When you use Amazon Web Services (AWS), AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) stays busy behind the scenes.

At AWS’s annual re:Inforce conference, AWS CISO Amy Herzog revealed IAM now handles 1.2 billion API calls per second worldwide. For reference, IAM handled around 400 million API calls at the same rate in 2021.

“This is like foundational glue to make AWS work,” Karen Haberkorn, AWS director of product management for identity, told IT Brew.

Something old, something new. Haberkorn broke down capabilities currently available in IAM Access Analyzer. One of the tool’s main features is an external access analyzer, which allows customers to see which AWS resources can be accessed outside of their organization.

“The customer knows what’s important [and] what access is intended, but the tool lets them see where those paths exist,” Haberkorn said.

Why IAM is the MVP of AWS.—BM

According to David Lareau, Medicomp’s then COO (and current CEO), everyone was pretty calm at midnight, despite the worldwide anxious buildup preceding the date: January 1, 2000. The year known as Y2K.

Stefan Weitz, on Microsoft’s IT team at the time, left his network operations center around 1 am West Coast time, feeling like the turn of the century had been “a little anticlimactic.”

Bill Huber, then a chief procurement officer at a big bank, was home with his family. He didn’t get any worrying calls.

Not a bad evening for the IT practitioner, considering some economists and corporate execs had warned that widespread computer failures could lead to a recession or even fatal catastrophes when machines mishandled the approaching date. The fear was that a two-digit formatting decision made during computing’s early days would lead to machines misinterpreting the year “2000” as the year “1900,” and disrupt any payroll, aircraft, power-plant, or other technologies that relied on accurate calendar data.

Luckily, Y2K was mostly MIA.—BH