AWS Cloud Operations & Migrations Blog

Category: Security, Identity, & Compliance

Using environment variables with Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics

With the increase in online traffic, organizations have prioritized the continuous monitoring of their applications so that they can detect issues before they cause widespread problems. Canaries emulate a user flow, making it possible for organizations to proactively catch errors thereby ensuring a good customer experience. Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics allows you to create canaries to […]

Understanding the differences between configuration history and configuration snapshot files in AWS Config

September 8, 2021: Amazon Elasticsearch Service has been renamed to Amazon OpenSearch Service. See details. When you run your applications on AWS, you often use AWS resources, which you must create and manage collectively. As the demand for your application keeps growing, so does your need to keep track of your AWS resources. AWS Config tracks […]

Figure 1: CloudTrail Process Flow

How to optimize AWS CloudTrail costs by using advanced event selectors

AWS CloudTrail can be used for security, monitoring restricted API calls, notification of threshold breaches, operational issues, filtering mechanisms for isolating data, faster root cause identification, and speedy resolution. CloudTrail can also be used for various compliance and governance controls, by helping you achieve compliance by logging API calls and changes to resources. Event selectors […]

CloudFormation StackSets delegated administration

If you are using AWS CloudFormation StackSets, you are having to manage your stacks from the AWS Organizations management account. According to best practice, the management account should be used only for tasks that require it. Until today, you had to use the management account to manage your AWS CloudFormation stack sets. To help limit […]

Continuous permissions rightsizing to ensure least privileges in AWS using CloudKnox and AWS Config

This blog post was contributed by Kanishk Mahajan, AWS and Maya Neelakandhan, CloudKnox As you migrate your workloads to the cloud or operate your existing workloads in the cloud it would be ideal if every application was deployed with the exact permissions that it required. In practice, however, the effort required to determine the precise […]

Best practices for creating and managing sandbox accounts in AWS

Organizations use multiple environments, each with different security and compliance controls, as part of their deployment pipeline. Following the principle of least privilege, production environments have the most restrictive security and compliance controls. They tightly limit who can access the environment and which actions each user (or principal) can perform. Development and test environments also […]

Four ways to retrieve any AWS service property using AWS CloudFormation (Part 3 of 3)

This post is the last in a series on how to build customizations using AWS CloudFormation. In part 1, we introduced you to cfn-response and crhelper and discussed the scenarios they are best suited for. In part 2, we addressed a coverage gap in our public roadmap and showed you how to build an AWS […]

Four ways to retrieve any AWS service property using AWS CloudFormation (Part 2 of 3)

This post is the second in a series on how to build customizations using AWS CloudFormation. In part 1, we showed you how to develop customizations using cfn-response and crhelper and shared the scenarios they are best suited for. In this post, we’ll use AWS CloudFormation macros to address some of the coverage gaps identified […]

ReadOnly SCP Post Featured Image

How to implement a read-only service control policy (SCP) for accounts in AWS Organizations

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.

Authorize different sets of interactive session commands for users using SSM documents

Limit interactive session commands by groups of users using AWS Systems Manager

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 […]