Category: AWS CloudFormation

Balancing developer freedom and governance controls is a key challenge faced by organizations that are adopting cloud. On one hand, developers need the freedom to innovate and develop new applications and services quickly and on the other, organizations need to maintain control over the resources used and the data processed in order to ensure compliance […]

Overview Effective operation of cloud applications and services demands a strong focus on monitoring and observability. It’s critical for your teams to define, capture, and analyze metrics, ensuring operational visibility and extracting actionable insights from logs. In many companies, technical teams share integrated systems to monitor the services or infrastructure they manage. Shared observability systems […]

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 […]

Many Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers struggle to keep cloud costs under control while allowing employees to innovate and develop their AWS skills. We talk to technology leaders every day who rank controlling cloud spend among their top concerns. Those same leaders don’t want to stifle innovation or restrict employee’s ability to learn AWS. Using […]

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 […]

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 […]

AWS Systems Manager Automation runbooks let you deploy, configure, and manage AWS resources safely and at scale. You can use AWS-published runbooks or build your own to enable AWS resource management across multiple accounts and regions. The AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK v2) is an open-source framework that can build applications with the expressive power of […]

AWS Resource Groups recently announced a new feature that pushes group lifecycle changes to Amazon EventBridge. A resource group is a collection of AWS resources, in the same AWS Region, that are grouped either using a tag-based query, or AWS CloudFormation stack-based query, and group lifecycle events make it easier for AWS customers to receive […]

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 […]