AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
Auto-Generate Secure and Standardized IaC for AWS services with StackGen
By: Cesar Rodriguez, VP Engineering – StackGen
By: Asif Awan, CoFounder & CPO – StackGen
By: Mohamed Mohamud, Partner Solutions Architect – AWS
By: Mengdi Chen, Sr Solutions Architect – AWS
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With the expansion of cloud computing, platform teams must balance faster development with secure and compliant infrastructure, as emphasized by the rising prominence of platform engineering and Gartner’s Hype Cycle. A Stacked Up report on infrastructure as code (IaC) maturity reveals that 97% of respondents struggle with IaC, primarily because of 56% configuration consistency and 54% multi-tool management.
Businesses transitioning from legacy environments rely on manual configurations, complex internal software, and static systems, which complicate security, consistency, and scalability. Ensuring smooth deployments across environments while maintaining security is a significant challenge, but modern tools and automation can simplify AWS deployment, offering a consistent, secure, and scalable cloud infrastructure.
StackGen’s Approach to IaC Modernization
StackGen provides a solution to cloud infrastructure management through four key approaches. As shown in Figure 1, StackGen generates secure cloud infrastructure through its comprehensive approach. First, it transforms manually created cloud environments, such as those built through ClickOps, into repeatable Infrastructure as Code, enabling consistent deployment and management. Second, the platform automatically generates unified architecture diagrams of your topology, providing clear visualization of your infrastructure. Third, StackGen incorporates automatic enforcement of security and governance policies as teams build their infrastructure, with policies specifically tailored to the AWS services being utilized. Finally, it offers a unified, standardized process that includes clear visualization of application architecture and built-in governance constraints, making it suitable for both human operators and AI-based operations. This integrated approach streamlines cloud infrastructure management while maintaining security and consistency.
StackGen also supports the deployment of your desired security and infrastructure states across multiple AWS regions, creating a repeatable and compliant environment no matter where your cloud resources are located. By defining your security policies and configurations in a centralized, consistent manner, StackGen ensures that these settings are automatically replicated across all AWS regions, eliminating inconsistencies and human error. With multi-region deployment, organizations achieve secure scalability while maintaining compliance through consistent security posture and governance across all regions, in line with industry standards and internal policies.
In nutshell, StackGen’s Agentic Infrastructure Automation Platform offers autonomous decision-making, proactive governance, and intelligent drift remediation redefining how organizations provision, monitor, and manage cloud infrastructure.
Repeatable IaC: Standardizing AWS Deployments
Many AWS customers’ infrastructure relies on static deployments, leading to configuration inconsistencies, increased operational risks, and inefficient resource utilization. Teams struggle to create standardized, reproducible infrastructure that adapts to changing organizational needs. Repeatable Infrastructure as Code (IaC) solves these problems by implementing infrastructure-as-code, automated configuration management, and consistent deployment frameworks. Organizations can now ensure uniform environments, reduce human error, and create predictable solutions that replicate across different contexts.
Figure 1 – StackGen generates Secure Cloud Infrastructure
Repeatable IaC has benefits for organizations, including the reduction of human error, and ensuring that environments remain consistent across testing, development, staging, and production. With repeatable IaC, these environments are created in the same way, providing identical setups that reduce the chances of manual mistakes in configuration or provisioning. Repeatable infrastructure also allows teams to track changes easily, by storing infrastructure configurations in version control such as GitHub, GitLab, or BitBucket, teams can track who made which changes and when, and roll back to a previous state if necessary.
Additional benefits to implementing repeatable IaC include faster provisioning, reusable modules and components, cost optimization, disaster recovery, multi-region replication, improved security, and developer environment parity. Standardizing by leveraging a repeatable IaC configuration ensures that teams work with the same standards every time, reducing costly delays to their organization’s cloud migration plan.
IaC Integration with DevOps Workflows in AWS
IaC has become a cornerstone of modern DevOps workflows, enabling teams to automate the provisioning, configuration, and management of cloud resources with consistency and speed. StackGen integrates IaC into DevOps practices by turning infrastructure management into an automated process. Developers and operations teams can version, deploy, and manage infrastructure using the same tools and processes they use for application code.
StackGen integrates into AWS CodeDeploy and AWS CodeBuild pipelines via GitHub.
