Category: Management Tools

As described in the Security Pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework, the careful management of the security configurations of the running systems within your environment forms the foundation of how you will maintain robust, secure, scalable systems. InSpec by Chef, an open-source testing framework, provides teams the ability to define and assess system state and […]

To help customers rapidly prototype, develop, and deploy their custom AWS Config rules at scale, AWS introduces a new version of the AWS Config Rule Development Kit (RDK). The RDK is a command-line utility designed to help you to shorten your security and compliance feedback cycles when using Config. It helps you build a continuous […]

AWS CloudFormation treats a stack as a collection of AWS resources that customers can manage as a single unit. After you launch a stack, you can use the AWS CloudFormation console, API, or AWS CLI to update resources in your stacks. You should not make any changes to stack resources outside of CloudFormation. This is […]

Recently, AWS Config announced support for Auto Scaling groups. You can now track configuration changes in Auto Scaling groups, such as minimum, maximum, and desired capacities, termination policies, scaling policies, subnets, and instance protection settings. You can also use a new managed AWS Config rule to check whether the Auto Scaling groups associated with your […]

Recently, AWS Config announced support for Classic Load Balancer in all public regions and AWS GovCloud (US). You can now start tracking the current and historical configurations of your Classic Load Balancers, and get notified via Amazon SNS when your configurations change. You can also use three new managed AWS Config rules to verify whether your […]

It’s been another exciting year for AWS Config, a service that enables you to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of your AWS resources. We have expanded our regional availability, added support for new resource types, introduced new managed Config rules, and introduced a dashboard view of your resource configuration and compliance. In this post, […]

In 2017, over 350,000 AWS customers used AWS CloudFormation to manage resources collected across 2.4M stacks. We added coverage for 14 new services and several new features. In this post, I’d like to look back at some features and new content that CloudFormation introduced in 2017, including: New AWS resources that you can provision with […]

The AWS CloudFormation team has been busy in the last couple of months, adding support for new resource types for recently released AWS services. In this post, I take a deep dive into using AWS Glue with CloudFormation. About AWS Glue AWS Glue was first announced at re:Invent in 2016, and was made generally available […]

AWS CloudFormation recently added support for these recently released AWS services: AWS Guard Duty is an automated threat-detection service that can be quickly enabled, does not require agents to be installed, and monitors unusual account usage using sources like AWS CloudTrail logs, DNS logs, and other sources. With the new AWS CloudFormation resource support, you […]

EC2Rescue for Windows is an easy-to-use tool that you run on an Amazon EC2 Windows Server instance to diagnose and troubleshoot possible problems. A common use of the tool is to reset the local administrator password. Password rotation is an important security task in any organization. In addition, setting strong passwords is necessary to ensure […]