Category: Advanced (300)

As many customers adopt AWS Control Tower, they have asked Raphael and me how to add additional governance policies such as the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) to their environments on top of the guardrails that AWS Control Tower provides. Customers want to enable these additional policies on the AWS Regions where AWS Control Tower is […]

AWS Config tracks changes made to supported resources and records them as configuration items (CIs), which are JSON files delivered to an Amazon S3 bucket. These are delivered in 6-hour intervals, as configuration history files. Each file contains details about the resources that changed in that 6-hour period, for the respective resource types, such as […]

In a distributed system environment, tracing service-to-service interactions is essential to easily identify service bottlenecks, faults, and errors. AWS X-Ray allows you to set up tracing on your applications hosted on a variety of compute environments, such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Amazon Elastic […]

Cut costs by minimizing infrastructure when it’s not under heavy use, for example turning off EC2 and RDS instances nights and weekends. In this post you will learn how to do this using Systems Manager Automation Documents, State Manager, and CloudWatch Events.

AWS Systems Manager helps to control the sequence of package deployment in managed instances. Managed instances can be Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, virtual machines (VM) including VMs in other cloud environments, and on-premises servers. Customers are trying to automate the process of managing their state of hybrid infrastructure. They need to run […]

Software Asset Governance or Software Asset Management is a key component of an organization’s cyber security strategy. Different aspects of Software Asset Governance find notable mentions in renowned security frameworks and standards such as SANS CIS Critical Security Controls, NIST Special Publication 800-53, and Cloud Security Alliance’s Cloud Control Matrix. The subject goes beyond cyber-security […]

Conversational interfaces like chatbots have become an important channel for brands to communicate with their customers, partners, and employees. They help with faster service, 24/7 availability, and reduced service costs. By monitoring conversations between your customers and the bot, you can gain insights into user interactions, trends, and missed utterances. The additional insights will help […]

In this blog post, I show you how to expand AWS Control Tower centralized logging strategy to cover Amazon VPC Flow Logs. Using this solution, you can manage VPC Flow Logs across multiple accounts with self-service automation and periodic consistency check.

In this blog post you learn how to visualize AWS CloudTrail events, near real time, using Kibana. This solution is useful if you use an ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) stack to aggregate logs from all your systems and applications, analyze these logs, and create visualizations for application and infrastructure monitoring. This solution is also useful […]

Application workloads being built for the cloud are getting easier to deploy with tools like Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS and AWS Fargate), infrastructure as code (IaC), and full-scale DevSecOps pipelines. But there’s more to migrating workloads than ease of development and deployment: application workloads still need […]