HITS

NEW YORK — Amazon Web Services (AWS) introduced a new machine-learning based security service at its AWS Summit Aug. 14, while announcing new cloud service client wins that included Hulu.

Amazon Macie uses machine learning to help customers prevent data loss by automatically discovering, classifying and protecting sensitive data in the AWS cloud, Matt Wood, AWS GM-artificial intelligence, said at the summit during a heavily-attended keynote.

Macie recognizes sensitive data including personally identifiable information (PII) or intellectual property, and provides customers with dashboards and alerts that offer visibility into how that data is being accessed or moved, he explained. The fully managed service continuously monitors data access activity for anomalies, and generates detailed alerts when it detects risk of unauthorized access or inadvertent data leaks, he said.

The new service became available Aug. 14 to protect data stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and support for additional AWS data stores will follow later this year, AWS said.

Customers can enable Amazon Macie from the AWS Management Console, and will pay only for the GBs of S3 content classified and the AWS CloudTrail events analyzed, with no upfront costs or software purchases needed, according to Wood. (CloudTrail is an AWS service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing and risk auditing of customers’ AWS accounts).

Initial AWS customers already using Macie include Netflix, Wood said at the summit. “The security of our customers’ data is a top priority for Netflix,” Patrick Kelley, senior cloud security engineer at Netflix, said in a news release announcing Macie. “Since we started using Amazon Macie, we’ve found that it is flexible enough to solve … challenges that would have previously required us to write custom code or build internal tools, such as securing PII and alerting us to access anomalies, helping us move fast with confidence,” he said.

Amazon Macie can send all findings to Amazon CloudWatch Events and will support application program interface (API) endpoints via the AWS software development kit later this year, enabling “robust interoperability with third-party solutions,” according to AWS.

Hulu, meanwhile, selected AWS as its cloud provider, Adrian Cockcroft, AWS VP-cloud architecture strategy, disclosed during the keynote.

Hulu leveraged AWS services to launch the new Hulu over-the-top (OTT) live TV service in May, enabling more than 50 live channels to be included initially, according to Rafael Soltanovich, Hulu VP of software development.

“Blending together subscription video on demand, live, DVR, premium content in one seamless, elegant user experience had never been done before,” he told the summit. To accomplish that, Hulu had to “rebuild our entire tech stack from backend services all the way to every single application,” he explained. Using AWS helped Hulu successfully launch the service, he said, pointing to its “elasticity, agility and security.”

Challenges that Hulu faced when developing the new live service included dealing with the huge amount of metadata that accompanied all the new content it was handling, Soltanovich said. Making sure that the correct description of a program or movie is attached to that content is one necessity, he pointed out, noting that it’s important to make sure that, for example, the Marvel movie “The Avengers” is correctly identified as a superhero action movie and has the right accompanying images so that viewers can see it’s that movie rather than the old British TV series of the same name or the movie of the same name that was based on that show.

Another large challenge that Hulu faced was handling the huge amount of data that included local sports and news in multiple markets, he said, noting that the live service was his company’s first large-scale deployment into the cloud.

Other media companies and broadcasters that have already been running their media supply chains and OTT delivery pipelines on AWS include AOL, BBC, Discovery Communications, Lionsgate, Netflix, PBS and Sony DADC, according to AWS. FICO and life sciences company GRAIL also selected AWS as their cloud provider, AWS announced Aug, 14.
In all, AWS now has “millions” of active customers each month, Cockcroft told the summit.

AWS also announced the availability of G3 instances, the next generation of GPU-powered Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances designed to make it easy to procure a powerful combination of central processing (CPU) and random-access memory (RAM) for workloads including 3D rendering, 3D visualizations, graphics-intensive remote workstations, video encoding and virtual reality applications. Backed by Nvidia Tesla M60 GPUs, G3 instances offer double the CPU power per GPU, and double the host memory per GPU, compared to the most powerful GPU cloud instance available today, AWS said.

The company also made AWS Glue available to all customers, it said. The fully managed extract, transform and load (ETL) service makes it easier for customers to prepare and load their data into Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), and databases running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for query and analysis, AWS said. Customers can create and run an ETL job with only a few clicks in the AWS Management Console.

They just have to point AWS Glue at their data stored on AWS, and Glue will discover the associated metadata, classify it, generate ETL scripts for data transformation, and load the transformed data into a destination data store, provisioning the infrastructure needed to complete the job, AWS said.

More than 20,000 people registered to attend the New York summit, Cockcroft said, noting the educational event featured 101 technical sessions.