Hey Cloud Ninjas,

This week, we’ve got a solid lineup of AWS insights for you. Whether you're tackling bot mitigation with AWS WAF, scaling research workloads with NIH, or securing data with Redshift and Thales, there's something for everyone. Plus, if you’ve ever wondered how entire countries move to the AWS cloud (yes, really), we’ve got you covered. Grab your coffee and let’s dive in!

Mastering AWS WAF Bot Control: Targeted Bots, Evasive Bots, and Adaptive User Experience

March 7 2025

AWS WAF Bot Control for Targeted Bots rules can help cloud engineers detect and manage bot threats, but traditional methods like blocking or CAPTCHA can disrupt user experience. This article covers using AWS WAF labels to pass bot activity signals to your application, combining labels to indicate bot confidence levels, and mitigation strategies for adapting user experience based on bot activity signals. Plus, it's written by David and Kartik, two experts who know their stuff and also probably know a thing or two about alpacas and goats.

Read it here >

How Govplace is Revolutionizing NIH Office of Portfolio Analysis with Scalable AWS Solutions for Cost Savings

March 7 2025

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Portfolio Analysis (OPA) struggled to keep up with demand for biomedical research analysis in their on-premises environment, taking up to six months to acquire and set up new hardware. By migrating to AWS and working with Govplace, OPA can now scale its analytical applications on demand to 10 times the capacity, with the ability to be in production in three hours instead of six months, providing faster and more efficient analysis for NIH. You should care because it shows how AWS is providing on-demand scalability and cost optimization for large-scale research analysis, all while maintaining security and access to critical technical resources and knowledge. Plus, it's always good to see a government agency embracing the cloud instead of being stuck in a data center time warp!

Read it here >

Level up your data visualization game with Amazon Redshift Data API and AWS IAM Identity Center

March 6 2025

Amazon Redshift Data API support for single sign-on and trusted identity propagation allows for building data visualization applications with role-based access control. This simplifies user management and ensures appropriate access to sensitive information, making it easier for organizations to make data-driven decisions with enhanced security. The post also provides a deep dive into trusted identity propagation, demonstrating how to create a third-party application backed by analytics insights arriving from Amazon Redshift securely using OIDC. This enables connecting to Amazon Redshift using SSO from the IdP of your choice, extending this method to authenticate other AWS services that support trusted identity propagation, such as Amazon Athena and Amazon QuickSight. So, if you want to securely access, visualize, and analyze data at scale while simplifying user management and ensuring data security, this article is a must-read!

Read it here >

Safely and Swiftly Bringing Countries into the AWS Cloud: A Technical Guide

March 6 2025

AWS is collaborating with national cyber regulators and public sector entities to enable secure adoption of the AWS Cloud across countries’ public sectors. This involves establishing relationships with cyber regulators, mapping compliance requirements, setting up secure landing zones, and migrating workloads. The success stories of the Netherlands and Spain highlight how AWS is helping customers meet country-specific compliance requirements in the public sector. Who doesn't love a good success story? It's like a tech version of a feel-good movie!

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Unleashing the Power of Thales' Tokenization Solution on AWS for PCI-DSS Compliance

March 6 2025

Keeping up with tightening data privacy regulations is a headache, but tokenization is a game-changer for cloud engineers looking to simplify compliance. Thales’ vaulted and vaultless tokenization solutions minimize the amount of sensitive data in your systems, shrink your PCI-DSS audit scope, and cut down compliance costs—all while keeping your AWS environment scalable and agile. Security, efficiency, and cost savings? Sounds like a solid win!

Read it here >

That’s a wrap for this week! Whether you're implementing better bot security, optimizing compliance, or exploring scalable cloud solutions, these insights should help you stay ahead of the game. See you next week for another round of AWS updates—until then, keep those deployments smooth and your infra resilient! 🚀

Cheers,
The Cloud Pulse team