AWS Cloud Operations Blog

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Managing AWS Organizations accounts using AWS Config and AWS CloudFormation StackSets

AWS Organizations enables you to consolidate multiple AWS accounts into an organization that you create and centrally manage. Organizations includes consolidated billing and account management capabilities that enable you to better meet your business’s budgetary, security, and compliance needs. As an administrator of an organization, you can create member accounts in your organization and invite […]

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 […]

Manage your Oracle JDK licenses with AWS License Manager

You can use AWS License Manager to track Oracle Java/JDK usage on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances and on-premises servers. If you’re already running Amazon Corretto (Amazon’s distribution of the OpenJDK), then you can probably stop reading now. This blog explains how License Manager can track license usage of other applications in your […]

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 […]

Improve monitoring efficiency using Amazon CloudWatch Composite Alarms

OVERVIEW Amazon CloudWatch alarms help customers improve infrastructure monitoring efficiency by reducing the time to detect, triage, and diagnose issues that impact workload performance. CloudWatch alarms can be used extensively as a means to alert customers when application and infrastructure metrics exceed static or dynamically set thresholds. On March 4, 2020 AWS released CloudWatch composite alarms to extend existing […]

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 […]

Multi-account framework

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. […]

Monitor your private internal endpoints 24×7 using CloudWatch Synthetics

Introduction Since Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics launched in 2019, Synthetics canaries have become the first line of defense to reliably alert developers if their public endpoints, including REST APIs and URLs, show unexpected latencies or availability drops. In addition, Synthetics canaries can also monitor for broken links, or unauthorized content changes resulting from phishing, code injection, […]

Event-based notifications AWS Service Catalog

Creating event-based notifications and remediation in AWS Service Catalog using AWS Config

AWS Service Catalog allows organizations to quickly let their users deploy approved IT services to organize, govern, and provision cloud resources on AWS. However, users launching multiple instances can cause issues because: Some instances are not always active. The lack of limits on the number of active instances can result in an organization’s costs going […]

Solution architecture for the proposed solution

Automate RDS Aurora Snapshots for disaster recovery

It is important to have a well-defined proactive disaster recovery strategy for efficient and uninterrupted flow of data across an organization. This applies to all components of your application architecture, including the database layer. While Amazon Aurora database clusters are fault-tolerant and highly available by design, for disaster recovery use cases, customers prefer to keep […]