(Awesome) Changes to PrivateLink, AppRunner, and Fraud Detector

What's going on with AWS this week? The PrivateLink party gets a little larger, AppRunner gets a much appreciated new capability, and Fraud Detector becomes aware of its surroundings. Plus, I'll let you know about a brand new series that you're going to love. Let's dig in!

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PrivateLink support just keeps on expanding... Recently AWS announced that a few more services have been added to the list, specifically Incident Manager, Amazon Elasticache, Amazon MemoryDB for Redis, and Amazon Forecast.

PrivateLink is the collective name that AWS has given to the ability to connect certain AWS services directly to your VPC, avoiding a round trip to the public endpoints of those services. Most services use interface endpoints while S3 and DynamoDB use gateway endpoints. The effect is the same… PrivateLink keeps your calls to these services off the public internet, instead using the AWS network backbone. This increases privacy and, with the help of endpoint policies, can greatly increase security.

AppRunner is AWS's turnkey container service that's kind of like a little brother to Fargate.

AppRunner aims to be a quick and low-hassle way to deploy and scale web apps using the containers paradigm — but with all the other complex parts taken care of behind the scenes. While purposefully designed to be simple, the ability to access resources within a VPC was curiously absent.

Well, that limitation is no more with the announcement that you can now connect AppRunner workloads to existing VPCs. So, your AppRunner hosted apps and APIs can now reach back into your VPC subnets to access those RDS instances, Redis caches, or anything else you have running in there, provided you configure a security group to allow it.

Plus, with that VPC connection, you could also use the PrivateLink we talked about earlier to privately connect to other AWS services from your AppRunner applications.

Last week, AWS announced that Amazon Fraud Detector now has geolocation as part of the service.

Amazon Fraud Detector is a managed machine-learning service that you can train to identify situations that look out of the ordinary and thus may indicate some nefarious stuff going on. With this new geolocation enrichment, as Fraud Detector calls it, the distance between the IP address of the client and physical locations such as a shipping address and billing address is automatically calculated and provided as an input to the fraud detection model.

Now, fraud detection services that use geolocation have been around for a while, but the cool part about Fraud Detector is that it learns from your actual transaction data and keeps learning. So, if geographically dispersed transactions are a normal part of your online business, they probably won't get flagged as being out of the ordinary as the model learns and improves.

Just when you thought things couldn't get more awesome, you’re going to love our new series, Cloud Builder Live, featuring my friend and colleague David Tucker. In this live-action series, you can follow along as David builds a working application in real-time using AWS, Microsoft Azure, and the Google Cloud Platform. It’s streaming now on YouTube and Twitch.

That, my friends, is all the AWS news that's fit to print this week. Stay safe, take care of one another, and keep being awesome, cloud gurus!