Tag: AWS CloudFormation

Introduction Many of my customers use AWS CloudFormation to streamline provisioning operations for AWS and third-party resources, that they describe with code in JSON- or YAML-formatted CloudFormation templates. Some workloads require custom logic or inputs beyond standard parameter values. For these scenarios, an often overlooked and useful CloudFormation feature lies in AWS Lambda-backed custom resources. With Lambda-backed custom […]

Service control policies (SCPs) are a set of policies that allow organizations to manage permissions using AWS Organizations. SCPs help control access to AWS services and resources provisioned across multiple accounts created within an organization. In addition, SCPs enable you to set up permission guardrails by defining the maximum available permissions for IAM principals in […]

Customers want flexibility and simpler ways to manage their AWS accounts. There are several ways customers can choose to customize their AWS account deployments at scale with flexibility such as Account Factory Customization (AFC), a native solution within AWS Control Tower account factory, or Customizations for Control Tower (CfCT), which this blog focuses on. To […]

AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager helps AWS customers manage and automate the process of patching their Linux and Windows managed nodes in AWS and hybrid environments. It provides various options and allows greater control over which patches are approved or rejected during installation using patch baselines. One parameter of patch baseline approval rules is the Auto […]

Customers build, deploy, and maintain millions of web applications on AWS and many customers deploy these applications using NGINX. The NGINX application server offers configurability, scalability, and the ability to handle millions of concurrent requests. Web application performance is key in modern enterprise infrastructure and applications. Customers leverage CloudWatch to monitor response times, uptime, and […]

Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics offers an automated approach to monitoring the performance and availability of your application endpoints, REST APIs, and website content, allowing you to discover issues before your customers do. As your applications and suite of accompanying canaries grows over time, it becomes more challenging and time consuming to manage them at scale. This […]

There are many benefits to using Infrastructure as Code (IaC), but as you grow your infrastructure or your IaC coverage, the number of components and their dependencies can become increasingly more complex. In this post we will walk through strategies to address this complexity. CloudFormation has built-in support for defining dependencies across resources in your […]

This post shows you how to monitor the days remaining for Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances. The solution uses a custom Amazon CloudWatch metric published via an AWS Lambda function. It creates a CloudWatch alarm and an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic for notification when the alarm exceeds the user-defined threshold. CloudWatch allows you […]

Many enterprises use ServiceNow to support their IT Service Management (ITSM) processes.  These enterprises are looking for ways to manage and integrate their AWS cloud operations with their existing ServiceNow deployments.  AWS provides the AWS Service Management Connector (SMC) for ServiceNow to enable users to provision, manage, and operate AWS resources natively through ServiceNow. To […]

AWS Config evaluates the configuration settings of your AWS resources. You do this by creating AWS Config rules, which represent your ideal configuration settings. AWS Config provides customizable, predefined rules called AWS Managed Rules to help you get started. While AWS Config continuously tracks the configuration changes that occur among your resources, it checks whether […]