Category: Technical How-to

Many AWS customers move their AWS accounts between organizations When your company manages more than one organization, and whether you regularly move accounts between them; or you are consolidating accounts after a merger, acquisition, or divesture. Account migrations are part of operating on AWS.   Previously, moving an account meant removing it from the source organization, making it standalone, then inviting it to the target organization. For accounts with AWS Resource Access […]

Introduction Robust patch management is essential for maintaining system security, reliability, and compliance across your IT infrastructure. AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager provides a full-featured patching solution, enabling you to automate the deployment of operating system updates to managed nodes across AWS accounts, on-premises, and multicloud environments. However, as your organization scales across dozens or […]

Organizations managing workloads on AWS rely on AWS CloudTrail to answer the fundamental questions: Who did what, where, and when? Since January 2022, customers have stored their CloudTrail activity logs in CloudTrail Lake, a managed data lake purpose-built for capturing, storing, querying user and API activity across their AWS environment.  As organizations scale across multiple […]

Editor’s note (July 2026): This post has been updated to reflect the general availability of Amazon CloudWatch native OpenTelemetry metrics ingestion and PromQL support, including new capabilities and revised pricing. If you run Kubernetes or microservices workloads on AWS, your metrics likely carry dozens of labels: namespace, pod, container, node, deployment, replica set, and custom […]

Introduction Enterprise applications using AWS X-Ray generate large volumes of distributed tracing data across multiple services. Static sampling strategies keep costs down by capturing a fixed percentage of traffic. However, they frequently miss critical data during intermittent failures or sudden latency spikes. Tracing every request for maximum visibility at scale may increase sampling costs for […]

AWS Systems Manager (formerly known as SSM) is an AWS service that you can use to view and control your servers on AWS cloud and on-premises infrastructure. Systems Manager makes it easy to manage a hybrid environment. To set up servers and virtual machines (VMs) in your hybrid environment as Systems Manager managed instances, you […]

Introduction Organizations using AWS Control Tower to govern their multi-account environments face a persistent challenge: when AWS CloudFormation deployments fail due to proactive control violations, teams receive minimal information about why the failure occurred or how to fix it. This lack of visibility leads to: Delayed deployments as developers struggle to understand cryptic error messages […]

As organizations scale their AWS environments, managing infrastructure consistently while enabling team autonomy becomes increasingly challenging. Landing Zone Accelerator on AWS (LZA) and AWS Account Factory for Terraform (AFT) both extend AWS Control Tower to help customers manage AWS environments at scale, offering complementary strengths. Many AWS customers struggle to balance centralized security governance with […]

How do you deploy hundreds of AWS accounts for a large-scale hackathon? Provide real-time visibility to leadership? Enable participant self-service while monitoring spending across accounts? Enterprise innovation events often lack real-time visibility into participant engagement, resource utilization, and outcomes. Leaders can’t see engagement metrics; builders can’t access accounts and information on-demand. Without observability and governance, […]

As you scale your AWS environment from hundreds to thousands of AWS accounts, maintaining consistent governance standards across this expanded infrastructure requires a strategic approach. Governance controls—the automated policies and rules that enforce standards across your cloud infrastructure—are essential for managing this scale, but implementing them presents two fundamental challenges. First, without proper controls, a […]