Title

AWS re:Invent 2023 - How Amazon MGM Studios protects its most important data (STG225)

Summary

• Speakers: Rafael Barrero (Senior Manager of SRE at Amazon Prime Video and Studios), Mike Millner (VP of Cloud Technology at Trend Micro), and Jason Warman (Technical Group Lead at PacGenesis).
• Context: The talk focuses on the data protection strategies employed by Amazon MGM Studios, particularly in the context of the media supply chain, which involves complex workflows and large data sets.
• Data Handling: Amazon MGM Studios creates 20-50 S3 buckets per month, with around 80 million objects in S3 per month. Data is received via various methods, including Direct Connect, Aspera, and Snowmobiles, with file sizes reaching over 3 terabytes.
• Global Scale: The infrastructure engineering team deploys across 27 AWS regions to support local productions on six continents.
• Security Goals: The goal is to secure assets at scale, with a focus on real integrity and visibility. They require a scalable, native, and extendable solution that can be deployed worldwide.
• Trend MicroStack: The Trend MicroStack is event-based, decoupled, serverless, and modernized to support a large number of events in S3. It includes a storage stack, scanner stack, and post-scan stack, with the scanner stack leveraging Trend's malware detection database.
• Deployment: AWS organizations and Service Catalog are used for deployment across member accounts. CloudFormation templates are tailored for production, and the infrastructure is productized for self-service and repeatability.
• Trend Micro's File Storage Security: This product is designed to be cloud-native and serverless, eliminating the need for infrastructure management and allowing for real-time malware scanning. It leverages AWS Lambda, S3 event notifications, range queries, signed URLs, and object tagging.
• Future Growth: Amazon MGM Studios anticipates a 2.25x increase in data and productions, emphasizing the need for a scalable security solution.
• Takeaways: Considerations for architecture, performance, costs, security model, and deployment model are crucial for scaling and securing data effectively.

Insights

• Supply Chain Security: The media supply chain is a critical area where data protection is paramount, as it involves creative processes with iterative content generation and large file sizes.
• Serverless Architecture: The serverless architecture of the Trend MicroStack allows for scalability and cost-efficiency, which is essential for handling the vast amount of data and the global presence of Amazon MGM Studios.
• Security at Scale: The challenge of securing data at scale is addressed by leveraging AWS's serverless capabilities, which provide a flexible and maintenance-free solution for malware scanning.
• Integration and Automation: The deep integration of Trend Micro's solution with AWS services and the use of infrastructure as code tools like CloudFormation and Service Catalog streamline the deployment process and enable automation.
• Visibility and Control: Providing visibility into security operations and control over the deployment and management of security solutions is crucial for both internal teams and compliance with security standards.
• Future-Proofing: The anticipated growth in data and productions at Amazon MGM Studios underscores the importance of having a security solution that can adapt and scale with the company's needs.
• Cost Management: The serverless model not only reduces operational complexity but also helps manage costs by eliminating the need for dedicated infrastructure for malware scanning.