AWS Cloud Operations Blog

Category: Technical How-to

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 […]

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 […]

Extend AWS Control Tower governance using AWS Config Conformance Packs

As many customers adopt AWS Control Tower, they have asked Raphael and me how to add additional governance policies such as the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) to their environments on top of the guardrails that AWS Control Tower provides. Customers want to enable these additional policies on the AWS Regions where AWS Control Tower is […]

Automating Amazon CloudWatch Alarms with AWS Systems Manager

Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service built for DevOps engineers, developers, Site Reliability Engineers (SRE), and IT managers. CloudWatch provides you with data and actionable insights to monitor your applications, respond to system-wide performance changes, optimize resource utilization, and get a unified view of operational health. Are you looking for an automated way […]

Identifying resources with the most configuration changes using AWS Config

AWS Config tracks changes made to supported resources and records them as configuration items (CIs), which are JSON files delivered to an Amazon S3 bucket. These are delivered in 6-hour intervals, as configuration history files. Each file contains details about the resources that changed in that 6-hour period, for the respective resource types, such as […]

Featured Image - Adjusting X-Ray sampling rules dynamically using CloudWatch Alarms

Dynamically adjusting X-Ray sampling rules

In a distributed system environment, tracing service-to-service interactions is essential to easily identify service bottlenecks, faults, and errors. AWS X-Ray allows you to set up tracing on your applications hosted on a variety of compute environments, such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Amazon Elastic […]

Simplifying permissions management at scale using tags in AWS Organizations

AWS Organizations has extended its existing tagging support for AWS accounts to include all Organizations resources, such as organizational units (OUs) and your root and organization-level policies. You can tag these resources as you create them, giving you a convenient way to make sure that your Organizations resources are categorized from the start, without needing […]