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AWS Config

AWS Config

AWS Config is a service that provides a detailed inventory of your AWS resources, records configuration changes, and allows you to evaluate those configurations against desired states. It helps you assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of your AWS resources, promoting better governance, compliance, and operational best practices.

Core Benefits​

AWS Config offers significant benefits for managing your AWS environment:

  • Evaluate Configurations Against a Desired State: Automatically checks resource configurations against specified rules, ensuring compliance with internal policies or industry standards.
  • Manage Resource Configuration Changes: Tracks and records all changes to resource configurations, providing a historical view and enabling precise change management.
  • Simplify Troubleshooting and Remediation: By logging every change, Config makes it easier to pinpoint the root cause of operational issues and revert to known good configurations.

Use Cases​

  • Continual Audit and Security Monitoring: Provides an ongoing audit trail of configuration changes, which is vital for security monitoring, anomaly detection, and demonstrating compliance.
  • Analysis and Compliance: Helps analyze your resource configurations to identify deviations from compliance baselines and generates reports for regulatory audits.
  • Streamline Operational Troubleshooting and Change Management: Quickly identifies configuration drift or unauthorized changes that might be impacting application performance or security.

Key Features​

  • Resource Inventory: Maintains a comprehensive, continuously updated inventory of all AWS resources in your account.
  • Configuration History: Records all configuration changes for your resources, providing a timeline of how they evolved over time.
  • Config Rules: Allows you to define custom or use pre-built rules to evaluate resource configurations for compliance with specific standards or best practices.
  • Remediation Actions: Integrates with AWS Systems Manager Automation to automatically remediate non-compliant resources, enforcing desired configurations.
  • Integration with Other AWS Services: Works seamlessly with services like AWS CloudTrail, Amazon SNS, and Amazon S3 for logging, notifications, and storage of configuration data.
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AWS Config is indispensable for maintaining a secure and compliant AWS environment by providing continuous visibility into resource configurations and their changes, enabling automated governance and simplified auditing.

Use case: Ideal for security engineers, compliance officers, auditors, and operations teams who need to monitor resource configurations, ensure compliance, track changes, and troubleshoot operational issues across their AWS infrastructure.

Additional Resources​