AWS Cloud Operations Blog

Category: Management & Governance

Tag workloads with AWS Config conformance packs across AWS accounts

Overview As cloud deployments get larger and more complex, Organizations struggle with managing and identifying a growing set of resources. Tags provide companies with metadata about their resources – they can use them to identify the resources for cost allocation, operations or data security. AWS Config is an AWS service that continually assesses, audits, and […]

Implementing a custom ConfigSource in Quarkus using AWS AppConfig

Most systems developed on the cloud nowadays implement a microservices architecture. A common demand is that each microservice is highly configurable and that configuration can be changed without changing code, and ideally, without restarting a running service instance. Quarkus (see https://quarkus.io/) is a popular framework for writing high-performing microservices in Java. AWS AppConfig is AWS’ […]

Reversing Technical Debt with Cloud

This blog post covers best practices to manage and reverse technical debt by prudently leveraging and operating cloud services. Technical debt is a metaphor coined by Ward Cunningham, to deal with the cost of making tradeoffs in software development to meet near-term business needs. In the case of financial debt, you take a loan to […]

Delegate AWS Organizations policy management in a multi-account environment

AWS Organizations helps you centrally manage and govern multiple AWS accounts within AWS. You can manage organization structure, add and remove accounts, define configuration using policies, handle consolidated billing, and control multi-account features of integrated AWS services. As your environment grows, your administrators have to manage more accounts and policies which often requires coordination between […]

Consolidate and query AWS CloudTrail data across accounts and regions using AWS CloudTrail Lake

AWS CloudTrail allows tracking of user and API activities across your AWS infrastructure. AWS CloudTrail best practices recommend AWS customers set up separate trails for different use cases such as operational troubleshooting, auditing, security monitoring, etc. Once the use case is accomplished, customers might permanently delete some of the trails but choose to retain their […]

Using Amazon CloudWatch metrics to monitor time to expiration for Reserved Instances | Amazon Web Services

This post shows you how to monitor the days remaining for Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances. The solution uses a custom Amazon CloudWatch metric published via an AWS Lambda function. It creates a CloudWatch alarm and an Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topic for notification when the alarm exceeds the user-defined threshold. CloudWatch allows you […]

How Skai leveraged AWS Step Functions to enforce its tagging policies

Skai is an independent, global marketing platform for strategy, measurement, and best-of-breed activation across all of the world’s most influential digital channels. Skai’s solution provides data-driven insights and optimization technology to help companies make informed decisions and scale performance across critical publishers. Skai possesses a highly technical engineering organization with over 350 software engineers, data […]

Automate AWS Account configuration and onboarding for AWS Service Management Connector for ServiceNow

Many enterprises use ServiceNow to support their IT Service Management (ITSM) processes.  These enterprises are looking for ways to manage and integrate their AWS cloud operations with their existing ServiceNow deployments.  AWS provides the AWS Service Management Connector (SMC) for ServiceNow to enable users to provision, manage, and operate AWS resources natively through ServiceNow. To […]

Get visibility into the activity logs for your workforce and customer identities

The customers we work with often use identity services like Okta to authenticate their workforce identity into the AWS environment, and customer identity service to build authentication into their business applications. In addition, we see customers using other partner solutions in security, cost management, cloud operations, and observability categories. We have heard that our customers […]

Automate AWS Config reporting for noncompliant resources that have been non-compliant for a period of time

AWS Config evaluates the configuration settings of your AWS resources. You do this by creating AWS Config rules, which represent your ideal configuration settings. AWS Config provides customizable, predefined rules called AWS Managed Rules to help you get started. While AWS Config continuously tracks the configuration changes that occur among your resources, it checks whether […]