AWS Service Moves Virtual Workloads To the Cloud Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), launched this week a new service that allows organizations to migrate their on-premises workloads into the cloud with minimal downtime. Customers in the Sydney, Northern Virginia, and Ireland regions can now access the AWS Server Migration Service (SMS). According to the company, it’s designed to allow organizations to migrate their virtual infrastructures into AWS Elastic Compute Cloud. (EC2) without any disruption or maintenance. In a Monday blog post, Jeff Barr, AWS evangelist, stated that this service “simplifies and streamlines the process for migrating existing virtualized apps to Amazon EC2”. It allows you to incrementally copy live Virtual Machines (VMs), to the cloud without the need to have a long maintenance period. Automate, schedule, track, and automate incremental replication of live server volumes. This simplifies the process of coordinating large-scale migrations that span hundreds or even thousands of volumes. Barr explained that SMS creates an Amazon Machine Image (AMI), for each server volume it replicates. Before the migration is completed, users can test each AMI. Customers must download the AWS Server Migration Service Connector to use SMS. This connector “runs in your existing virtualized environment and allows the migration itself, in an agentless fashion,” according Barr. After downloading the Connectors users can access SMS via their AWS Management console. There users can select which servers to replicate, set replication frequency, and monitor current migration jobs. AWS documentation states that SMS is limited to these:

“50 concurrent VM migrations per account “90 days of service usage per virtual machine (not per account), starting with the initial replication of a virtual machine. Unless a customer requests …

AWS Security Hub is now generally available. AWS Security Hub has been released from preview and is now generally available. This one-stop shop allows users to monitor and manage compliance information and security alerts coming from a variety of cloud services. AWS launched the tool in preview in December last year, following a series of security breaches that affected customers who had not properly configured their Amazon S3 storage containers. Although the AWS platform is not to blame, the company seems to have increased its security initiatives. They added controls to prevent public access to S3 storage containers, as one example of many other initiatives. The AWS Security Hub will undoubtedly help users to focus on security and get a handle of wide-ranging security issues. According to the hub’s website, Security Hub is a single place that aggregates and organizes security alerts or findings from multiple AWS services such as Amazon GuardDuty and Amazon Inspector as well as AWS Partner solutions. All this data is presented in integrated dashboards with graphs and tables that can be accessed by users. The tool also lets users automatically monitor their cloud environments, checking on compliance according to the AWS best practices and organization-specific industry standards. [Click on the image to see a larger view.] How AWS Security hub Works (source: AWS). Brandon West, a developer with Amazon Web Services Inc., dived into the details in a blog post on June 24, detailing the hands-on aspects and nitty-gritty of integrations, custom actions, and more. It works with all AWS accounts and integrates seamlessly with many AWS services as well as third-party products,” West stated. You can also use the Security Hub API for your own integrations. These were his “important notes”

AWS Config must also be enabled in order for Security Hub compliance checks can run. AWS Security Hub is available for 15 regions: US East, US East (Ohio), US West(Oregon), …