AWS Cloud Operations Blog
Category: Security, Identity, & Compliance
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 […]
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.
DevSecOps for auto healing PCI DSS 3.2.1 violations in AWS using custom AWS Config conformance packs, AWS Systems Manager and AWS CodePipeline
If you migrate your workloads to the cloud to modernize your applications or secure infrastructure and operations, you’ll find these migrations are increasingly performed with a DevOps methodology that incorporates continuous development, integration, and testing. It is always a best practice to incorporate security as code in your DevOps workflows to uncover security issues when […]
Open sesame: Granting privileged access to EC2 instances with Session Manager
In this guest blog post, Herman Lee (Cloud Solution Architect, VP) and Nauman Noor (Managing Director) from the public cloud engineering team at State Street discuss their use of AWS Systems Manager Session Manager for privileged access management of Amazon EC2 instances. State Street Corporation is a financial services company responsible for the management, custody, […]
Manage AWS Managed Microsoft AD resources with Session Manager port forwarding
Active Directory administrators are accustomed to managing domain resources using Remote Server Administrators Tools (RSAT) installed on either their workstations or a member server in the domain. When it comes to managing resources on a managed Active Directory service, such as the case with AWS Managed Microsoft AD, these tools must be available for administrators […]
How to aggregate and visualize AWS Health events using AWS Organizations and Amazon Elasticsearch Service
September 8, 2021: Amazon Elasticsearch Service has been renamed to Amazon OpenSearch Service. See details. In this post, I show you how to aggregate AWS Health events centrally from all accounts in your organization using AWS Organizations, AWS Lambda, and AWS Health API, and then build automation to ingest and visualize the operations data using […]






