With the ever-changing nature of Cloud Computing in AWS, through the use of Auto Scaling, and self-healing architecture mechanisms, having visibility and awareness of your AWS resources is invaluable. It can be difficult to understand what your resources within your infrastructure looks like, for example:
- Understanding what resources you have
- Having an awareness of the status of resource configurations
- Knowledge of resource relationships and connectivity within your environment
- Having a clear resource history, including all previous changes
- Understanding if your resources are compliant with specific governance controls
- Having up to date and accurate auditing information that can be passed to external auditors
Depending on the size of your deployment within AWS, obtaining this information can become both a time and resource-intensive exercise, unless you use AWS Config.
This course is an introduction to AWS Config and will explain how AWS Config allows you to have visibility of your entire AWS infrastructure from a configuration perspective. As well as how to use the service to act as a resource inventory, compliance checker and manage configuration changes of your resources. Also discussed, we look at how AWS Config be used as a part of your security analysis procedure.
This course is designed to take you from a beginner of AWS Config to being able to implement the service within your environment.
The topics covered in this course are as follows:
- What is AWS Config? Within this lecture, you will understand exactly what the Service is and what function it provides
- Key Components: This lecture breaks down the service looking at all the components and their relationships to each other and the role they play as a part of the AWS Config service
- Service Integration: This lecture will look at how the AWS Config service integrates with other AWS Services, such as SNS, S3, CloudTrail, etc
- Managing compliance with AWS Config: Here we focus on how to maintain compliance using AWS Config, whether these be internal or external requirements or standards
- Use cases and Best Practices: This lecture will focus on some of the use cases of when is best to use AWS Config to help you maintain, support and operate your AWS environment
If you have thoughts or suggestions for this course, please contact Cloud Academy at support@cloudacademy.com.
Hello and welcome to this course covering AWS Config. This service is classed as a management tool service which is fully managed and allows you to have visibility of your entire AWS infrastructure from a configuration perspective. As well as using the service to act as a resource inventory, compliance checker, and manage configuration changes of your resources it can also be used as a part of your security analysis procedure.
Before we go any further, I'd like to introduce myself. My name is Stuart Scott. I am on of the trainers here at Cloud Academy specializing in AWS Amazon web services. Feel free to connect with me with any questions using the detail shown on screen. Alternatively, you can always get in touch with us here at Cloud Academy using the community form where one of our cloud experts will reply to your question.
This course will be beneficial for people who are responsible for managing resource configuration changes within an AWS cloud environment. Also auditors who must have an awareness of all AWS infrastructure and their current configurations and compliants as well as security engineers who are responsible for implementing AWS security and analyzing logs and identifying weaknesses and breaches to their environment.
Throughout this course we are going to be taking a deep look at AWS config and as a result the following areas are going to be discussed. Starting with:
What is AWS Config? Within this lecture, we will understand exactly what the service is and what function it provides.
Next we'll take a look at key components. This lecture breaks down the service to allow us to look at all the components and their relationships to each other and the role they play as a part of the AWS Config service.
Then we'll look at service integration. This lecture will look at how the AWS Config service integrates with other AWS services.
Following this, we'll look at how to manage compliance with AWS Config. Here we will focus on how to maintain compliance using AWS config whether these be internal or external requirements or standards.
And then finally, we'll look at some use cases and best practices. And this lecture will focus on some of the use cases of when it's best to use AWS Config to help you maintain, support and operate your AWS environment.
On completion of this course, you will be able to recognize and explain how the AWS Config service can be used by AWS customers to monitor environmental changes. You'll be able to recognize and explain the core elements of the AWS Config service. You'll be able to comfortably configure and implement AWS Config within your own environment and you'll understand how to maintain compliance of your resources using AWS Config. For example, to help maintain security policies.
Although you do not need to be an AWS expert to appreciate and benefit from this course, students will benefit from having a basic understanding of cloud computing and the AWS platform. So we recommend completing the What is Cloud Computing course along with the AWS Fundamentals Learning path. A high level awareness of the following added services would also be beneficial but not essential. Simple notification service, SNS, simple queue service, SQS, simple storage service, S3, AWS CloudTrail, and identity and access management.
Feedback on our courses here at Cloud Academy are valuable to both us as trainers and any students looking to take the same course in the future. If you have any feedback, positive or negative, it would be greatly appreciated if you could use the comments section found on the landing page of this course.
That brings us to the end of this lecture. Coming up next, we'll answer the question what is AWS Config?
Stuart has been working within the IT industry for two decades covering a huge range of topic areas and technologies, from data center and network infrastructure design, to cloud architecture and implementation.
To date, Stuart has created 150+ courses relating to Cloud reaching over 180,000 students, mostly within the AWS category and with a heavy focus on security and compliance.
Stuart is a member of the AWS Community Builders Program for his contributions towards AWS.
He is AWS certified and accredited in addition to being a published author covering topics across the AWS landscape.
In January 2016 Stuart was awarded ‘Expert of the Year Award 2015’ from Experts Exchange for his knowledge share within cloud services to the community.
Stuart enjoys writing about cloud technologies and you will find many of his articles within our blog pages.