AWS Cloud Operations Blog

Category: Compute

Centralizing configuration management using AWS Systems Manager

In this guest post, Kaitlyn Fedorak (Engineer) and contributors, Cody Olsen (Senior Engineer), Will Scott (Engineer), Samuel Raghunandan (Engineer), from Xero discuss their use of AWS Systems Manager Inventory and State Manager for configuration management of Amazon EC2 instances. Any team or company can leverage a similar design described in this post to save on […]

CfCt AWS SAM blog

Simplify infrastructure deployments using Customizations for AWS Control Tower and AWS Serverless Application Model

Customers want flexibility and simpler ways to manage their AWS accounts. There are several ways customers can choose to customize their AWS account deployments at scale with flexibility such as Account Factory Customization (AFC), a native solution within AWS Control Tower account factory, or Customizations for Control Tower (CfCT), which this blog focuses on. To […]

Automate updating approval cut off dates for Patch Manager Patch Baselines

Automate updating approval cut off dates for Patch Manager Patch Baselines

AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager helps AWS customers manage and automate the process of patching their Linux and Windows managed nodes in AWS and hybrid environments. It provides various options and allows greater control over which patches are approved or rejected during installation using patch baselines. One parameter of patch baseline approval rules is the Auto […]

Automate creation of Amazon CloudWatch alarms and dashboards with AWS Systems Manager and Ansible

Automate creation of Amazon CloudWatch alarms and dashboards with AWS Systems Manager and Ansible

Monitoring Amazon EC2 instances is critical to proactively identify any underlying issues or to troubleshoot the performance of the instances. Amazon CloudWatch provides a reliable, scalable, and flexible monitoring solution. Customers running EC2 instances in a self-managed environment typically use Amazon CloudWatch metrics to monitor the performance of their instances and set up alarms for […]

Building CIS hardened Golden Images and Pipelines with EC2 Image Builder

Until recently, customers had to navigate to the AWS Marketplace Console and search for a compatible Amazon Machine Image (AMI) product for your image pipeline. They also had to write their own custom components to harden the operating systems to meet Center for Internet Security (CIS) Benchmark guidelines. This required subscriptions to the CIS Benchmark […]

Monitoring best practices for AWS Outposts

Monitoring best practices for AWS Outposts

AWS Outposts allows you to run AWS infrastructure and services on-premises for a consistent fully managed hybrid experience. Outposts supports workloads and devices requiring low latency access to on-premises systems, local data processing, data residency, and application migration with local system inter dependencies. Outposts offers customers Amazon CloudWatch metrics and AWS Health events to effectively […]

How Hapag-Lloyd established observability for serverless multi-account workloads

This post is co-authored by Grzegorz Kaczor from Hapag-Lloyd AG and Michael Graumann and Daniel Moser from AWS. Introduction Establishing observability over the state, performance, health, and security posture of applications is key to successfully operating multi-account workloads in the cloud. As the number and size of workloads increases, finding and correlating all available information […]

Implementing AWS Session Manager logging guardrails in a multi-account environment

Raiffeisen Bank International (RBI), a prominent Austrian banking group, maintains a multi-account AWS environment that allows product teams to build and test new customer features at speed, but within the limits of central security guardrails. One of these guardrails requires central logging of all sessions established to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances across the […]

Using Open Source Grafana Operator on your Kubernetes cluster to manage Amazon Managed Grafana

Introduction Kubernetes APIs are robust and its control loop mechanism allows us to control the state of resources that are even outside of Kubernetes environments. Customers have shifted their focus towards workload gravity and rely on Kubernetes-native controllers to deploy and manage the lifecycle of external resources such as Cloud resources. We have seen customers […]

Create event-driven workflow with AWS Resource Groups lifecycle events

AWS Resource Groups recently announced a new feature that pushes group lifecycle changes to Amazon EventBridge. A resource group is a collection of AWS resources, in the same AWS Region, that are grouped either using a tag-based query, or AWS CloudFormation stack-based query, and group lifecycle events make it easier for AWS customers to receive […]