of the technological benefits of 5G while maintaining the security and granular application and device controls of a private network.

Top-3 Use Cases are

1. Run a smart manufacturing facility
2. Enable business-critical applications
3. Deliver reliable campus connectivity

Preview is available at https://pages.awscloud.com/Private5GPreview.html

UPnP

 Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) service becomes dangerous if it establishes connections with devices that are infected with malware. Such connections make DDoS attacks possible. UPnP exploitation can result in more than just the connection of an infected device

A malicious campaign known as 'Eternal Silence' is abusing UPnP turns your router into a proxy server used to launch malicious attacks while hiding the location of the threat actors.

The new rulesets defined by the hackers contain the phrase 'galleta silenciosa', which is Spanish for 'silent cookie'.

{"NewProtocol": "TCP", "NewInternalPort": "445", "NewInternalClient": "192.168.10.212",
"NewPortMappingDescription": "galleta silenciosa", "NewExternalPort": "47669"}

The injections attempt to expose TCP ports 139 and 445 on devices connected to the targeted router, roughly 1,700,000 machines running SMB services.

As the best practice, the latest firmware update should be a priority as the device vendor may have addressed any UPnP implementation flaws via a security update.

Multi Cloud

 

Covid is impacting the entire world for last 2+ years.  I'm not escaped in this list. Yes, me & my family got affected during the initial weeks of 2022. By God's grace, we recovered well now.

During the isolation days, few books inspired towards "Multi Cloud Strategy"

In fact, many successful enterprises are moving from single cloud provider to multi cloud partners.  It improves the availability and reliability of the underlying business products with load balancing across multi cloud.

In a multi-cloud environment, an enterprise utilizes multiple public cloud services, most often from different cloud providers. Hybrid cloud includes a private cloud and are typically managed as one entity. Multi-clouds involve more than one public cloud service, which often perform different functions.

To make it in action, I'm getting ready with Microsoft Azure cloud platform after the last years' Amazon AWS cloud architect certifications. My organization goal is also towards this strategy.

AWS Trasnfer FEDRAMP

 

Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) is a government-wide program that provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services.

AWS Transfer Family provides fully managed file transfers over SFTP, FTPS, and FTP for Amazon S3 and Amazon EFS. The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) is a US government-wide program that delivers a standard approach to the security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services

AWS Transfer Family is now authorized as FedRAMP Moderate in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon) and as FedRAMP High in GovCloud(US-West) and GovCloud(US-East).

 US Federal agencies and commercial customers working with the US Federal government can now utilize AWS Transfer Family to run sensitive and highly regulated file transfer workloads.
 
 AWS compliance reference is available at https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/services-in-scope/

AWS Log4j Vulnerability

We know Log4j security vulnerability hits the world recently and everyone is reacting to resolve immediately.  AWS is not an exception and their fixes are listed below.

More information about the Java hot patch is available at https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/open-source-hotpatch-for-apache-log4j-vulnerability/

Amazon Connect
Amazon Connect has been updated to mitigate the issues identified in CVE-2021-44228. 

Amazon Chime
Amazon Chime SDK services have been updated to mitigate the issues identified in CVE-2021-44228 and CVE-2021-45046.

Amazon EMR
CVE-2021-44228 impacts Apache Log4j versions between 2.0 and 2.14.1 when processing inputs from untrusted sources. EMR clusters launched with EMR 5 and EMR 6 releases include open source frameworks such as Apache Hive, Apache Flink, HUDI, Presto, and Trino, which use these versions of Apache Log4j. When you launch a cluster with EMR’s default configuration, it does not process inputs from untrusted sources. Many customers use the open source frameworks installed on their EMR clusters to process and log inputs from untrusted sources. Therefore, AWS recommends that you apply the solution described here.

Amazon Fraud Detector
Amazon Fraud Detector services have been updated to mitigate the issues identified in CVE-2021-44228.

Amazon Kendra
Amazon Kendra has been updated to mitigate CVE-2021-44228.

Amazon Lex
Amazon Lex has been updated to mitigate the issues identified in CVE-2021-44228.

Amazon Macie
The Amazon Macie service has been updated to mitigate the issues identified in CVE-2021-44228.

Amazon Macie Classic
The Amazon Macie Classic service has been updated to mitigate the issues identified in CVE-2021-44228.

Amazon Monitron
Amazon Monitron has been updated to mitigate the issues identified in CVE-2021-44228.

Amazon RDS
Amazon RDS and Amazon Aurora have been updated to mitigate the issues identified in CVE-2021-44228.

Amazon Rekognition
Amazon Rekognition services have been updated to mitigate the issues identified in CVE-2021-44228.

Amazon VPC
Amazon VPC, including Internet Gateway and Virtual Gateway services, have been updated to mitigate the Log4j issue referenced in CVE-2021-44228.

AWS AppSync
AWS AppSync has been updated to mitigate the issues identified in CVE-2021-44228 and CVE-2021-45046.

AWS Certificate Manager
AWS Certificate Manager services have been updated to mitigate the issues identified in CVE-2021-44228.

AWS Service Catalog
AWS Service Catalog has been updated to mitigate the issues identified in CVE-2021-44228.

AWS Systems Manager
AWS Systems Manager service has been updated to mitigate the issues identified in CVE-2021-44228. The Systems Manager agent itself is not affected by this issue.

Software Resilience

 

This week blog is based on my work experience in AWS.  On Tuesday 7 Dec 2021, our products got affected due to AWS multi hours global outage. 

The first phase of outage began at approximately 15:35 UTC (7:35 am PT), when multiple Amazon sites and services began to show significant performance degradation. While site loading appeared to mostly normalize by 16:50 UTC (8:50 am PT), we observed AWS API service failures that caused API transactions to experience dramatically higher completion times or simply time out.

Second wave of the outage lasted for over 7 hours, not fully resolving until approximately 0:44 UTC (4:44 pm PT) . We managed our products with Disaster Recovery (DR) strategy.

Amazon confirmed that service issues with AWS main US-East-1 region, located in Northern Virginia, were causing problems for its warehouse and delivery network.

On reading the various industry news, it was an opportunity to learn AWS influences in the industry.

AWS controlled 33% of the global cloud infrastructure market in the second quarter, according to Synergy Research Group, followed by Microsoft at 20% and Google at 10%.

As the result, key industry observations are

• brought down many popular websites and services.
• some of Amazon’s delivery operations ground to a halt, and third-party sellers couldn’t ship products.
• Colleges that rely on software to host content had to postpone exams during finals week.
  

As software engineer, personal learning/improvement (recollecting golden words of my mentor Suresh) - resilience is to re-adapt to any crisis situation intelligently