This integration ensures that infrastructure changes are tested, reviewed, and deployed with the same rigor and speed as application changes, driving faster release cycles and improving collaboration between development and operations teams. This compatibility reduces the potential for human error, ensuring a more efficient continuous deployment pipeline and improved collaboration among developers, platform engineers and DevOps teams.
Achieving Security and Compliance
Legacy systems often carry security risks due to outdated protocols, manual configuration errors, and limited visibility into vulnerabilities. Migrating these systems to AWS introduces an opportunity to mitigate those risks by adopting cloud-native security best practices. However, without the right tools, organizations can struggle to ensure consistent security across environments, leading to potential gaps in access control, data protection, and compliance. Addressing these legacy risks requires not just moving workloads but rethinking how security is managed at every layer—networking, access, and data storage.
StackGen’s Security Features
StackGen provides security features to help mitigate legacy risks and enhance cloud security from the start. It offers automated Identity and Access Management (IAM) management to enforce the principle of least privilege, ensuring that only authorized users have access to sensitive resources. Figure 2 demonstrates the policy selection interface, where users can configure security settings for their AppStack deployments. StackGen also integrates encryption by default for data at rest and in transit, safeguarding critical information. Additionally, it supports compliance with key industry standards, including HIPAA, MARS-E, FedRAMP, HIPAA, NIST, PCI,.GDPR, and SOC 2, helping organizations meet regulatory requirements. For continuous security assurance, StackGen incorporates the necessary requirements within the generated IaC. This feature helps organizations identify and remediate security risks in real time, ensuring that their AWS infrastructure remains secure and compliant at all times.
Figure 2 – StackGen policy selection screen for AppStack security settings
Automated enforcement of security policies in IaC environments ensures best practices are maintained throughout the cloud infrastructure lifecycle. By automatically applying these requirements in the generated IaC, tools like StackGen can identify vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and compliance gaps before deployment. Being proactive empowers teams to prioritize detection and remediation of security risks early on in the SDLC, minimizing exposure to potential threats. This helps organizations maintain a secure, compliant cloud environment, reduce the risk of costly breaches, ensuring their infrastructure meets both internal policies and external regulations. As illustrated in Figure 3, StackGen enables seamless integration with Amazon EKS while maintaining AWS-specific resource selections.
Figure 3 – StackGen AppStack in Amazon EKS with AWS resource selections
Ensuring Consistency and Repeatability in AWS Environments
Ideally, your infrastructure’s target state would stay the same over time. Realistically, when multiple changes occur across teams many times a day, configuration changes are bound to happen. The discrepancy between planned and current infrastructure states, termed configuration drift, presents a significant hurdle in addressing technical debt within DevOps and platform engineering. Drift management can slow down developer productivity, with large pull requests and merge conflicts taking time to review, debug, and merge in order to get the target infrastructure state back in alignment with the actual state.
Figure 4 shows StackGen’s topology diagram interface, which allows users to create and manage resource packs through an intuitive visual interface.
Figure 4 – StackGen topology diagram with resource pack creation menu
StackGen ensures consistency across AWS environments by using version-controlled templates to standardize deployments across multiple teams and projects. By automating the generation of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) based on best practices, StackGen eliminates the risk of configuration drift and manual errors. These templates are versioned and stored in source control, allowing teams to track changes, roll back to previous versions, and collaborate more effectively. Whether deploying in development, staging, or production environments, StackGen ensures that the same templates are used consistently, maintaining uniformity and reliability in every AWS deployment. This version-controlled approach also helps enforce governance, ensuring that all environments adhere to the same security, compliance, and operational standards.
Conclusion
StackGen simplifies AWS modernization by automating Infrastructure as Code generation while maintaining security and compliance standards. The platform streamlines cloud deployments through automated policy enforcement, standardized templates, and clear visualization of infrastructure, enabling teams to focus on innovation rather than manual configuration.
StackGen is available through the AWS Marketplace, facilitating easy integration into your existing AWS infrastructure. To learn more about accelerating your cloud infrastructure deployment while maintaining security and compliance, visit stackgen.com or explore our solutions in the AWS Marketplace.
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StackGen – AWS Partner Spotlight
StackGen an AWS Advanced Technology Partner, is a generative infrastructure platform that delivers self-service infrastructure with built-in governance and compliance. The platform generates production-ready Terraform code from application code or existing environments, helping enterprises reduce provisioning time by 75% while maintaining complete security coverage.