Category: Technical How-to

If you’re an organization with multiple AWS accounts and independent teams, cloud governance can seem a daunting task. The complexities of balancing developer velocity with centralized governance risks can slow down the innovation you’re trying to speed up. Fortunately, AWS Service Catalog, and AWS Backup help to implement a well-architected approach to self-service while meeting […]

Customers who manage multiple AWS accounts in AWS Organizations can use service control policies (SCPs) to centrally manage permissions in their environment. SCPs can be applied to an organization unit (OU), account, or entire organization to restrict the maximum permissions that can be applied in the scoped AWS accounts. In this post, we are going to explore the use of SCPs to restrict an AWS account to read-only access.

Organizations manage an increasingly diverse IT infrastructure, one that spans cloud and on-premises environments and uses different tools and services. Managing these diverse hybrid environments can be complicated and resource-intensive. Fleet Manager, a new feature in AWS Systems Manager, makes it easy and cost-effective to remotely manage Windows and Linux servers running across AWS, on-premises, […]

AWS Systems Manager Explorer is a customizable operations dashboard that displays an aggregated view of operations data from across your AWS accounts and AWS Regions. Explorer provides context into how operational issues are distributed, trend over time, and vary by category. In this blog post, I explain how Explorer gathers the compliance status of AWS […]

In this guest post, Ciaran Kearney, Data Engineer at multinational telecommunications company BT discusses how BT built a monitoring solution using Amazon CloudWatch dashboards, composite alarms, and embedded metric format to support the monitoring of millions of devices. Customers with high-cardinality monitoring use cases often face challenges when it comes to implementing observability. Monitoring high-cardinality workloads […]

You can use rules in Amazon CloudWatch Contributor Insights to gain security visibility into your VPC flow logs. The rules analyze flow logs in targeted groups in Amazon CloudWatch Logs and display the Top-N contributors for a given log field or combination of log fields. In this post, I’ll show you how to set up CloudWatch Contributor Insight rules for VPC flow logs. I’ll demonstrate how to:

Map the VPC flow log format to rules in Contributor Insights.
Explain how a single rule can be used to monitor many VPC flow logs.
Walk through some sample rules and show them in a CloudWatch dashboard.

Amazon CloudWatch Dashboards are a great way to monitor your AWS resources. During peak events when you are expecting high traffic, monitoring your AWS resources helps you stay ahead of any issues that may arise. You might want a customized and automated dashboard that can be used during a seasonal event, important releases, holidays, and […]

In this blog post, we share a procedure for configuring AWS Systems Manager Session Manager run as support for Active Directory (AD) federated users using AWS Security Token Service (AWS STS) session tags. We show you how to start a Session Manager session using the AD user name of the federated user on an AD-joined […]

Customers are looking for a way to limit the types of commands that can be run on their Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances when using AWS Systems Manager Session Manager interactive sessions. Allowed commands vary by group, meaning you need to allow different sets of commands based on the group of users. For […]

Each AWS service requires explicit access to resources, endpoints, and objects that reside in the domain of another service. This is referred to as the permission boundary. Services like AWS Config, Amazon Macie, and AWS GuardDuty require an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role that grants access to resources outside of its control. Understanding […]