AWS Cloud Operations & Migrations Blog

Category: AWS CloudFormation

Use Amazon CloudWatch Contributor Insights for general analysis of Apache logs

Customers build, deploy, and maintain millions of web applications on AWS and many customers deploy these applications using the Apache web application server. Web application performance is a key metric in modern enterprise applications. On AWS customers leverage Amazon CloudWatch to monitor response times, uptime, and provide SLAs. Engineering teams that run large scale applications […]

Enabling Self Service for Cloud Custodian policies on AWS using AWS Service Catalog

Customers are increasingly seeking tools and solutions that can help them achieve their desired outcomes more efficiently and effectively. In the context of cloud management, the need for self-service capabilities has become more pronounced as organizations strive to optimize their cloud resources, improve security, and enhance their overall cloud operations. AWS Service Catalog offers the […]

How to use AWS Config proactive rules and AWS CloudFormation Hooks to prevent creation of noncompliant cloud resources

Balancing developer freedom and governance controls is a key challenge faced by organizations that are adopting cloud. On one hand, developers need the freedom to innovate and develop new applications and services quickly and on the other, organizations need to maintain control over the resources used and the data processed in order to ensure compliance […]

Observe your Azure and AWS workloads simultaneously with Amazon CloudWatch

Observe your Azure and AWS workloads simultaneously with Amazon CloudWatch

Overview Effective operation of cloud applications and services demands a strong focus on monitoring and observability. It’s critical for your teams to define, capture, and analyze metrics, ensuring operational visibility and extracting actionable insights from logs. In many companies, technical teams share integrated systems to monitor the services or infrastructure they manage. Shared observability systems […]

Using Lambda-backed Custom Resources to Reduce Overhead in a Multi-Account Environment

Using Lambda-backed Custom Resources to Reduce Overhead in a Multi-Account Environment

Introduction Many of my customers use AWS CloudFormation to streamline provisioning operations for AWS and third-party resources, that they describe with code in JSON- or YAML-formatted CloudFormation templates. Some workloads require custom logic or inputs beyond standard parameter values. For these scenarios, an often overlooked and useful CloudFormation feature lies in AWS Lambda-backed custom resources. With Lambda-backed custom […]

Provision sandbox accounts with budget limits to reduce costs using AWS Control Tower

Provision sandbox accounts with budget limits to reduce costs using AWS Control Tower

Many Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers struggle to keep cloud costs under control while allowing employees to innovate and develop their AWS skills. We talk to technology leaders every day who rank controlling cloud spend among their top concerns. Those same leaders don’t want to stifle innovation or restrict employee’s ability to learn AWS. Using […]

Achieving operational excellence with design considerations for AWS Organizations SCPs

Service control policies (SCPs) are a set of policies that allow organizations to manage permissions using AWS Organizations. SCPs help control access to AWS services and resources provisioned across multiple accounts created within an organization. In addition, SCPs enable you to set up permission guardrails by defining the maximum available permissions for IAM principals in […]

Managing CloudWatch Synthetics canaries at scale

Managing CloudWatch Synthetics canaries at scale

Amazon CloudWatch Synthetics offers an automated approach to monitoring the performance and availability of your application endpoints, REST APIs, and website content, allowing you to discover issues before your customers do. As your applications and suite of accompanying canaries grows over time, it becomes more challenging and time consuming to manage them at scale. This […]

Coordinating complex resource dependencies across CloudFormation stacks

There are many benefits to using Infrastructure as Code (IaC), but as you grow your infrastructure or your IaC coverage, the number of components and their dependencies can become increasingly more complex. In this post we will walk through strategies to address this complexity. CloudFormation has built-in support for defining dependencies across resources in your […]

Build AWS Systems Manager Automation runbooks using AWS CDK

AWS Systems Manager Automation runbooks let you deploy, configure, and manage AWS resources safely and at scale. You can use AWS-published runbooks or build your own to enable AWS resource management across multiple accounts and regions. The AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK v2) is an open-source framework that can build applications with the expressive power of […]