In this episode of AWS TechChat, we take a journey into Amazon Managed Blockchain and Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB). I interview a blockchain specialist - Forrest, who help us deep dive into the depths of blockchain technologies and terminologies.

We start the show by setting foundations, diving into cryptocurrencies, tokenization, and smart contracts before walking through the difference between layer 1, layer 2, and sidechains.

We then pivot the discussion to private and public blockchain, Hyperledger as well as Ethereum. We close out this segment by answering some of the frequently asked questions - “Is there only one blockchain? Why do we need multiple blockchains?” 

We also discuss about blockchain versus databases and how to decide between Amazon Managed Blockchain and Amazon QLDB. 

Finally, we wrap up the show with some exciting use cases and share how you should start your blockchain journey. 

Speakers
Shai Perednik - Sr. Solutions Architect, AWS
Forrest Colyer - Blockchain Specialist Solutions Architect, AWS

AWS Events:
AWS Innovate – Data Edition https://aws.amazon.com/events/aws-innovate/data/   
AWS Events and Webinars - http://aws.amazon.com/events/ 

Customer stories
How Contura Energy built a letter of credit application on Amazon Managed Blockchain https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/how-contura-energy-built-a-letter-of-credit-application-on-amazon-managed-blockchain/
Enterprise solutions with blockchain: Use cases from Nestlé, Sony Music, and Workday https://d1.awsstatic.com/events/reinvent/2019/Enterprise_solutions_with_blockchain_Use_cases_from_Nestle_Sony_Music_and_Workday_BLC204.pdf 
Nestlé brings supply chain transparency with Amazon Managed Blockchain https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6vPvZ0-7dY 
Amazon Managed Blockchain Customers https://aws.amazon.com/managed-blockchain/customers/ 

Resources
Getting started with the Amazon QLDB console  https://docs.aws.amazon.com/qldb/latest/developerguide/getting-started.html
Get Started Creating a Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain Network Using Amazon Managed Blockchain  https://docs.aws.amazon.com/managed-blockchain/latest/hyperledger-fabric-dev/managed-blockchain-get-started-tutorial.html
Deploy an Ethereum node on Amazon Managed Blockchain https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/deploy-an-ethereum-node-on-amazon-managed-blockchain/
Building a serverless blockchain application with Amazon Managed Blockchain https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/building-a-serverless-blockchain-application-with-amazon-managed-blockchain/
Integrate Amazon Managed Blockchain identities with Amazon Cognito https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/integrate-amazon-managed-blockchain-identities-with-amazon-cognito/
Tracking activity in Amazon Managed Blockchain with Amazon CloudWatch Logs https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/tracking-activity-in-amazon-managed-blockchain-with-amazon-cloudwatch-logs/
Automating Hyperledger Fabric chaincode deployment on Amazon Managed Blockchain using AWS CodePipeline https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/automating-hyperledger-fabric-chaincode-deployment-on-amazon-managed-blockchain-using-aws-codepipeline/

Episode 84 - Blockchain Special

A round-up of the latest AWS news, services and feature updates and expert tips for cloud enthusiasts, IT professionals and developers, delivered by AWS subject matter experts.

Episode 1 - Key announcements from AWS Summit Sydney 2016

Dr Pete and Russ deliver another rich round-up of recent AWS news. They cover India's recent AWS Region launch, the latest services and feature updates around EC2 with Elastic Network Adaptor, Run Command, Elastic File System (EFS), Python Serverless Microframework for AWS, as well as Mobile Hub, Lumberyard, Database Migration, Aurora and a whole lot more. They are also joined by a special guest from APAC Certification and Training,
Ash Willis. Ash joins our hosts to chat about honing your cloud skills, and best practice tips to get you started on your AWS certification journey. All this and more - be sure to tune in!

Episode 3 – A round-up of AWS updates, including launch of 35th AZ & AWS certification expert tips

Tune into the latest episode of AWS TechChat as special guest Adrian Cockcroft, Vice President, Cloud Architecture Strategy, AWS joins our hosts Dr Pete and Russ to talk about Innovation, Architecture and the AWS Cloud.

Episode 14 - Special Episode with Adrian Cockcroft

In this AWS TechChat - Application Security Edition,  Shane chats with Gabe about all things application security, providing a crash course for the builder in all of us.

They start the show with some level setting to set the scene, introducing the Top 10 OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) before moving on to CVE's (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures). They then move up the stack to Layer 7 and speak about AWS WAF, which is our web application firewall that helps protect your web applications from common web exploits and how you can use AWS WAF to mitigate against OWASP Top 10 risks as well as how you can leverage managed rule sets for common COTS (Commercial off-the-shelf) applications. 

Lastly, introducing Amazon Inspector - an automated security assessment service that helps shine a light on the security and compliance of applications deployed on Amazon EC2 by detecting CVE's and instance drift again CIS standards.

Episode 47 - Application Security Special

In this episode of AWS TechChat, Shane and Pete take it up a notch in a thought-provoking episode. They discuss some key AWS feature releases that are fundamentally changing the approach of how customers wire up those more complex AWS account structures and talk to you about some modern approaches more mature customers are adopting.

We started the show with AWS RAM (Resource Access Manager) which is a simple and secure way to share resources across AWS Accounts, worth taking a look if you use VPC Peering or hybrid DNS resolvers today.

They then pivoted to AWS CDK (Cloud Development Kit) which is a software development framework, with the artifact being AWS CloudFormation, yet another tool to help you move to No-Ops and focus on improving developer productivity. AWS CDK offers a higher-level object-oriented abstraction to define AWS resources imperatively.

And lastly out with the old and in with the new (and it’s not Pete). Node JS 6 is EOL (End-of-Life) for AWS Lambda, and we announce the arrival of Node JS 10 touting significant performance and functionality improvements.

