AWS Cloud Operations Blog

Category: Management Tools

Manage Amazon EC2 instance clock accuracy using Amazon Time Sync Service and Amazon CloudWatch – Part 1

This two-part series discusses the measurement and management of time accuracy on Amazon EC2 instances. Part 1 covers the important concepts related to system and reference time. Part 2 covers the mechanism of measure, monitor, and maintain accurate system time on EC2 instances. A large and diverse set of customer workloads depends on the observed […]

Monitor API Gateway endpoints with Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics

Monitoring the health of your API endpoints is important to understand the overall health of your workloads. You can use Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics to monitor your API endpoints and understand the overall health of your workloads. CloudWatch Synthetics canaries allow you to monitor API endpoints by creating HTTP steps and configuring the request type, endpoint URL, […]

Decision-making framework for configuration with AWS AppConfig

Decision-making framework for configuration with AWS AppConfig

In this blog post, we show you how to separate configuration from code, explain the differences between dynamic and static configuration, and help you determine which values to use in your dynamic configuration. We also share processes to keep bloat down in your application configuration. Finally, we introduce you to AWS AppConfig, which allows you […]

Use AWS Lambda and Amazon QuickSight to Build a Dashboard for AWS Health Events in Organizational View

Centralized DevOps teams responsible for the operation of Amazon Web Services (AWS) resources across an organization want to have a consistent approach for receiving and visualizing notifications for AWS Health events. It’s challenging and time-consuming to collect this data from individual accounts through email notifications, by managing separate event data, or even by manually clicking […]

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Use Amazon Athena and Amazon QuickSight to build custom reports of AWS Well-Architected Reviews

AWS Well-Architected helps cloud architects build secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure for their applications and workloads. Based on five pillars — operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization — AWS Well-Architected provides a consistent approach for customers and partners to evaluate architectures, and implement designs that can scale over time. You can […]

Orchestrating multi-step, custom patch processes using AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager

The ongoing management of operating system and application-level patching is critical for ensuring that your organization’s software is up to date and meets compliance policies. Patching is not always a straightforward process. You often need to orchestrate custom procedures, workflows, and scripts to ensure that applications can be safely stopped, started, and verified during the […]

Figure 1: CloudTrail Process Flow

How to optimize AWS CloudTrail costs by using advanced event selectors

AWS CloudTrail can be used for security, monitoring restricted API calls, notification of threshold breaches, operational issues, filtering mechanisms for isolating data, faster root cause identification, and speedy resolution. CloudTrail can also be used for various compliance and governance controls, by helping you achieve compliance by logging API calls and changes to resources. Event selectors […]

CloudFormation StackSets delegated administration

If you are using AWS CloudFormation StackSets, you are having to manage your stacks from the AWS Organizations management account. According to best practice, the management account should be used only for tasks that require it. Until today, you had to use the management account to manage your AWS CloudFormation stack sets. To help limit […]

Continuous permissions rightsizing to ensure least privileges in AWS using CloudKnox and AWS Config

This blog post was contributed by Kanishk Mahajan, AWS and Maya Neelakandhan, CloudKnox As you migrate your workloads to the cloud or operate your existing workloads in the cloud it would be ideal if every application was deployed with the exact permissions that it required. In practice, however, the effort required to determine the precise […]

Best practices for creating and managing sandbox accounts in AWS

Organizations use multiple environments, each with different security and compliance controls, as part of their deployment pipeline. Following the principle of least privilege, production environments have the most restrictive security and compliance controls. They tightly limit who can access the environment and which actions each user (or principal) can perform. Development and test environments also […]