Category: AWS CloudFormation

“Stack drift” is a common occurrence for organizations using AWS CloudFormation, and remediating stack drift represents a persistent and tedious challenge for organizations managing critical infrastructure with CloudFormation stacks. Stack drift occurs when the actual configuration of an infrastructure resource differs from its expected configuration. Typically, this is caused by users editing resources directly by […]

Last updated 24 Feb 2022 to support submission of 300+ account entries per each deployment. Last updated 17 Nov 2021 to handle the changes to Account Factory inputs parameters with Nested OU support. Last updated 25 JUL 2021 to pass account details from local S3 bucket. Many customers that we work with are creating and […]

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 […]

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 […]

AWS Organizations enables you to consolidate multiple AWS accounts into an organization that you create and centrally manage. Organizations includes consolidated billing and account management capabilities that enable you to better meet your business’s budgetary, security, and compliance needs. As an administrator of an organization, you can create member accounts in your organization and invite […]

Introduction If you have deployed Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (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 […]

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 that […]

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 […]

When it comes to restaurants, consistency is key. Being able to create a salad once is simple, but being able to recreate the exact salad multiple times tends to be more difficult. Little variances between them may cause issues, like too much or not enough salad dressing, ruining the balance of the composed salad. Infrastructure […]

In large enterprise organizations, it’s challenging to maintain standardization across environments. This is especially true if these environments are provisioned in a self-service manner—and even more so when new users access these provisioning services. Once you have the resources deployed into an environment, it can be hard, or even impossible, to change it. In case […]