AWS Cloud Operations & Migrations Blog

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Use AWS Systems Manager Explorer to optimize your compute resources across your AWS Organizations

As a solutions architect with AWS, I work with customers to right-size their Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute instances to achieve a balance between performance and cost. Optimization is an iterative task that involves several cycles of making changes, analyzing results, and repeating until you reach a satisfactory state. You need to understand the details of […]

Bring your own CLI to Session Manager with configurable shell profiles

In keeping with the principle that identity is the new perimeter, AWS Systems Manager Session Manager provides a mechanism for authenticated and authorized AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) principals to gain data-plane shell access to Amazon EC2 instances, without setting up a traditional SSH pathway for access. It has become an indispensable tool for […]

AWS Organizations, AWS Config, and Terraform

In this post, I show how you can use AWS Organizations, AWS Config, and HashiCorp’s Terraform to deploy guardrails at scale. AWS Config provides configuration, compliance, and auditing features that are required for governing your resources and providing security posture assessment at scale. With its recent support for AWS Organizations, AWS Config makes it possible […]

AWS CloudFormation StackSet Orchestration: Automated deployment using AWS Step Functions

We often use AWS CloudFormation StackSets to automatically deploy infrastructure into many different accounts. Whether they are managed by AWS Control Tower or AWS Organizations, StackSets provide a simple and automated way to handle the creation of resources and infrastructure right after provisioning a new account. You can automatically deploy StackSets to accounts that belong […]

Real-time alerts on X-Ray Insights

Send real-time alerts about application anomalies using AWS X-Ray insights

Today AWS X-Ray launches support for notifications to its insights. This means that on an X-Ray group where insights are enabled, you can now configure notifications to be sent to Amazon EventBridge. Through the use of anomaly detection, AWS X-Ray helps you analyze and debug distributed applications. AWS X-Ray Insights uses anomaly detection to create actionable insights […]

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 […]

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 […]