AWS Management Tools Blog

Many organizations have predictable spikes in the usage of their applications and services. For example, retailers see large spikes in usage during Black Friday or Cyber Monday. The beauty of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is that it allows customers to quickly scale up their compute power to meet these demands. However, some customers […]

The AWS CloudFormation team has been busy in the last couple of months, adding support for new resource types for recently released AWS services. In this post, I take a deep dive into using AWS Glue with CloudFormation. About AWS Glue AWS Glue was first announced at re:Invent in 2016, and was made generally available […]

AWS CloudFormation recently added support for these recently released AWS services: AWS Guard Duty is an automated threat-detection service that can be quickly enabled, does not require agents to be installed, and monitors unusual account usage using sources like AWS CloudTrail logs, DNS logs, and other sources. With the new AWS CloudFormation resource support, you […]

EC2Rescue for Windows is an easy-to-use tool that you run on an Amazon EC2 Windows Server instance to diagnose and troubleshoot possible problems. A common use of the tool is to reset the local administrator password. Password rotation is an important security task in any organization. In addition, setting strong passwords is necessary to ensure […]

The grant least privilege best practice advises you to grant only the permissions that are required to perform a task. To follow this best practice you should determine what your users need to do and then design IAM policies that let users perform only those tasks. AWS Service Catalog extends the very same best practice. If you […]

This blog-post is part two in a two-part series of blog posts. Part one shows you how to use AWS Service Catalog to control AWS resources available to your users. Part two shows you how you can use AWS Lambda to decommission all products provisioned from any product of a Portfolio. Sometimes you might have […]

By Melonia Mendonca, Software Development Engineer at Amazon Web Services AWS Systems Manager (SSM) documents enable infrastructure as code that allows you to configure, manage, and automate your AWS and on-premises resources using AWS Systems Manager services. These SSM Documents define the actions that you want to perform on managed instances. Systems Manager offers a […]

Many large enterprises operate on a federated model. That is, they are separated into different business units or organizations, with different goals, procedures, and skill sets. These enterprises typically use a system to manage their infrastructure configuration and changes. You might ask, “Can we apply a federated model to configuration management? If so, what are […]

AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate and AWS OpsWorks for Puppet Enterprise provide fully managed Chef and Puppet servers with a suite of automation tools for infrastructure and application management. Enterprise customers rely on OpsWorks for easy configuration management and secure maintenance as the service automatically patches, updates, and backs up servers. This blog post gives […]

AWS OpsWorks for Puppet Enterprise was released in November of 2017. It has a secure API (associate node) that provides a secure, convenient, and AWS-integrated method to sign certificates for clients of OpsWorks for Puppet Enterprise. This secure API is ideal for use within a user data script when being used for AWS CloudFormation (which […]