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Amazon Config

Overview

Amazon Config is a service that enables you to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of your Amazon Web Services resources. Config continuously monitors and records your Amazon Web Services resource configurations and allows you to automate the evaluation of recorded configurations against desired configurations. With Config, you can review changes in configurations and relationships between Amazon Web Services resources, dive into detailed resource configuration histories, and determine your overall compliance against the configurations specified in your internal guidelines. This enables you to simplify compliance auditing, security analysis, change management, and operational troubleshooting.

Benefits

Continuous monitoring

With Amazon Config, you are able to continuously monitor and record configuration changes of your Amazon Web Services resources. Config also enables you to inventory your Amazon Web Services resources, the configurations of your Amazon Web Services resources, as well as software configurations within EC2 instances at any point in time. Once change from a previous state is detected, an Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) notification can be delivered for you to review and take action.

Continuous assessment

Amazon Config allows you to continuously audit and assess the overall compliance of your Amazon Web Services resource configurations with your organization’s policies and guidelines. Config provides you with the ability to define rules for provisioning and configuring Amazon Web Services resources. Resource configurations or configuration changes that deviate from your rules automatically trigger Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) notifications that help you identify compliance gaps. You can also take advantage of the visual dashboard to check your overall compliance status and quickly spot non-compliant resources.

Operational troubleshooting

With Amazon Config, you can capture a comprehensive history of your Amazon Web Services resource configuration changes to simplify troubleshooting of your operational issues. Config helps you identify the root cause of operational issues through its integration with Amazon CloudTrail, a service that records events related to API calls for your account. Config leverages CloudTrail records to correlate configuration changes to particular events in your account. You can obtain the details of the event API call that invoked the change (e.g., who made the request, at what time, and from which IP address) from the CloudTrail logs.

Change management

With Amazon Config, you are able to track the relationships among resources and review resource dependencies prior to making changes. Once a change occurs, you are able to quickly review the history of the resource's configuration and determine what the resource’s configuration looked like at any point in the past. Config provides you with information to assess how a change to a resource configuration would affect your other resources which minimizes the impact of change-related incidents.

Use cases

Discovery

Amazon Config will discover resources that exist in your account, record their current configuration and capture any changes to these configurations. Config will also retain configuration details for resources that have been deleted. A comprehensive snapshot of all resources and their configuration attributes provides a complete inventory of resources in your account.

Change management

When your resources are created, updated, or deleted, Amazon Config streams these configuration changes to Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), so that you are notified of all the configuration changes. Amazon Config represents relationships between resources so that you can assess how a change to one resource may impact other resources.

Continuous audit and compliance

Amazon Config is designed to help you assess compliance with your internal policies and regulatory standards by providing you visibility into the configuration of your Amazon Web Services resources, and evaluating resource configuration changes against your desired configurations.

Compliance as code

Amazon Config allows you to codify your compliance with custom rules in Amazon Lambda that define your internal best practices and guidelines for resource configurations. Using Config, you can automate assessment of your resource configurations and resource changes to ensure continuous compliance and self-governance across your Amazon Web Services infrastructure.

Troubleshooting

Using Amazon Config, you can quickly troubleshoot operational issues by identifying the recent configuration changes to your resources.

Security analysis

Data from Amazon Config enables you to continuously monitor the configurations of your resources and evaluate these configurations for potential security weaknesses. Changes to your resource configurations can trigger Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) notifications, which can be sent to your security team to review and take action. After a potential security event, Config enables you to review the configuration history of your resources and examine your security posture.

Learn more about Amazon Config

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