Category: Learning Levels

As an organization expands its use of AWS services, there is often a conversation about the need to create multiple AWS accounts to ensure separation of business processes or for security, compliance, and billing. Many of the customers we work with use separate AWS accounts for each business unit so they can meet the different […]

We have introduced an updated version of the AWS Config Rule Development Kit (RDK). The RDK helps you rapidly deploy custom AWS Config rules at scale across multiple AWS accounts and Regions. You can also create a centralized dashboard to view the AWS Config rule compliance status across various AWS accounts. This blog post is […]

Most AWS CloudFormation templates use parameters to enable customization. It’s important to validate parameters to ensure a good user experience. AWS CloudFormation gives you several ways to perform parameter validation. For example, you can specify AllowedValues or a Default, or you can assign Types. For more information on validating parameters, see the documentation. Often, developers […]

Patching Windows instances in private subnets could be challenging since those Amazon EC2 instances have no internet connectivity. In this blog post we explain how to use AWS Systems Manager and Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) to keep those instances updated. We’ll create a new VPC with the proper endpoints, security groups, and network access […]

Point-and-click management randomizes servers with every single change made. It’s great to configure your servers with code. In addition, having automation to manage server configuration and compliance helps companies save time, improve availability, and lower the risks associated with up-time and security. However, the learning experience and administrative effort required to maintain such an environment […]

Update 01/2023: AWS Systems Manager announces Patch Policies, enabling cross account and cross Region patching. Patch Policies provide a user experience in a single console to easily define and enforce patch compliance across accounts and Regions with a few clicks. For more information, see Centrally deploy patching operations across your AWS Organization using Systems Manager […]

AWS Service Catalog enables organizations to centrally manage commonly-deployed AWS services and provisioned software products. It also helps you achieve consistent governance and compliance requirements, while it empowers users to self-serve and quickly deploy the approved AWS services they need. Customers that I talk to want to have a mechanism to keep previously provisioned products […]

There are less than two weeks left until re:Invent 2018. As in years past, AWS CloudFormation will be there, both behind the scenes deploying infrastructure and front-and-center for break-out sessions, workshops, and chalk talks. Here are a few highlights we’ve pulled from the session catalog, followed by the full list of CloudFormation-focused sessions and workshops to help […]

The AWS Service Catalog connector for ServiceNow allows AWS enterprise customers to securely provision compliant workloads using ServiceNow on AWS. A lot of customers ask me how to create an approval workflow in ServiceNow for deploying AWS products. For example, such a workflow might be needed if a data scientist wants to launch an Amazon EMR […]

Introduction Amazon CloudWatch Events now supports tag changes on AWS resources. Using this new CloudWatch Event type, you can build CloudWatch event rules to match tag changes and route them to one or more targets like an AWS Lambda function to trigger automated workflows. In this blog post, I’ll provide an example for using AWS […]