AWS Cloud Operations Blog

Category: Management & Governance

Use AWS License Manager and AWS Systems Manager to discover SQL Server BYOL instances

Use AWS License Manager and AWS Systems Manager to discover SQL Server BYOL instances

Most enterprises find it hard to maintain control of the commercial licensing of Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, and IBM products due to limited visibility. They wind up over-provisioning licenses to avoid the headache with third party license providers or under-provisioning licenses, only to be faced with steep penalties. If your enterprise uses AWS, you can address this […]

Introducing the AWS AppConfig Python Helper Library

AWS AppConfig enables you to manage and quickly deploy application configurations without doing time-consuming code deployments. With AWS AppConfig, you can create an application configuration, validate it to make sure it is free of syntax or semantic errors, and deploy it to your targets at a controlled rate at runtime. If AWS AppConfig encounters errors […]

Standardizing Database Migrations with AWS Database Migration Service and AWS Service Catalog

Companies and organizations are moving data and technology infrastructure to AWS to modernize their applications and gain access to cloud services. The move results in lower costs, increased productivity, and reduced downtime. Some customers are migrating data to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to take advantage of AWS AI and ML services, while others […]

Using Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics to find broken links on your website

Most businesses and professionals build and maintain websites to bring visibility and credibility to their work. These websites often act as a medium for messaging. They shape the online perception of the business. When links on a website are broken, users get frustrated. If they cannot access the information they need, they might take their […]

2020 in Review for AWS CloudFormation

As we move into 2021, we would like to provide a recap of how AWS CloudFormation coverage changed in 2020 and offer you a look at new features. These changes lay the foundation for 2021 as we focus on registry, resource types, and resource coverage. Resource Coverage In 2019, we released the AWS CloudFormation registry, […]

AWS Control Tower Detective Guardrails as an AWS Config Conformance Pack

Many of the customers I work with would like to be able to apply AWS Control Tower’s detective guardrails to an existing AWS account before moving them to Control Tower governance. Now that you can launch AWS Control Tower in an existing AWS Organization, customers want to evaluate their existing accounts for compliance with AWS […]

Using environment variables with Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics

With the increase in online traffic, organizations have prioritized the continuous monitoring of their applications so that they can detect issues before they cause widespread problems. Canaries emulate a user flow, making it possible for organizations to proactively catch errors thereby ensuring a good customer experience. Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics allows you to create canaries to […]

Architecture diagram with icons representing the AWS services and their relationships for the CloudWatchAutoAlarms Lambda function

Use tags to create and maintain Amazon CloudWatch alarms for Amazon EC2 instances (Part 1)

This blog post is the first in a two-part series. I walk you through a solution to automatically create and enforce a standard set of Amazon CloudWatch metric alarms for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud  (Amazon EC2) instances by using Amazon EC2 instance tags. Creating and configuring a standard set of CloudWatch alarms for a large […]

Use tags to create and maintain Amazon CloudWatch alarms for Amazon EC2 instances (Part 2)

This blog post is the second in a two-part series. Part one of this blog post showed how to deploy and configure the CloudWatchAutoAlarms Lambda function to create a default alarm set and custom alarms for your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances using EC2 instance tags. In this post, I show how you […]

Manage Amazon EC2 instance clock accuracy using Amazon Time Sync Service and Amazon CloudWatch – Part 2

In part 1 of this series, I cover important concepts about measuring the accuracy of time on Amazon EC2 instances . I discussed calculating ClockErrorBound (?) and using its value as a range between which system time is accurate. In this part, I walk through the process of using Amazon CloudWatch to measure and monitor […]