We’re half way through the year and there are lots of updates I’ve been missing so I figured I’d go back over my slack channel where I store RSS feeds and have a read. Here are some of the ones I think are notable from Jan which you may already know because you’re better at keeping pace than I am this year 😀

January

Announcement
AWS Control Tower announces the availability of lifecycle event notifications. A lifecycle event marks the completion of a Control Tower action that can change the state of resources such as organizational units (OUs), accounts and guardrails that are created and managed by Control Tower. Lifecycle events are recorded as AWS CloudTrail events and delivered to Amazon EventBridge as events, and the event log states if the Control Tower action completed successfully or not.
Comment
Nice. CloudTrail events is near real time so this is cool.
Announcement
Amazon VPC Ingress Routing Now Supports AWS CloudFormation
You can now create AWS CloudFormation templates to provision and configure Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) ingress routing infrastructures predictably and repeatedly. Amazon VPC ingress routing allows you to route ingress and egress traffic to and from internet gateways and virtual private gateways through networking and security virtual appliances in your VPCs. 
Comment
Always nice when CloudFormation catches up. Noting this one due to the fact it relates to the newer features for routing to a security appliance.
Announcement
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/01/aws-key-management-service-expands-support-for-asymmetric-keys/
With this feature, AWS customers and 3rd parties can perform unauthenticated encryption outside of AWS KMS using an RSA public key, but enforce authenticated decryption within AWS KMS using the corresponding private key. Similarly, customers can use ECC or RSA private keys to generate digital signatures and 3rd parties can perform verification outside AWS KMS using the public keys.  
To learn more about this new feature, visit AWS documentation.  
Comment
Noted from Docs: You can create and manage symmetric and asymmetric CMKs by using the AWS KMS console and the AWS KMS API. However, AWS KMS supports different features for CMKs of different types.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/kms/latest/developerguide/symm-asymm-compare.html
Announcement
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/01/aws-codepipeline-enables-stopping-pipeline-executions/
Now, you can also stop a pipeline execution immediately. For example, if you notice that a release going through a pipeline contains an issue, you can quickly stop it from deploying any further. Additionally, if you are testing your pipeline configuration and want to quickly re-run a pipeline without waiting for the current pipeline execution to complete, you can immediately abandon the pipeline execution and allow a new one to take over.  
Comment
From the Console or SDK
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/codepipeline/latest/userguide/pipelines-stop.html
Announcement
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/01/amazon-ebs-direct-apis-for-snapshots-now-available-in-ten-additional-regions/
Comment
One for external “ISVs” focused on Backups. Nice on AWS.
Announcement
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/01/aws-elastic-beanstalk-adds-support-for-windows-server-2019-and-net-core-3-1/
AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports Windows Server 2019, Windows Server Core 2019, and .NET Core 3.1.  
Comment
Cool. Nice one for Microsoft Devs
Announcement
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/01/amazon-guardduty-announces-threat-detection-enhancements/
The broad global adoption of Amazon GuardDuty and scale of coverage has helped surface common customer architectures and configurations that can produce high volumes of security alerts. These patterns have been used to intelligently enhance GuardDuty detection models in order to recognize valid use cases that were very similar to attack traffic. AWS Security has been able to pull these observations into the GuardDuty detection analytics, reducing alert volume without sacrificing coverage or security value.  
Comment
Soooo here is the problem with AI in security. At least AWS is keeping on top of model generation however they need all the data and false positives to work redo the modelling :\

Welp thats Jan. guess I need to put some time aside for Feb as I’m way behind 😉

Paul.