Category: Advanced (300)

One of the security best practices that is time-consuming to manage is enforcing IAM access key rotation for IAM users. Access keys give IAM users the ability to connect to Amazon EC2 instances. Therefore rotating these regularly (for example, every 90 days) is one of the key steps in protecting your resources from unauthorized access. […]

Update 10/2020 – Viewing patch compliance findings across AWS accounts in AWS Security Hub is supported natively. For more information please see What’s new announcement here. Introduction In this blog post, I discuss how to import critical patch compliance findings into Security Hub. Security Hub is a service that provides customers with a comprehensive view […]

Many of the customers we work with look for ways to manage compliance and gain additional insights across their AWS multi-account organization from a central location. We often begin the discussion with AWS Control Tower, as it offers the easiest way to set up and govern a multi-account AWS environment. AWS Control Tower is an […]

Introduction Many of the customers that we have worked with are using advanced network architectures in AWS for multi-VPC and multi-account architectures. Placing workloads into separate Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) has several advantages, chief among them isolating sensitive workloads and allowing teams to innovate without fear of impacting other systems. Many companies are taking […]

Public and private sector customers are now often working to automate their account creation and operations into the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. These customers use the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions to access FedRamp certified services and ITAR-governed datasets for multiple accounts. Managing this type of multi-account enterprise footprint with AWS Organizations helps reduce operational costs […]

Introduction If you have deployed Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) instances via AWS CloudFormation, you most likely want to install software or configure the operating system of the instance. To accomplish this, you may have used cfn-init, one of the CloudFormation helper scripts available to AWS customers since February 2012. However, since that time AWS […]

Introduction Both custom resources and resource types are used to create an AWS CloudFormation resource that allow you to manage third-party resources. For example, during the creation of a simple website you may want to provision a third-party website monitor, which has a public API. In this case, you would develop and use a resource […]

AWS announced that AWS Systems Manager’s Run Command now offers Chef InSpec audits through the AWS-RunInspecChecks document. This is a significant win for Systems Manager enthusiasts and other users who prefer an OS-based compliance check solution rather than using a whole new cloud service. This blog post is not about how to keep an OS […]

Introduction Since Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics launched in 2019, Synthetics canaries have become the first line of defense to reliably alert developers if their public endpoints, including REST APIs and URLs, show unexpected latencies or availability drops. In addition, Synthetics canaries can also monitor for broken links, or unauthorized content changes resulting from phishing, code injection, […]

AWS Service Catalog allows organizations to quickly let their users deploy approved IT services to organize, govern, and provision cloud resources on AWS. However, users launching multiple instances can cause issues because: Some instances are not always active. The lack of limits on the number of active instances can result in an organization’s costs going […]