AWS Cloud Operations Blog

Category: Management Tools

Gain visibility into your Kubernetes spend with CloudZero and Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights

Gain visibility into your Kubernetes spend with CloudZero and Amazon CloudWatch Container Insights

Container adoption has been increasing rapidly in the past few years. Customers are deploying workloads of all sizes on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). Typically, cluster administrators deploy several business applications and workloads on a cluster to achieve more efficient deployment density. On large clusters in a shared infrastructure where workloads of different sizes […]

AWS AppConfig Lambda Extension

Deploying application configuration to serverless: Introducing the AWS AppConfig Lambda extension

At AWS, we feel strongly that separating application configuration from application code is a best practice. Being able to deploy configuration independently from code makes it possible to build services like Service Quotas and launch new services and features right as we announce them. If we didn’t separate these, even a simple configuration change would […]

Enabling Amazon GuardDuty in AWS Control Tower using Delegated Administrator

My customers have asked how to monitor their AWS environments for potential malicious activity. Many have standardized on using AWS Control Tower to implement a multi-account framework that is governed and based on known AWS best practices. They are also interested in enabling Amazon GuardDuty to supplement this with effective monitoring capabilities. This post shows […]

Automated configuration of Session Manager without an internet gateway

Automated configuration of Session Manager without an internet gateway

Session Manager is a fully managed AWS Systems Manager capability that you can use to manage your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, on-premises instances, and virtual machines (VMs) through an interactive one-click browser-based shell or through the AWS CLI. Session Manager also provides secure and auditable instance management without the need to open […]

Analyze and debug applications using AWS X-Ray trace data with Grafana

Analyze and debug applications using AWS X-Ray trace data with Grafana

Today, AWS and Grafana Labs are making available a free and open-source AWS X-Ray data source plugin. You can use the latest release of Grafana (version 7.2.0 or later) to visualize AWS X-Ray traces directly in your Grafana dashboards in order to triage performance issues in applications instrumented with X-Ray. This enables you to build a single […]

How BBVA USA delivered security and governance at scale using management tools

As BBVA USA began its digital transformation journey, the security operations team had to improve its processes around provisioning and baselining of AWS accounts. The demand for new AWS accounts continued to increase from multiple application teams within the bank. In an effort to standardize new accounts within the enterprise, BBVA USA built an automated […]

Extend AWS Control Tower governance using AWS Config Conformance Packs

As many customers adopt AWS Control Tower, they have asked Raphael and me how to add additional governance policies such as the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) to their environments on top of the guardrails that AWS Control Tower provides. Customers want to enable these additional policies on the AWS Regions where AWS Control Tower is […]

Automating Amazon CloudWatch Alarms with AWS Systems Manager

Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service built for DevOps engineers, developers, Site Reliability Engineers (SRE), and IT managers. CloudWatch provides you with data and actionable insights to monitor your applications, respond to system-wide performance changes, optimize resource utilization, and get a unified view of operational health. Are you looking for an automated way […]

Identifying resources with the most configuration changes using AWS Config

AWS Config tracks changes made to supported resources and records them as configuration items (CIs), which are JSON files delivered to an Amazon S3 bucket. These are delivered in 6-hour intervals, as configuration history files. Each file contains details about the resources that changed in that 6-hour period, for the respective resource types, such as […]