AWS Cloud Operations Blog

Tag: Automation

Automatic drift remediation solution architecture

Implement automatic drift remediation for AWS CloudFormation using Amazon CloudWatch and AWS Lambda

“Stack drift” is a common occurrence for organizations using AWS CloudFormation, and remediating stack drift represents a persistent and tedious challenge for organizations managing critical infrastructure with CloudFormation stacks. Stack drift occurs when the actual configuration of an infrastructure resource differs from its expected configuration. Typically, this is caused by users editing resources directly by […]

Keeping Ansible effortless with AWS Systems Manager

Ansible is a powerful tool because it lets you handle many complicated tasks with minimal effort. Some time ago, I published running Ansible playbooks using Systems Manager blog when the first version of the AWS Systems Manager (SSM) document was released, which enabled support for Ansible. In that blog, I discussed the tight integration of […]

Software patching with AWS Systems Manager

Cloud computing adoption has been rapidly increasing with enterprises around the globe, opting for various migration patterns during their cloud journey. Taking monolithic legacy applications as-is and moving them to the cloud, is an approach also known as “lift-and-shift,” and is one of the main drivers for cloud migration. As customers become more knowledgeable about […]

Implementing Serverless Transit Network Orchestrator (STNO) in AWS Control Tower

Introduction Many of the customers that we have worked with are using advanced network architectures in AWS for multi-VPC and multi-account architectures. Placing workloads into separate Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) has several advantages, chief among them isolating sensitive workloads and allowing teams to innovate without fear of impacting other systems. Many companies are taking […]

Using State Manager over cfn-init in CloudFormation and its benefits

Introduction If you have deployed Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances via AWS CloudFormation, you most likely want to install software or configure the operating system of the instance. To accomplish this, you may have used cfn-init, one of the CloudFormation helper scripts available to AWS customers since February 2012. However, since that time AWS […]

Solution architecture for the proposed solution

Automate RDS Aurora Snapshots for disaster recovery

It is important to have a well-defined proactive disaster recovery strategy for efficient and uninterrupted flow of data across an organization. This applies to all components of your application architecture, including the database layer. While Amazon Aurora database clusters are fault-tolerant and highly available by design, for disaster recovery use cases, customers prefer to keep […]

Deploy Enterprise Proof-of-Concept with prooV and AWS Service Catalog

Deploy Enterprise Proof-of-Concept with prooV and AWS Service Catalog Proof-of-concept testing is a must-have practice for enterprise application development teams for decision making regarding technology adoption. With the elasticity and scalability provided by the cloud, it’s more important now than ever to predict and understand application behavior in a real-world scenario. Before releasing a new […]

How to execute Chef recipes using AWS Systems Manager

It’s exciting to see how many AWS customers are taking advantage of AWS Systems Manager to manage and deploy infrastructure configuration at scale. I have previously blogged about the benefits of using AWS Systems Manager with configuration management tools, including Ansible and Salt. Recent improvements to the configuration management functionality, has made the service even […]

Workflow diagram that shows how Control Tower's lifecycle events are generated and recorded

Using lifecycle events to track AWS Control Tower actions and trigger automated workflows

Many customers that I work with are creating and provisioning new accounts using AWS Control Tower. They prefer an AWS native solution for creating their environment knowing that it will be based upon documented AWS Best Practices. As customers scale their account creation, there exists an opportunity to use additional Control Tower features to perform […]