Governance & Security Flashcards
(44 cards)
AWS Global Infrastructure
Edge locations and Regional Edge Cache
Local Zones
Availability Zones
Regions
AWS Regions
- A region is a geographical area
- Each region consists of 2 or more availability zones
- Isolated from other AWS Regions
Availability Zones
- Availability Zones are physically separate and isolated from each
other - AZs span one or more data centers
- Each AZ is designed as an independent failure zone
Local Zones
- AWS Local Zones place compute, storage, database, and other select
AWS services closer to end-users - Extension of an AWS Region where you can run your latency sensitive
applications
Edge Locations and Regional Edge Caches
- Edge locations are Content Delivery Network (CDN) endpoints for
CloudFront - There are many more edge locations than regions
- Regional Edge Caches sit between your CloudFront Origin servers and
the Edge Locations - A Regional Edge Cache has a larger cache-width than each of the
individual Edge Locations
Advantages of cloud?
- Trade capital expense for variable expense
- Benefit from massive economies of scale
- Stop guessing about capacity
- Increase speed and agility
- Stop spending money running and maintaining data centres
- Go global in minutes
IAM Best Practices - General
- Create individual IAM users
- Use groups to assign permissions to IAM users
- Grant least privilege
- Use access levels to review IAM permissions
- Monitor activity in your AWS account
IAM Best Practices - Roles
*Use roles for applications that run on Amazon EC2 instances
* Use roles to delegate permissions
IAM Best Practices - Policies
- Get started using permissions with AWS managed policies
- Use customer managed policies instead of inline policies
- Use policy conditions for extra security
IAM Best Practices - Credential Management
- Lock away your AWS account root user access keys
- Configure a strong password policy for your users
- Enable MFA
- Do not share access keys
- Rotate credentials regularly
- Remove unnecessary credentials
Amazon EC2 Metadata and User Data
- User data is data that is supplied by the user at instance
launch in the form of a script - Instance metadata is data about your instance that you can use to configure or manage the running instance
- User data and metadata are not encrypted
- Instance metadata is available at
http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data
Access keys
- Access keys can be used on EC2 instances to gain permissions
to other AWS services - Access keys are stored in plaintext so this is not secure
- Better to use IAM roles whenever possible and avoid access
keys
AWS Organizations
- Allows you to consolidate multiple AWS accounts into an
organization that you create and centrally manage - Available in two feature sets:
- Consolidated Billing
- All features
- Includes root accounts and organizational units
- Policies are applied to root accounts or OUs
AWS Organization Consolidated billing includes?
- Paying Account – independent and cannot access resources of other
accounts - Linked Accounts – all linked accounts are independent
AWS Control Tower
- Simplifies the process of creating multi-account environments
- Sets up governance, compliance, and security guardrails for
you - Integrates with other services and features to setup the
environment for you including: - AWS Organizations, SCPs, OUs, AWS Config, AWS CloudTrail,
Amazon S3, Amazon SNS, AWS CloudFormation, AWS Service
Catalog, AWS Single Sign-On (SSO)
AWS Systems Manager
- Manages many AWS resources including Amazon EC2, Amazon
S3, Amazon RDS etc. - Systems Manager Components:
- Automation – uses documents to run automations
- Run Command – run commands on EC2 instances
- Inventory – gather inventory information
- Patch Manager – manage patching schedules and installation
- Session Manager – connect securely without SSH or RDP
- Parameter Store – store secrets and configuration data securely
AWS Service Catalog
- Allows organizations to create and manage catalogs of IT
services that are approved for use on AWS - Allows you to centrally manage commonly deployed IT
services - IT services can include virtual machine images, servers,
software, and databases and multi-tier application
architectures - Enables users to quickly deploy only the approved IT services
they need
AWS Config
- Fully-managed service for compliance management
- Helps with compliance auditing, security analysis, resource
change tracking and troubleshooting
Trusted Advisor
- Online resource that helps to reduce cost, increase
performance and improve security by optimizing your AWS
environment - Provides real time guidance to help you provision your
resources following best practices - Advises you on Cost Optimization, Performance, Security,
and Fault Tolerance
AWS Personal Health Dashboard
- Provides alerts and remediation guidance when AWS is
experiencing events that may impact you - Gives you a personalized view into the performance and
availability of the AWS services underlying your AWS
resources - Also provides proactive notification to help you plan for
scheduled activities
Service Health Dashboard
- Shows you current status of AWS services
- Not personalized
AWS Directory Services
AWS Directory Service
for Microsoft Active
Directory
AD Connector
Simple AD
AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory - description, use case
Service Description
AWS-managed full Microsoft AD running on Windows Server 2012 R2
Use Case
Enterprises that want hosted Microsoft Active Directory
AD Connector - description, use case
AD Connector Allows on-premises users to log into AWS services with their existing AD credentials
Use Case
Single sign-on for on-premises employees