This section of the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional learning path introduces the key identity management, security, and encryption services within AWS relevant to the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional exam. Core to security is AWS Identity & Access Management commonly referred to as IAM. This service manages identities and their permissions that can access your AWS resources, so understanding how this service works and what you can do with it will help you to maintain a secure AWS environment. IAM is an important service in ensuring your resources are secure.
Want more? Try a Lab Playground or do a Lab Challenge!
Learning Objectives
- Learn about identity and access management on AWS, including users, groups & roles, IAM policies, MFA, identity federation, and cross-account access
- Learn the fundamentals of AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF), including what it is, when to use it, how it works, and why use it
- Understand how to configure and monitor AWS WAF
- Learn about AWS Firewall Manager and its components
- Learn how to configure AWS Shield
- Learn the fundamentals of AWS Cognito
Amazon GuardDuty is an intelligent threat detection service that provides you with an accurate way to consistently monitor and protect your AWS accounts and workloads for suspicious activity. We're talking about intelligent threat identification for your accounts, data, and workflows. It uses trained machine learning models to identify suspicious user and resource behaviors. It also learns from your environment to eliminate false positive identifications.
Amazon GuardDuty is able to analyze CloudTrail logs, VPC flow logs, and DNS query logs to identify issues worth looking into. An interesting item about GuardDuty is that sample findings help you analyze the type of results that GuardDuty delivers. When you generate sample findings, GuardDuty populates your current findings list with one sample finding of each type.
Don't forget, GuardDuty is able to display its results to AWS Security Hub. Generating sample findings will allow you to verify AWS Security Hub's functionality sooner more than later. Let's take a look at some sample results from the GuardDuty screens. As a result, Amazon GuardDuty gives you a listing of findings classified under three categories, low, medium, and high severity.
In this screen of the AWS console, low severity findings are marked in blue with a small circle next to the finding. Medium severity findings are marked by GuardDuty in orange with a small square next to the finding. High severity findings are marked by GuardDuty in red with a small triangle next to the finding. Also notice how, on the top right, you have a findings summary showing the total for each of the severity categories.
Danny has over 20 years of IT experience as a software developer, cloud engineer, and technical trainer. After attending a conference on cloud computing in 2009, he knew he wanted to build his career around what was still a very new, emerging technology at the time — and share this transformational knowledge with others. He has spoken to IT professional audiences at local, regional, and national user groups and conferences. He has delivered in-person classroom and virtual training, interactive webinars, and authored video training courses covering many different technologies, including Amazon Web Services. He currently has six active AWS certifications, including certifications at the Professional and Specialty level.