AWS Cloud Operations & Migrations Blog

Tag: Management & Governance

Using Single Sign-on with Azure Active Directory and Cloud Migration Factory for simplified identity management

In this blog post we’ll look at how to configure the AWS Cloud Migration Factory (CMF) solution to use SAML authentication. We will use an existing identity provider (in this case Azure Active Directory). However, this can be replicated with any IDP that offers SAML authentication. By federating existing logins and accounts with CMF, the […]

Building CIS hardened Golden Images and Pipelines with EC2 Image Builder

Until recently, customers had to navigate to the AWS Marketplace Console and search for a compatible Amazon Machine Image (AMI) product for your image pipeline. They also had to write their own custom components to harden the operating systems to meet Center for Internet Security (CIS) Benchmark guidelines. This required subscriptions to the CIS Benchmark […]

AWS Organizations, moving an organization member account to another organization: Part 1

AWS customers use AWS Organizations as the basis of a multi-account AWS environment as defined by the Organizing Your AWS Environment Using Multiple Accounts AWS Whitepaper. Organizations is an AWS service that enables you to centrally manage and govern multiple accounts. Often there is a scenario when you must move an AWS account from one […]

Centrally track Oracle database licenses in AWS Organizations using AWS License Manager and AWS Systems Manager

As you continue to run your business-critical workloads in hybrid environments, you’ll most likely face the challenges of license management of products, such as Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, and IBM due to limited visibility and governance. You’ll most likely eventually over-provision licenses to avoid the headache with third-party license providers or under-provisioning licenses, only to face […]

How to develop an Observability strategy – Part 2

Your observability strategy starts with your business. “Observability” describes how well you can understand what’s happening in a system. Developing an observability strategy isn’t a one-time effort. It’s a continuous improvement effort that occurs throughout the lifecycle of your workloads. It enables your teams to determine whether or not the workloads they design and run […]

Automate continuous compliance at scale in AWS

AWS Config continuously monitors and records your AWS resource configurations. You can use the service to automate the evaluation and remediation of recorded configurations against desired configurations. You also can review changes in configurations and relationships between AWS resources and dive into the history of a resource configuration. AWS Config conformance packs provide a general-purpose compliance […]

Using Amazon CloudWatch dashboards custom widgets

Many of our customers use Amazon CloudWatch dashboards but have additional use cases that would benefit from the ability to include custom datasets in their existing dashboards. Custom widgets let you create your own visualizations or datasets, share them with other teams, provide input or parameters to your widget, and adjust the time scoped on […]

AWS Organizations now provides a simple, scalable and more secure way to close your member accounts

Today, you can centrally close member accounts in your AWS organization enabling easier and more efficient account management of your AWS environment. This means you’re able to close member accounts from your organization’s management account without needing to login to each member account individually with root credentials. You can also ensure that only authorized IAM […]

Automate AWS Backups with AWS Service Catalog

If you’re an organization with multiple AWS accounts and independent teams, cloud governance can seem a daunting task. The complexities of balancing developer velocity with centralized governance risks can slow down the innovation you’re trying to speed up. Fortunately, AWS Service Catalog, and AWS Backup help to implement a well-architected approach to self-service while meeting […]

How BT uses Amazon CloudWatch to monitor millions of devices

In this guest post, Ciaran Kearney, Data Engineer at multinational telecommunications company BT discusses how BT built a monitoring solution using Amazon CloudWatch dashboards, composite alarms, and embedded metric format to support the monitoring of millions of devices. Customers with high-cardinality monitoring use cases often face challenges when it comes to implementing observability. Monitoring high-cardinality workloads […]