Category: Management Tools

AWS recently launched a new version of the AWS Well-Architected Framework, and updates to the AWS Well-Architected Tool. The new changes were made in response to industry trends, as well as feedback from customers and AWS Well-Architected Partners. This post provides a brief overview of what’s new and is intended for AWS Well-Architected Partners, members of the AWS Partner Network (APN) who are new to AWS Well-Architected, or AWS Cloud customers.

Cost conscious credit unions looking to provide digital banking services need logical isolation from other tenants. Larger credit unions, on the other hand, require physical as well as logical isolation from other tenants. Persistent Systems Digital Credit Union Solution helps a credit union go live in a short time frame with digital banking offerings such as digital loans or digital deposits. The solution uses fine-grained microservices, deployed on Amazon EKS and provided as secure API’s using Amazon API Gateway.

Shift-Left is increasingly being employed within DevOps organizations to ensure companies minimize risk early in their infrastructure as code (IaC) deployment cycle. This post explains how to combine two of the technologies that make Shift-Left possible. The first is AWS CloudFormation, which represents IaC, and the second is Trend Micro’s Template Scanner, which checks your IaC to make sure it conforms to the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

As larger and more complex workloads are deployed on AWS, multi-account solutions are an increasingly common architectural blueprint. Often referred to as cloud “landing zones,” these blueprints enable simple administrative boundaries. However, using multiple accounts increases the complexity of security tooling, access control and authorization, and cross-account networking. AWS Control Tower simplifies the process of setting up multi-account environments with predefined security baseline templates.

AWS Config continuously monitors and records your AWS resource configurations, and allows you to automate the evaluation of recorded configurations against desired configurations. This post aims to assist you on deploying a set of custom AWS Config Rules that leverages third-party REST APIs to evaluate AWS resources in an automated fashion. The AWS Config evaluations represented in this guide show the reporting status of Amazon EC2 instances against TrendMicro and Qualys.

By hosting a Palo Alto Networks VM-Series firewall in an Amazon VPC, you can use AWS native cloud services—such as Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, and AWS Lambda—to monitor your firewall for changes in configuration. This post explains why that’s desirable and walks you through the steps required to do it. You now have a way to monitor your Palo Alto Networks firewall that is very similar to how you monitor your AWS environment with AWS Config.

Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics monitors RESTful APIs, URLs, and website content endpoints via synthetic traffic. Dynatrace also offers powerful, integrated synthetic capabilities, but if you use both CloudWatch and Dynatrace you have to switch between their consoles to check status. Now, you can integrate CloudWatch Synthetics into Dynatrace and check for unexpected behavior across both platforms from a single dashboard in your Dynatrace account.

The move to primarily cloud-based operations has pushed enterprises to prioritize digital security mechanisms and regulatory compliance controls to safeguard weaknesses and reduce effects of an attack. TCS Cloud Exponence is a multi-cloud operations solution with a focus on a range of critical security operations such as cloud perimeter monitoring, patch management, vulnerability assessment, compliance monitoring, alerting, and reporting.

Chaos engineering is the discipline of experimenting on a software system or service to build confidence in its capability to withstand turbulent and unexpected conditions. Its goal is to reveal weaknesses before they break. The AWS Well-Architected Review and chaos engineering go hand-in-hand, and Gremlin’s chaos engineering platform validates your service’s compliance with two pillars of the Well-Architected Framework: operational excellence and reliability.

Terraform and AWS CloudFormation allow you to express infrastructure resources as code and manage them programmatically. Each has its advantages, but some enterprises already have expertise in Terraform and prefer using it to manage their AWS resources. To accommodate that preference, CloudFormation allows you to use non-AWS resources to manage AWS infrastructure. Learn the steps to create a CloudFormation registry resource type for Terraform and deploy it as an AWS Service Catalog product.