Category: Learning Levels

At AWS, we feel strongly that separating application configuration from application code is a best practice. Being able to deploy configuration independently from code makes it possible to build services like Service Quotas and launch new services and features right as we announce them. If we didn’t separate these, even a simple configuration change would […]

My customers have asked how to monitor their AWS environments for potential malicious activity. Many have standardized on using AWS Control Tower to implement a multi-account framework that is governed and based on known AWS best practices. They are also interested in enabling Amazon GuardDuty to supplement this with effective monitoring capabilities. This post shows […]

Session Manager is a fully managed AWS Systems Manager capability that you can use to manage your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, on-premises instances, and virtual machines (VMs) through an interactive one-click browser-based shell or through the AWS CLI. Session Manager also provides secure and auditable instance management without the need to open […]

Today, AWS and Grafana Labs are making available a free and open-source AWS X-Ray data source plugin. You can use the latest release of Grafana (version 7.2.0 or later) to visualize AWS X-Ray traces directly in your Grafana dashboards in order to triage performance issues in applications instrumented with X-Ray. This enables you to build a single […]

As BBVA USA began its digital transformation journey, the security operations team had to improve its processes around provisioning and baselining of AWS accounts. The demand for new AWS accounts continued to increase from multiple application teams within the bank. In an effort to standardize new accounts within the enterprise, BBVA USA built an automated […]

As many customers adopt AWS Control Tower, they have asked Raphael and me how to add additional governance policies such as the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) to their environments on top of the guardrails that AWS Control Tower provides. Customers want to enable these additional policies on the AWS Regions where AWS Control Tower is […]

Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service built for DevOps engineers, developers, Site Reliability Engineers (SRE), and IT managers. CloudWatch provides you with data and actionable insights to monitor your applications, respond to system-wide performance changes, optimize resource utilization, and get a unified view of operational health. Are you looking for an automated way […]

AWS Config tracks changes made to supported resources and records them as configuration items (CIs), which are JSON files delivered to an Amazon S3 bucket. These are delivered in 6-hour intervals, as configuration history files. Each file contains details about the resources that changed in that 6-hour period, for the respective resource types, such as […]

In a distributed system environment, tracing service-to-service interactions is essential to easily identify service bottlenecks, faults, and errors. AWS X-Ray allows you to set up tracing on your applications hosted on a variety of compute environments, such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Amazon Elastic […]

AWS Organizations has extended its existing tagging support for AWS accounts to include all Organizations resources, such as organizational units (OUs) and your root and organization-level policies. You can tag these resources as you create them, giving you a convenient way to make sure that your Organizations resources are categorized from the start, without needing […]