AWS Management Tools Blog

For customers new to configuration management with AWS OpsWorks for Puppet Enterprise (OWPE), a frequently-asked question is “How do I store sensitive data, such as database passwords, for use in my manifests?” Hiera allows you to manage and access data from various backends (data storage locations). By default, Hiera 5 supports YAML, JSON, and HOCON […]

To manage access to the AWS Cloud, many companies prefer Enterprise Federation over AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users. Identity federation provides single sign-on (SSO) to access AWS accounts using credentials from the corporate directory. This method of accessing AWS allows companies to utilize their existing identity solutions, such as Active Directory (AD) or […]

The AWS Partner Network Blog has recently published a series describing a method to automate the creation of an IAM role for cross-account access, and how to collect the information needed for a partner to assume the role after creation. This post gives readers an overview of the series, summarizing each of the individual posts […]

Today, we are happy to announce that AWS CloudTrail now supports the Lambda Invoke API as a new data event type with the launch of CloudTrail Lambda data events. Previously, AWS CloudTrail supported management events for AWS Lambda, which allowed you to capture when and by whom a function was created, modified, or deleted. With […]

Understanding your service limits (and how close you are to them) is an important part of managing your AWS deployments – continuous monitoring allows you to request limit increases or shut down resources before the limit is reached. One of the easiest ways to do this is via AWS Trusted Advisor’s Service Limit Dashboard, which […]

When you have workloads or applications hosted on IIS Web Server, it’s important to monitor and analyze both IIS and HttpErr logs for abnormalities. IIS logs contain an entry for every request to the site. However, at times, you might not find the requests in IIS logs, even though IIS logging is enabled. There is […]

We are happy to announce the support for Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) on Amazon EC2 instances running Windows AMIs. VSS is a popular volume backup technology in the Microsoft Windows ecosystem (compatible with most Microsoft applications, including SQL Server and Exchange Server). VSS manages disk operations, such as file writes, when a backup […]

AWS has introduced a simpler way for you to query for the latest Windows Amazon Machine Image (AMI). You can now use Amazon EC2 Systems Manager Parameter Store. Prior to this release, finding the latest regional ImageID for an Amazon-provided AMI involved a three-step process. First, use an API call to search the list of […]

By Daniel Koo, Senior Director at FINRA, and Stephen Mele, Software Developer at FINRA Introduction Moving from a traditional data center to the cloud can impose many questions around compliance and security. FINRA took these concerns very seriously with our cloud migration journey to AWS. As a regulatory organization, overseeing up to 75 billion market […]

“We want to get execution logs from our EC2 instances into S3,” my customer said. “Then we can store them and process them later, for optimization, audit, and security review, and so on. We’d like to do it in our CloudFormation stacks, as that’s our execution standard. Can you help us?” This blog post shows […]