Posted On: Nov 26, 2023

AWS Config announces the launch of periodic recording to track resource configuration changes more efficiently at scale. This launch extends AWS Config’s existing recording capabilities, which continuously track every change as it occurs. Periodic recording captures the latest configuration changes of your resources once every 24 hours, reducing the number of changes delivered. Both continuous and periodic recording options are priced based on the number of configurations items.

By only recording configuration items for changes once per day, periodic recording can lower the volume and cost of collecting configuration changes, while helping you scalably track and enforce compliance across cloud resources which change frequently. For example, say your Amazon EC2 instance had multiple configuration changes in the last 24 hours. With continuous recording, you will receive a configuration item for every change that occurred. With periodic recording, you will receive a configuration item representing the most recent state of the instance over the 24-hour period, if it’s different from the previous one recorded.

You have flexibility to choose which resource types you want to track using continuous or periodic recording. After selecting the initial setting for all resource types, you can use optional overrides to adjust the frequency of recording for individual resource types. As a result, you can have some resource types tracked continuously and others tracked periodically within the same account. 

AWS Config periodic recording is available in all commercial AWS Regions and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. Visit the AWS Config pricing page or see our documentation to learn more about this feature.