Category: Management Tools

Recently, AWS released five new Amazon EC2 Systems Manager Automation actions. These actions allow you to: Launch an AWS CloudFormation stack Delete the stack Insert a delay in your workflow Copy and encrypt Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) Tag AWS resources These actions extend the existing collection of actions, which can be used to orchestrate tasks […]

In November 2016, AWS CloudTrail announced a new feature that provides the ability to filter events that are collected within a CloudTrail trail. This simple feature helps AWS customers save time and money by creating trails that contain a subset of overall API operations and account activity. In this post, I show you how to […]

When you are managing instances at scale, it’s important to be able to define and apply software configurations as well as ensuring that the instances don’t deviate from the expected state. That way, you can make sure that your applications and infrastructure operate as you’d expect. State Manager, which was launched as part of Amazon […]

Bastion hosts (also called “jump servers”) are often used as a best practice for accessing privately accessible hosts within a system environment. For example, your system might include an application host that is not intended to be publicly accessible. To access it for product updates or managing system patches, you typically log in to a […]

Customers use AWS CodeDeploy to automate application deployment because it provides a uniform method for: Updating applications across development, staging, and production environments. Handling the complexity of updating applications and avoiding service downtime. However, deploying and configuring applications often requires access to secrets and configuration data, such as API keys or database passwords, in source […]

Recently, we have seen a few interesting articles on using Parameter Store, part of EC2 Systems Manager, to store and access secrets on AWS. In his post, Simple Secrets Management via AWS’ EC2 Parameter Store, Matt Adorjan shows how to protect your AWS environment by securely storing secrets with Parameter Store and controlling access to […]

  A few days ago, The AWS Big Data Blog published a new blog post: “Analyze Security, Compliance, and Operational Activity Using AWS CloudTrail and Amazon Athena.” In this blog post, AWS Professional Services Consultant Sai Sriparasa shows how to set up and use the recently released Amazon Athena CloudTrail SerDe to query AWS CloudTrail […]

Amazon EC2 instances are often created and destroyed as demand dictates. Auto Scaling is great for dynamically scaling servers so that EC2 resources are consumed only when they are necessary. This blog post will show you how to connect EC2 instances created by an Auto Scaling group to an AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate server. […]

AWS Config is a fully managed service that provides AWS resource inventory, configuration history, and configuration change notifications to enable security and governance. You can use AWS Config Rules enables you to create rules that automatically check the configuration of AWS resources recorded by AWS Config. Over the last year, we expanded the service coverage […]

AWS CloudFormation allows developers and systems administrators to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources (called a stack) by provisioning and updating them in an orderly and predictable way. In this blog post, we will look back on the CloudFormation features and updates introduced in 2016, including: New AWS resources you can provision […]