AWS Cloud Operations & Migrations Blog
Category: AWS CloudFormation
How to self-service manage AWS Auto Scaling groups and Amazon Redshift with AWS Service Catalog Service Actions
Some of the customers I work with provide AWS Service Catalog products to their end-users to enable self-service for launching and managing Amazon Redshift, EMR clusters or web applications at scale using AWS Auto Scaling groups. These end-users would like the ability to self-manage these resources, for example, be able to take a snapshot of […]
Enhancing configuration management at Verizon using AWS Systems Manager
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. In this post, I describe how we at Verizon found a balance operating between agility, governance, and standardization for our AWS […]
Automating life-cycle management for ephemeral resources using AWS Service Catalog
Enterprises deploy AWS resources and services daily to support different business objectives. For example: A data scientist might like to create an EMR cluster for a job that should not take longer than one week. A sales engineer needs a demo environment for two days. A marketing application owner wants a marketing application to run […]
Managing multiple stacks and overriding parameters in AWS CloudFormation
In Q4 2018, the AWS CloudFormation team released a refreshed version of the management console as an opt-in experience. This redesign re-explored many of the common ways that you can interact with this service. In this post, I’d like to introduce a suite of updates that makes the redesign into the default console experience. The […]
Tracking software licenses with AWS Service Catalog and AWS Step Functions
Enterprises have many business requirements for tracking how software product licenses are used in their organization for financial, governance, and compliance reasons. By tracking license usage, organizations can stay within budget, track expenditures, and avoid unplanned true-up bills from their vendors’ true-up processes. The goal is to track the usage licenses as resources are deployed. […]
How DocuTAP automates cloud operations using AWS Management Tools
Now that large organizations have the flexibility to quickly launch infrastructure and leverage new services, they must find the means to maintain consistent controls without restricting development velocity. In this guest post, Brian Olson, Cloud Architect at health care company DocuTAP, discusses how a combination of AWS Management and Governance services and AWS developer tools […]
Standardizing infrastructure delivery in distributed environments using AWS Service Catalog
A common security design pattern and best practice among many of our enterprise customers is to provide application isolation through the adoption of a multi-account strategy. Many customers choose to create individual AWS accounts based on software development lifecycle (SDLC) phases such as Development (Dev), Quality Assurance (QA), and Production (Prod), to provide complete separation […]
Enable self-service, secured data science using Amazon SageMaker notebooks and AWS Service Catalog
by Sanjay Garje and Vebhhav (Veb) Singh Enterprises of all sizes are moving to the AWS Cloud. We hear from leadership of those enterprise teams that they are looking to provide a safe, cost-governed way to provide easy access to Amazon SageMaker to promote experimentation with data science to unlock new business opportunities and disrupt […]
Git pre-commit validation of AWS CloudFormation templates with cfn-lint
We’re living in a golden age of AWS CloudFormation tooling. Tools like cfn_nag and taskcat make it easier to treat your infrastructure as code by performing testing and validation before you deploy a single resource into your accounts. In this blog post, I’ll show you how to use linters to validate your CloudFormation templates.
AWS CloudFormation: 2018 in review
I want to take you on a quick look back at what we added for AWS CloudFormation in 2018. We added coverage for 18 new AWS services (up from 14 in 2017) and many new features for existing services, several available at launch. Highlights of the features and new content that CloudFormation introduced in 2018, […]