Category: Configuration, compliance, and auditing

Many of our customers manage multiple AWS accounts in AWS Organizations and utilize Service Control Policies (SCPs) to centrally manage permissions in their organization. SCPs offer central control over the maximum available permissions for every account in your organization and can be applied to an account, organization units (OUs), or the organization as a whole […]

Organizations managing cloud infrastructure in AWS need effective mechanisms to audit operations in their AWS accounts for security and compliance. In November 2013, we announced AWS CloudTrail as the auditing platform for AWS. Since then, millions of customers have adopted this service. We believe CloudTrail is so important to AWS customers’ success that every new […]

This post was co-authored by Amy McVey and Jarrod Lewis from AER As AWS usage within a business increases over time, it can become difficult to track the AWS resources that have been created (e.g. EC2 instances, S3 buckets) and who is responsible for them. This can lead to unnecessary costs from resources that are […]

This post was written by Scott Alexander and Kevin Formsma from Mphasis Stelligent. Every day, more developers are having lightbulb moments as they realize they can design and manage their infrastructure. It’s our responsibility, as practitioners of the DevOps mindset, to build systems that allow developers to move quickly and speed up the feedback loop […]

This post demonstrates how to enable AWS Config and deploy a sample AWS Config Conformance pack using HashiCorp’s Terraform. AWS Config provides configuration, compliance, and auditing features required for governing your resources and providing security posture assessment at scale. This service lets you create managed rules, which are predefined, customizable rules that AWS Config uses […]

This blog provides step-by-step instructions for building an AWS Config custom rule and a custom Config Remediation so that you can optimize your EBS Volume types with Amazon EBS gp3 volumes. AWS Config is a service that lets you assess, audit, and evaluate your AWS resource configurations. AWS Config provides AWS Managed Rules, which are […]

Highly regulated industries must maintain an audit trail of events at various levels to meet regulatory and industry compliance requirements. Data events provide visibility into the resource operations performed on or in a resource, including object-level API activities such as delete, update, and put items. You can use AWS CloudTrail to create an audit trail […]

The customers I work with often handle multiple applications in their cloud environments. In general, an application includes multiple AWS resources deployed via AWS CloudFormation stacks, APIs, or other infrastructure as code tools. My customers often ask me about efficient mechanisms for managing the resources and governing the security policies of their resources in an Application […]

In this post, we will show you how you can design and implement a configuration management database (CMDB) strategy as part of your cloud operating model. We are going to review some common needs when building a CMDB and the relevant AWS services that will help you build a comprehensive solution. We will talk about […]

AWS allows customers to assign metadata to their AWS resources in the form of tags. Each tag consists of a customer-defined key and an optional value. Tags can make it easier to manage, search for, and filter resources by purpose, owner, environment, or other criteria. AWS tags can be used for many purposes like organizing […]