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.
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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
You need to be responsible for the security of applications, processes, and tools that run on EC2 instances. Amazon Inspector lets you analyze your deployed EC2 instances and helps you identify potential security issues. Some of the basic features include a knowledge base with hundreds of rules that are mapped to common security compliance standards and vulnerability definitions. These rules are regularly updated by AWS security experts. You can install an agent in the operating system of an Amazon EC2 instance to monitor behavior like network, file system, and process activity.
You can also automate vulnerability assessments to make security testing of EC2 instances a regular part of your cloud operations. As a result, Amazon Inspector gives you a prioritized list of findings. A sample list of findings is shown. Amazon inspector is all about protecting the security of your EC2 instances.
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.