AWS Config rules are a powerful feature for continuous monitoring and compliance assessment of your AWS resources. They enable you to evaluate resource configurations against desired settings and best practices automatically.
AWS Config rules work by continuously tracking resource configuration ch…AWS Config rules are a powerful feature for continuous monitoring and compliance assessment of your AWS resources. They enable you to evaluate resource configurations against desired settings and best practices automatically.
AWS Config rules work by continuously tracking resource configuration changes and evaluating them against predefined or custom rules. When a resource violates a rule, AWS Config flags it as non-compliant, allowing teams to take corrective action.
There are two types of Config rules:
1. **AWS Managed Rules**: Pre-built rules created by AWS covering common compliance scenarios such as checking if S3 buckets have encryption enabled, verifying security group configurations, or ensuring EBS volumes are encrypted.
2. **Custom Rules**: Rules you create using AWS Lambda functions to define specific compliance logic tailored to your organization's requirements.
Config rules can be triggered in two ways:
- **Configuration Changes**: Rules evaluate when specific resource types are created, modified, or deleted
- **Periodic**: Rules run at specified intervals (hourly, every 6 hours, 12 hours, or 24 hours)
For Solutions Architects, AWS Config rules integrate seamlessly with other AWS services for comprehensive monitoring solutions:
- **AWS CloudWatch Events**: Trigger automated responses when non-compliance is detected
- **AWS Systems Manager**: Execute remediation runbooks
- **AWS Security Hub**: Aggregate compliance findings across accounts
- **AWS Organizations**: Deploy conformance packs across multiple accounts
Best practices include:
- Implementing auto-remediation using SSM Automation documents
- Using aggregators for multi-account and multi-region visibility
- Creating conformance packs to group related rules together
- Integrating with SNS for real-time notifications
AWS Config rules provide essential capabilities for maintaining governance, ensuring security compliance, and supporting operational excellence in your AWS environment, making them fundamental for any continuous improvement strategy.
AWS Config Rules for Monitoring - Complete Guide
Why AWS Config Rules Monitoring is Important
AWS Config Rules are essential for maintaining compliance, security, and operational excellence in your AWS environment. They enable continuous monitoring and automatic evaluation of your AWS resource configurations against desired settings. For Solutions Architects, understanding Config Rules is critical for designing self-healing architectures and ensuring governance at scale.
What is AWS Config Rules?
AWS Config Rules are customizable rules that AWS Config uses to evaluate whether your AWS resources comply with your desired configurations. There are two types of rules:
1. AWS Managed Rules: Pre-built rules created and maintained by AWS covering common compliance scenarios like checking if EBS volumes are encrypted or if S3 buckets have public access blocked.
2. Custom Rules: Rules you create using AWS Lambda functions to evaluate configurations based on your specific business requirements.
How AWS Config Rules Work
1. Configuration Recording: AWS Config continuously records configuration changes to your AWS resources.
2. Rule Evaluation Triggers: - Configuration Changes: Rules evaluate when a relevant resource is created, modified, or deleted - Periodic: Rules evaluate at specified intervals (1, 3, 6, 12, or 24 hours)
3. Compliance Evaluation: Each rule checks resources and marks them as COMPLIANT, NON_COMPLIANT, or NOT_APPLICABLE.
4. Remediation Actions: You can configure automatic remediation using AWS Systems Manager Automation documents to fix non-compliant resources.
Key Features for Monitoring
- Aggregators: Collect Config data across multiple accounts and regions into a single dashboard - Conformance Packs: Collections of Config rules and remediation actions packaged together as a single entity - Integration with CloudWatch: Send compliance status to CloudWatch Events for alerting - SNS Notifications: Receive alerts when resources become non-compliant
Common Use Cases
- Ensuring all EBS volumes and RDS instances are encrypted - Verifying security groups do not allow unrestricted SSH access - Checking that CloudTrail is enabled in all regions - Validating that IAM policies follow least privilege principles - Ensuring S3 buckets are not publicly accessible
Exam Tips: Answering Questions on AWS Config Rules Monitoring
1. Differentiate from Similar Services: - AWS Config tracks configuration changes and compliance - CloudTrail tracks API calls (who did what) - CloudWatch monitors performance metrics and logs
2. Know the Evaluation Triggers: When a question mentions real-time compliance checking, think configuration-change triggered rules. For regular compliance audits, think periodic evaluation.
3. Multi-Account Scenarios: For questions about compliance across an AWS Organization, remember that Config Aggregators can collect data from multiple accounts and regions.
4. Remediation Questions: When asked about automatically fixing non-compliant resources, the answer involves SSM Automation documents integrated with Config Rules.
5. Cost Optimization: Remember that you pay per configuration item recorded and per rule evaluation. Limit recording to necessary resource types to control costs.
6. Regional Service: AWS Config is regional. To monitor all regions, you must enable Config in each region or use an aggregator.
7. Common Managed Rules to Know: - s3-bucket-public-read-prohibited - encrypted-volumes - restricted-ssh - cloudtrail-enabled - rds-instance-public-access-check