Okay. Hello Cloud Gurus, how y'all doing, I'm Scott Pletcher with more AWS news than you just might be able to use. The PrivateLink party gets a little larger, App Runner 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. So wipe that cheesy puff dust off your face, kick those beer cans outta the way.

And don't you dare touch that leftover slice of cold pizza. It's time for AWS this Week. Well, PrivateLink support just keeps on expanding. And recently AWS announced a few more services have been added to the list. The newly added services are 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. But 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. App Runner is AWS's turnkey container service that's kind of like a little brother to Fargate.

The service aims to be a quick and low hassle way to deploy and scale web apps using the familiar container paradigm, but with all the other complex parts taken care of behind the scenes. Now, while designed to be purposefully 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 App Runner workloads to an existing VPC. So your App Runner 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 that you configure a security group to allow it. Plus with the VPC connection, you can also use PrivateLink that we talked about earlier to privately connect to other AWS services from your App Runner applications.

Last week AWS announced that Amazon Fraud Detector now has geolocation as part of the service. Fraud Detector is a managed machine learning service that you can train to identify situations that look a little out of the ordinary and thus may indicate some nefarious stuff going on. With this new geolocation in enrichment as Fraud Detector calls them, the distance between the IP address of the client and the physical location such as shipping addresses and billing addresses 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. Well if past history is any indicator,

this episode will likely drop late Sunday evening or early Monday. For those of us in the Americas. Just mere hours after the big game, I have to call it the big game because it's real name is copyrighted, and I don't want any trouble there. Now, since we are recording this prior to the big game, I'm staking my prediction right now for everyone to hear my prediction is this: one out of every three commercials will have something to do with cryptocurrency. There you have it. Well, we shall see if my prediction pans out. Here's another prediction:

you are 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. The series premieres this Tuesday, February 15th, 6:00 PM Eastern, 3:00 PM Pacific streaming on YouTube and Twitch. In this first episode, David will be building a serverless react app using AWS Amplify. So do check it out and we'll include a link down below.

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.