CloudWise Secure Bastion Host - Hardened AL2023 AMI

The Secure Bastion Host Community Edition by Syed Solutions is a pre-hardened Amazon Linux 2023 AMI that provides a secure administrative entry point for AWS environments. Instead of spending hours manually hardening a stock Amazon Linux instance - configuring SELinux, locking down SSH, enabling audit logging, and enforcing IMDSv2 - you launch a single AMI that delivers all of these controls out of the box.

This is a no-cost community AMI. There is no software charge; you pay only for the underlying AWS infrastructure (EC2 instance, EBS storage, data transfer) at standard AWS rates.

A stock AL2023 instance ships with permissive defaults: SELinux in permissive mode, no firewall rules, no audit logging, and IMDSv1 still accessible. Hardening it yourself requires researching and applying dozens of configuration changes, testing for regressions, and maintaining those settings over time. Secure Bastion Host Community Edition closes that gap by delivering a production-ready hardened baseline from the first boot.

AWS Systems Manager Session Manager - Encrypted, auditable shell access without opening inbound SSH ports or exposing a public IP address Hardened SSH as break-glass access - Available when the SSM agent is unreachable, with strict cipher suites and key-only authentication SELinux in Enforcing mode - Mandatory access controls that contain processes and limit lateral movement if a service is compromised firewalld - Host-based firewall with a deny-all default policy auditd with pre-configured rules - Kernel-level logging of privileged commands, file access, and authentication events for compliance and forensics IMDSv2 enforcement - Blocks SSRF-based credential theft by requiring session tokens for metadata access Persistent system logging - Survives reboots so you never lose evidence during incident response Automated security-only package updates - Reduces your CVE exposure window without introducing feature regressions

A DevOps engineer at a regulated organization needs to troubleshoot a database running in a private subnet during an incident. Using Session Manager through the Secure Bastion Host, they connect without exposing any public IP, and every keystroke is logged to CloudWatch Logs for the compliance team to audit later. If Session Manager is unavailable due to an SSM agent issue, hardened SSH provides a documented break-glass path.

1. Launch the AMI in your VPC private subnet with an IAM instance profile that includes the AmazonSSMManagedInstanceCore policy.
2. Ensure the subnet has a NAT Gateway or VPC endpoints for SSM, SSM Messages, and EC2 Messages.
3. Open the AWS Systems Manager console, select Session Manager, and start a session to your new instance.
4. Optionally configure CloudWatch Logs for session logging and Amazon Inspector for vulnerability scanning.
5. Validate SELinux status and auditd rules are active by running "sestatus" and "auditctl -l" from your session.

The AMI is designed to work with the broader AWS security ecosystem. Optional integrations include:

Amazon CloudWatch Logs - Centralize session transcripts and system logs AWS CloudTrail - Track API calls related to your bastion instance Amazon Inspector - Continuous vulnerability assessment AWS CloudFormation - Automate repeatable deployments

Secure Bastion Host Community Edition is built for cloud engineers, security teams, and DevOps practitioners who need a hardened administrative access point but do not want to invest the time to build and maintain one from scratch. It is suitable for development, staging, and production environments across any industry that values auditable, least-privilege access.

Subscribe and launch the AMI directly from AWS Marketplace. If you need a guided walkthrough of deployment or want to discuss how the AMI fits your security architecture, contact Syed Solutions at Contact@SyedSolutions.com  to schedule a brief consultation.