AWS Cloud Operations Blog
Category: Security, Identity, & Compliance
Use Contributor Insights to analyze AWS Network Firewall
AWS recently launched AWS Network Firewall, a stateful, managed network firewall that provides intrusion detection and prevention for Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). In a large-scale enterprise environment, it can be difficult and time-consuming to inspect multiple log groups and log streams. Investigating a security incident across a Network Firewall fleet that spans different VPCs […]
Automate suspension of an AWS CodePipeline release during critical events using AWS Systems Manager Change Calendar and Amazon EventBridge
In this blog post, I show you how to set up public holidays calendars using AWS Systems Manager Change Calendar and suspend your AWS CodePipeline pipelines during the critical holidays in these calendar events. For example, let’s say an application release pipeline in your AWS account builds and deploys a new version of the application […]
The latest from AWS Organizations (Spring 2021)
AWS Organizations provides features customers can use to manage their AWS environment across accounts. When paired with other AWS services, AWS Organizations helps you manage permissions, create and share resources, govern your environment, and centrally control your security requirements. Here’s what the team has been up to since our virtual 2020 re:Invent season. Use attribute-based […]
AWS Health Aware – Customize AWS Health Alerts for Organizational and Personal AWS Accounts
AWS strives for high availability and has a 99.9% uptime for most services. However, in the rare event that incidents do occur, customers should be prepared to respond. AWS Health is the primary channel to communicate service degradation, scheduled changes, and resource impacting issues. For customers running critical applications, having access to proactive and real-time […]
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 […]
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 […]