Category: Compute

Note: As of March 28, 2017,  Amazon EC2 supports tagging on creation, enforced tag usage, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) resource-level permissions, and enforced volume encryption. See New – Tag EC2 Instances & EBS Volumes on Creation on the AWS Blog for more information. Access to manage Amazon EC2 instances can be controlled using […]

Seamlessly joining Windows EC2 instances in AWS to a Microsoft Active Directory domain is a common scenario, especially for enterprises building a hybrid cloud architecture. With AWS Directory Service, you can target an Active Directory domain managed on-premises or within AWS. How to Connect Your On-Premises Active Directory to AWS Using AD Connector takes you […]

Update: The video and slides from the webinar are now available. As part of the AWS Webinar Series, AWS will present Using AWS WAF and Lambda for Automatic Protection on Wednesday, March 2. This webinar will start at 10:00 A.M. and end at 11:00 A.M. Pacific Time (UTC-8). AWS WAF Software Development Manager Nathan Dye […]

Note from July 3, 2017: The solution in this post has been integrated into AWS WAF Security Automations, and AWS maintains up-to-date solution code in the companion GitHub repository.   One security challenge you may have faced is how to prevent your web servers from being flooded by unwanted requests, or scanning tools such as bots and […]

Note from April 1, 2021: Before implementing the steps in this blog post, please request an EC2 limit increase for “rules per security group.” Ask for 220 rules per security group in the AWS Region where your security groups will be. Note from December 3, 2019: The features and services described in this post have […]

Governance among IT teams has become increasingly challenging, especially when dealing with application deployments that involve many different technologies. For example, consider the case of trying to collocate multiple applications on a shared operating system. Accidental conflicts can stem from the applications themselves, or the underlying libraries and network ports they rely on. The likelihood […]

As a cloud support engineer, I am frequently asked this question: “How can I lock down my user’s Amazon EC2 access to a single VPC?” This blog post will answer the question and explain how you can help control this level of access through the use of AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies and […]

Let’s face it—not all APIs were created equal. For example, you may be really interested in knowing when any of your Amazon EC2 instances are terminated (ec2:TerminateInstance), but less interested when an object is put in an Amazon S3 bucket (s3:PutObject). In this example, you can delete an object, but you can’t bring back that […]

In September, the AWS Elastic Beanstalk team announced two new features that involve roles: support for federation and support for instance profiles. Support for federated users means that people in your organization can sign in to the AWS Management Console and manage Elastic Beanstalk using their own credentials, without having to have a IAM user […]

When you launch an Amazon EC2 instance, you can associate an AWS IAM role with the instance to give applications or CLI commands that run on the instance permissions that are defined by the role. When a role is associated with an instance, EC2 obtains temporary security credentials for the role you associated with the […]