AWS Cloud Operations Blog

Category: AWS Control Tower

Service Notice – Upcoming changes required for AWS Config

On July 5, 2022, the AWS managed policy AWSConfigRole will be deprecated. This policy is being replaced by a more scoped-down policy, AWS_ConfigRole. The AWSConfigRole managed policy will continue working for all currently attached users, groups, and roles. However, after July 5, 2022, the AWSConfigRole managed policy can’t be attached to any new users, groups, […]

Figure 3 Flight Controller deployment using CFCTv2

Flight Controller by Contino – A Solution built on AWS Control Tower

Today AWS customers are rapidly adopting the cloud and at a massive scale. To support this demand, customers must build a strong foundation based on AWS well-architected best practices. A well-architected landing zone is a key construct that lets you vend accounts, provision access, setup security guardrails, and build CI/CD pipelines. However, at scale, implicit […]

Integrating existing AWS CloudTrail configurations when launching AWS Control Tower

[Update] AWS Control Tower 3.0 now allows you to either select organization-level CloudTrail trails or opt out of Control Tower-managed trails, eliminating the need for the workaround mentioned in this blog. For additional details, refer to the Release notes. The customers that we work with often use multiple AWS accounts to meet their business needs. […]

Supporting Data Residency Requirements by Extending AWS Control Tower Governance to Non-supported Regions

In today’s complex computing environment, organizations continually have new requirements for maintaining data. In essence, data residency is established on multiple levels, and AWS offers different features and services to support it. This post focuses on utilizing the AWS Control Tower governance model to support data residency requirements in regions where AWS Control Tower isn’t […]

Chaos engineering leveraging AWS Fault Injection Simulator in a multi-account AWS environment

Large-scale distributed software systems in the cloud are composed of several individual sub-systems—such as CDNs, load balancers, web servers, application servers and databases—as well as their interactions. The interactions sometimes have unpredictable outcomes caused by unforeseen events (for example, a network failure, instance failure, etc.). These events can lead to system-wide failures of your critical […]

Automate enrollment of accounts with existing AWS Config resources into AWS Control Tower

Customers who deployed AWS Control Tower in their existing organization will begin enrolling existing member accounts located under Organization Units (OU) to bring those accounts under the governance of Control Tower. In most cases, the customer has already enabled AWS Config to record, and evaluate AWS resource configurations in existing accounts. Previously, customers who would want […]

Organizing your AWS Control Tower landing zone with nested OUs

AWS Control Tower provides the easiest way for you to set up and govern your AWS environment, or landing zone, following prescriptive AWS best practices managed on your behalf. AWS Control Tower orchestrates multiple AWS services (AWS Organizations, AWS CloudFormation StackSets, Amazon S3, AWS Single Sign-On, AWS Config, AWS CloudTrail) to build a landing zone […]

Root and Nested Organizational Unit Support for Customizations for AWS Control Tower

Customers often use AWS accounts as a boundary to segregate their workloads, environments, business units, compliance requirements, or any type of logical isolation that suits their business. An AWS account serves as a hard boundary by design – each account is its own logical entity with controls, limits, and guardrails. Large customers typically have many […]

Migrate AWS Landing Zone solution to AWS Control Tower

Customers who wanted to quickly set up a secure, compliant, multi-account AWS environment had adopted AWS Landing Zone solution (ALZ). To reduce the burden of managing this ALZ, AWS has announced a managed service – AWS Control Tower (Control Tower). AWS Control Tower creates your landing zone using AWS Organizations, thereby bringing together ongoing account […]

Extending your Control Tower Network security with Amazon Route 53 DNS Firewall

In our previous post, “Securely scale multi-account architecture with AWS Network Firewall and AWS Control Tower”, we described how AWS Network Firewall can be implemented in an AWS Control Tower environment. AWS Network Firewall provides a stateful, managed firewall with rules to filter and block network and application layer traffic coming to your applications. Centralized […]