Category: Compute

Today, AWS released an updated resource — AWS Policy Perspectives-Data Residency — to provide an additional option for you if you need to store and process your data on premises. This white paper update discusses AWS Outposts, which offers a hybrid solution for customers that might find that certain workloads are better suited for on-premises […]

January 6, 2021: We updated this post to fix a bug related to allow listing noncompliant roles. January 6, 2020: We updated this post to reflect a valid STS session duration if configured to assume a role into other accounts. Developing in the cloud encourages you to iterate frequently as your applications and resources evolve. […]

July 27, 2021: We’ve updated the link to the 2019 re:Invent session on this topic. Since it first launched over 10 years ago, the Amazon EC2 Instance Metadata Service (IMDS) has helped customers build secure and scalable applications. The IMDS solved a big security headache for cloud users by providing access to temporary, frequently rotated […]

AWS Secrets Manager recently announced a feature update to rotate credentials for all Amazon RDS database types. This allows you to automatically rotate credentials for all types of databases hosted on Amazon RDS. In this post, I show you how to rotate database secrets for a non-RDS database using AWS Secrets Manager. I use a […]

October 29, 2021: AWS KMS is replacing the term customer master key (CMK) with AWS KMS key and KMS key. The concept has not changed. To prevent breaking changes, AWS KMS is keeping some variations of this term. More info. Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) offers an encryption solution for your Amazon EBS volumes so […]

When managing your AWS resources, you often need to grant one AWS service access to another to accomplish tasks. For example, you could use an AWS Lambda function to resize, watermark, and postprocess images, for which you would need to store the associated metadata in Amazon DynamoDB. You also could use Lambda, Amazon S3, and […]

As companies mature in their cloud journey, they implement layered security capabilities and practices in their cloud architectures. One such practice is to continually assess golden Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) for security vulnerabilities. AMIs provide the information required to launch an Amazon EC2 instance, which is a virtual server in the AWS Cloud. A golden […]

The AWS Knowledge Center helps answer the questions most frequently asked by AWS Support customers. The following 10 Knowledge Center security articles and videos have been the most viewed this month. It’s likely you’ve wondered about a few of these topics yourself, so here’s a chance to learn the answers! How do I create an AWS […]

Yesterday in Part 1 of this blog post, I showed you how to: Launch an Amazon EC2 instance with an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role, an Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume, and tags that Amazon EC2 Systems Manager (Systems Manager) and Amazon Inspector use. Configure Systems Manager to install the Amazon […]

Most malware tries to compromise your systems by using a known vulnerability that the maker of the operating system has already patched. To help prevent malware from affecting your systems, two security best practices are to apply all operating system patches to your systems and actively monitor your systems for missing patches. In case you […]