Amazon Web Services Inc. said today that its newest service, AWS CloudTrail Lake, is now generally available.

CloudTrail Lake is a managed audit and security lake for cloud customers that can be used to aggregate, immutably store and query activity logs for auditing, security investigation and operational troubleshooting purposes.

The service is an extension of the original AWS CloudTrail that was launched back in November 2013. AWS CloudTrail meets the demand for an effective mechanism to audit AWS operations for security and compliance. Amazon believes the service is so important to its customers that it gives every new customer a free 90-day trial.

AWS CloudTrail Lake is said to simplify CloudTrail analysis workflows by integrating the collection, storage, preparation and optimization of data for analysis and query. Customers will no longer need to maintain separate data processing pipelines that potentially span multiple teams and products.

In a blog post, Amazon Principal Specialist Solutions Architect Andres Silva explained how AWS CloudTrail Lake makes it easy to query CloudTrail data using the Structured Query Language that so many users will already be familiar with. The task is made even easier, he said, with dozens of sample queries designed to help customers get started with writing their own queries for common scenarios, such as identifying the records of all activity performed by a specific user, to help with security investigations.

Key capabilities include the immutable nature of all data stored within AWS CloudTrail Lake, plus a default retention period of seven years. The service also supports the collection of data events from multiple AWS regions and accounts, Silva said.

AWS CloudTrail Lake can be enabled now via the CloudTrail console in Amazon’s US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), Canada (Central), Africa (Cape Town), Europe (Ireland), Europe (London), Europe (Paris), Europe (Milan), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Stockholm), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Osaka), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Jakarta), Middle East (Bahrain) and South America (Sao Paulo) regions.

Image: rawpixel/freepik