AWS Cloud Operations & Migrations Blog
Category: Technical How-to
Run compliance enforcement and view compliant and non-compliant instances using AWS Systems Manager and PowerShell DSC
Point-and-click management randomizes servers with every single change made. It’s great to configure your servers with code. In addition, having automation to manage server configuration and compliance helps companies save time, improve availability, and lower the risks associated with up-time and security. However, the learning experience and administrative effort required to maintain such an environment […]
Centralized multi-account and multi-Region patching with AWS Systems Manager Automation
Update 01/2023: AWS Systems Manager announces Patch Policies, enabling cross account and cross Region patching. Patch Policies provide a user experience in a single console to easily define and enforce patch compliance across accounts and Regions with a few clicks. For more information, see Centrally deploy patching operations across your AWS Organization using Systems Manager […]
How to update AWS Service Catalog provisioned products to new product versions and report changes using AWS Step Functions, AWS Lambda, and Amazon Athena
AWS Service Catalog enables organizations to centrally manage commonly-deployed AWS services and provisioned software products. It also helps you achieve consistent governance and compliance requirements, while it empowers users to self-serve and quickly deploy the approved AWS services they need. Customers that I talk to want to have a mechanism to keep previously provisioned products […]
Create an approval workflow for AWS Service Catalog in ServiceNow
The AWS Service Catalog connector for ServiceNow allows AWS enterprise customers to securely provision compliant workloads using ServiceNow on AWS. A lot of customers ask me how to create an approval workflow in ServiceNow for deploying AWS products. For example, such a workflow might be needed if a data scientist wants to launch an Amazon EMR […]
Monitor tag changes on AWS resources with serverless workflows and Amazon CloudWatch Events
Introduction Amazon CloudWatch Events now supports tag changes on AWS resources. Using this new CloudWatch Event type, you can build CloudWatch event rules to match tag changes and route them to one or more targets like an AWS Lambda function to trigger automated workflows. In this blog post, I’ll provide an example for using AWS […]
Building a portfolio of self-service databases with AWS Service Catalog and AWS CloudFormation
Modern distributed applications are moving towards a “purpose-built” database strategy. This means that the selection of database type, size, and configuration should match the problem the database is trying to solve. AWS customers are also requiring that these databases have the appropriate level of security control and organizational governance to operate in customer environments. AWS […]
Resolving circular dependency in provisioning of Amazon S3 buckets with AWS Lambda event notifications
Overview AWS CloudFormation provides a common language for you to describe and provision all of the infrastructure resources in your cloud environment. CloudFormation allows you to use a simple text file to model and provision, in an automated and secure manner, all the resources needed for your applications across all AWS Regions and accounts. It […]
Create a security partition for your applications using AWS Service Catalog and AWS Lambda
Some of the customers I work with want to create complete application separation for each application. They don’t want any two applications running on AWS to communicate using APIs or to network with each other’s AWS resources. In other words, they want each application to “stay in its own lane” as competitive swimmers do. In […]