AWS Cloud Operations Blog

Category: AWS Config

AWS CloudTrail Best Practices

September 8, 2021: HAQM Elasticsearch Service has been renamed to HAQM OpenSearch Service. See details. AWS CloudTrail gives you a history of AWS calls for your account, including API calls made through the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, and command line tools. As a result, you can identify: Which users and accounts called AWS APIs […]

AWS Config

Using AWS Config custom resources to track any resource on AWS

AWS Config is a powerful service you can use to track infrastructure resources and simplify compliance. AWS Config continuously monitors and records your resource configurations. It also allows you to use AWS Config rules to automate the evaluation of recorded configurations against desired state. You can use its remediation actions to address noncompliant resources and […]

Latest from AWS Organizations

The latest from AWS Organizations (Spring 2021)

AWS Organizations provides features customers can use to manage their AWS environment across accounts. When paired with other AWS services, AWS Organizations helps you manage permissions, create and share resources, govern your environment, and centrally control your security requirements. Here’s what the team has been up to since our virtual 2020 re:Invent season. Use attribute-based […]

Set up an organization-wide aggregator in AWS Config using a delegated administrator account

AWS Config provides a detailed view of the configuration of AWS resources in your AWS account. With AWS Config, you can review changes in configurations and relationships between AWS resources, explore resource configuration histories, and use rules to determine compliance. An aggregator is an AWS Config resource type that collects AWS Config configuration and compliance […]

AWS Control Tower Detective Guardrails as an AWS Config Conformance Pack

Many of the customers I work with would like to be able to apply AWS Control Tower’s detective guardrails to an existing AWS account before moving them to Control Tower governance. Now that you can launch AWS Control Tower in an existing AWS Organization, customers want to evaluate their existing accounts for compliance with AWS […]

Understanding the differences between configuration history and configuration snapshot files in AWS Config

September 8, 2021: HAQM Elasticsearch Service has been renamed to HAQM OpenSearch Service. See details. When you run your applications on AWS, you often use AWS resources, which you must create and manage collectively. As the demand for your application keeps growing, so does your need to keep track of your AWS resources. AWS Config tracks […]

Continuous permissions rightsizing to ensure least privileges in AWS using CloudKnox and AWS Config

This blog post was contributed by Kanishk Mahajan, AWS and Maya Neelakandhan, CloudKnox As you migrate your workloads to the cloud or operate your existing workloads in the cloud it would be ideal if every application was deployed with the exact permissions that it required. In practice, however, the effort required to determine the precise […]

Best practices for creating and managing sandbox accounts in AWS

Organizations use multiple environments, each with different security and compliance controls, as part of their deployment pipeline. Following the principle of least privilege, production environments have the most restrictive security and compliance controls. They tightly limit who can access the environment and which actions each user (or principal) can perform. Development and test environments also […]

Visualizing AWS Config data using HAQM Athena and HAQM QuickSight

In this guest post, Henrik André Olsen, Solutions Architect, discusses how he visualized AWS Config data in HAQM QuickSight dashboards with a high value for the Danish insurance company Topdanmark.  If you are an AWS Config user, you are probably already familiar with how to use the AWS Config console to access data, but it’s […]

View AWS Config rules across multiple accounts and Regions using AWS Systems Manager Explorer

AWS Systems Manager Explorer is a customizable operations dashboard that displays an aggregated view of operations data from across your AWS accounts and AWS Regions. Explorer provides context into how operational issues are distributed, trend over time, and vary by category. In this blog post, I explain how Explorer gathers the compliance status of AWS […]