Episode 49 - AWS RAM and CDK Deep Dive

In this themed episode of AWS TechChat, Shane brings along a special guest, AWS Solution Architect and Container expert - Mitch Beaumont. 

We started the show reminiscing about container history, going way back looking at where we came from and how we arrived at the position we are today and gave a quick overview of our container offerings - Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), and AWS Fargate. 

I then posed a fictitious question about container orchestration - what options are available and the pros and cons of each platform.

We looked at our container roadmap, so pop that into your favorite search engine (https://github.com/aws/containers-roadmap) to get an understanding of what has shipped, what is coming soon and what we are working on.

They say, if you are not keeping score it’s just practice, so Mitch ran us through the approaches we need to take as we make the shift through to containers around observability and monitoring before talking through deployment and operational patterns. 

Lastly, to close out the show, we once again touched base with Firecracker. Firecraker provides hardware-level isolation with the convenience of containers and underpins many of the container and serverless offerings on AWS. It is open-source so feel free to download it, kick the tires and have a play.

Speakers:
Shane Baldacchino - Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS
Mitch Beaumont - Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS

Resources:
What is a Container? https://aws.amazon.com/containers/
Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) https://aws.amazon.com/ecs/
AWS Fargate https://aws.amazon.com/fargate/
AWS Container Roadmap https://github.com/aws/containers-roadmap
Elastic Network Interfaces https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/using-eni.html
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) https://aws.amazon.com/eks/
Amazon VPC CNI Plugin for Kubernetes Upgrades https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eks/latest/userguide/cni-upgrades.html
Elastic Load Balancing https://aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/
Amazon CloudWatch https://aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/
Centralized Container Logging with Fluent Bit https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/centralized-container-logging-fluent-bit/
Amazon ECS and AWS Fargate FireLens https://github.com/aws/containers-roadmap/tree/master/preview-programs/firelens
Firecracker https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker
AWS Container DevSecOps Workshop https://container-devsecops.awssecworkshops.com/

APAC Online Event:
AWSome Day Online series https://aws.amazon.com/events/awsome-day/awsome-day-online/
AWS Data Analytics & Machine Learning Online Series https://aws.amazon.com/events/data-analytics-series/
AWS Builders Online Series on-demand https://aws.amazon.com/events/builders-online-series/
AWS Innovate on-demand aws.amazon.com/events/aws-innovate/

Episode 55 - Container Special

In this round-up episode of AWS TechChat, Shane and Dean come at you with raft of short sharp and important updates that occurred in August and September in the year 2019.

They start the show with an announcement - support for multiple TLS certificates on Network Load Balancers using Server Name Indication (SNI). You can now host multiple secure applications, each with its own TLS certificate, on a single load balancer listener.

Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB) is now GA, and it is a fully managed ledger database that provides a transparent, immutable, and cryptographically verifiable transaction log ‎owned by a central trusted authority.

They then spoke about the recently announced AWS Solution that uses Amazon Comprehend and Amazon Elasticsearch (ES) Service for indexing and analyzing unstructured text. This reference implementation in the form of AWS CloudFormation (CFN) deploys a cost-effective, end-to-end solution for extracting meaningful insights from unstructured data. Also, it has a tasty Kibana dashboard to provide visualizations. 

Updates for Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Flow logs - In addition to existing fields, you can now choose to add in additional meta-data that will help provide more meaningful conclusions.

Finally, to close out the show we covered two updates for Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). Amazon EKS now allows you to assign IAM permissions to Kubernetes service accounts. This update gives you fine-grained, pod level access-control when running clusters with multiple co-located services. Secondly, we just released 1.14.6 for Amazon EKS. Please check out the EKS support policy as we only support the last three (1.12, 1.13 & 1.14) EKS releases.

Speakers:
Shane Baldacchino - Solutions Architect, ANZ, AWS
Dean Samuels – Lead Architect, ASEAN, AWS

Resources:
Amazon CloudFront announces its first Edge location in Portugal - https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/09/amazon-cloudfront-lisbon-portugal/ 
Amazon CloudFront announces new Edge location in Israel - https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/08/cloudfront-israel/ 
Amazon CloudFront expands presence in the Middle East with first Edge location in Bahrain - https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2018/08/cloudfront-bahrain-launch/ 
Network Load Balancers now support multiple TLS certificates using Server Name Indication (SNI) - https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/09/elastic-load-balancing-network-load-balancers-now-supports-multiple-tls-certificates-using-server-name-indication/
Additional Metadata to Amazon VPC Flow Logs - https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/09/now-add-additional-metadata-to-amazon-vpc-flow-logs/ 
General Availability of Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB) - https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/09/announcing-general-availability-qldb/ 
Analyzing Text with Amazon Elasticsearch Service and Amazon Comprehend - https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/09/introducing-analyzing-text-with-amazon-elasticsearch-service-and-amazon-comprehend/ 
Amazon EKS now supports Kubernetes version 1.14 https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/09/amazon-eks-now-supports-kubernetes-version-1-14/

AWS Events:
AWSome Day Online series https://aws.amazon.com/events/awsome-day/awsome-day-online/
AWS Modern Application Development Online Event https://aws.amazon.com/events/application/modern-app-development/ 
AWS Data Analytics Online Series on-demand https://aws.amazon.com/events/data-analytics-series/
AWS Builders Online Series on-demand https://aws.amazon.com/events/builders-online-series/
AWS Innovate on-demand https://aws.amazon.com/events/aws-innovate/  
AWS re:Invent https://reinvent.awsevents.com/

Episode 56 - September 2019 Tech Round-up

Co-hosted by AWS Solution Architects and Evangelists, Shai Perednik, Dean Samuels and guest hosts!