AWS Cloud Operations Blog
Category: Best Practices
Implementing Serverless Transit Network Orchestrator (STNO) in AWS Control Tower
Introduction Many of the customers that we have worked with are using advanced network architectures in AWS for multi-VPC and multi-account architectures. Placing workloads into separate Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) has several advantages, chief among them isolating sensitive workloads and allowing teams to innovate without fear of impacting other systems. Many companies are taking […]
Automate account creation and resource provisioning for AWS GovCloud(US), using AWS Service Catalog, AWS Organizations, and AWS Lambda
Public and private sector customers are now often working to automate their account creation and operations into the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. These customers use the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions to access FedRamp certified services and ITAR-governed datasets for multiple accounts. Managing this type of multi-account enterprise footprint with AWS Organizations helps reduce operational costs […]
Using State Manager over cfn-init in CloudFormation and its benefits
Introduction If you have deployed Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances via AWS CloudFormation, you most likely want to install software or configure the operating system of the instance. To accomplish this, you may have used cfn-init, one of the CloudFormation helper scripts available to AWS customers since February 2012. However, since that time AWS […]
How to optimize assessment of cloud services
As my colleague Ilya Epshteyn introduced in his blog titled “How financial institutions can approve AWS services for highly confidential data,” common across the financial services industry is a formal assessment process for cloud services. These assessment processes vary in depth and breadth, striving to determine which cloud services will be best suited to fulfill […]
Setting up custom AWS Config rule that checks the OS CIS compliance
AWS announced that AWS Systems Manager’s Run Command now offers Chef InSpec audits through the AWS-RunInspecChecks document. This is a significant win for Systems Manager enthusiasts and other users who prefer an OS-based compliance check solution rather than using a whole new cloud service. This blog post is not about how to keep an OS […]
Governance, risk, and compliance when establishing your cloud presence
June 22, 2021: We’ve updated this post to reference the recently published Management & Governance Lens, an extension of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. When speaking with the business and technology leaders I work with, they express the need to bring new products and services to market quickly. They must also stay secure while doing so. […]
AWS Config best practices
AWS Config is a service that maintains a configuration history of your AWS resources and evaluates the configuration against best practices and your internal policies. You can use this information for operational troubleshooting, audit, and compliance use cases. In this blog post, I share best practices on how to use AWS Config as a tool […]
Using lifecycle events to track AWS Control Tower actions and trigger automated workflows
Many customers that I work with are creating and provisioning new accounts using AWS Control Tower. They prefer an AWS native solution for creating their environment knowing that it will be based upon documented AWS Best Practices. As customers scale their account creation, there exists an opportunity to use additional Control Tower features to perform […]