Creating a Multi-Account CI/CD Pipeline with AWS CodePipeline

Whenever I’ve tried to learn a particular service or functionality within AWS, I find the best way is to do the ClickOps approach (i.e. Good Old Point and Click in the Console). Once I’ve figured out how to get it working via that method, I then go through the process of trying to automate it through Infrastructure as Code and in my case thats using AWS CloudFormation.

One particular example of this was getting a bit more familiar with AWS CodePipeline so that I could try to automate the delivery of CloudFormation Templates across multiple AWS Accounts in a similar manner as to how you would deploy solutions in a Software Delivery Lifecycle (SDLC). When I was learning how to do this through the management console, I found out that its not possible to do it all within the console and therefore you have to also leverage the AWS CLI for specific parts.

Customising AWS Control Tower with CfCT

If you missed the previous posts on Deploying a Landing Zone with AWS Control Tower or you’ve not had much experience with the service, I’d recommend going back through and reading those firstly before continuing.

• Part 1 - Deploying AWS Control Tower
• Part 2 - AWS Control Tower Post Configuration Tasks focusing on Organisational Structure and Guardrails
• Part 3 - AWS Control Tower Post Configuration Tasks focusing on IAM Identity Center and Provisioning New AWS Accounts

In this post, I’m going to walkthrough how you can start customising Control Tower using the Security Reference Architecture (SRA). The SRA utilises Customisations for Control Tower (CfCT) which deploys a DevOps pipeline that works with CloudFormation templates and Control Tower lifecycle events.

Deploying a Landing Zone with AWS Control Tower - Part 3

Previously in Part 2 of this Walkthrough, I showed you how to create the organisational structure and enable guardrails within Control Tower.

In this post, I’m going to walkthrough some of the remaining post configuration task including configuring IAM Identity Center and provisioning a new AWS Account through Account Factory.

Configuring IAM Identity Center for Single Sign-On

AWS IAM Identity Center (formerly known as AWS SSO) is a service that enables you to have a single point of entry for managing resources within all of your AWS Accounts in an organisation.

Deploying a Landing Zone with AWS Control Tower - Part 2

Previously in Part 1 of this Walkthrough, I touched on what a Landing Zone was and a brief background on them before going through how to launch AWS Control Tower as the foundation of a Multi-Account Architecture.

In this , I’m going to walkthrough through some of the initial post configuration activities with Control Tower including setting up the organisational structure and enabling guardrails.

What has Control Tower deployed?

As part of the setup, Control Tower has utilised a number of other AWS Services including:

Deploying a Landing Zone with AWS Control Tower - Part 1

One of the first starting points for many organisations using Public Cloud is the establishment of a Landing Zone. A Landing Zone is a well-architected, multi-account environment that’s based on security and compliance best practices..

There are several reasons why organisations leverage a multi-account strategy including but not limited to:

• Service Quotas: Each AWS Service typically has a number of different quotas; some of these are soft limits that can be increased by requesting an increase in the limit through a support ticket whilst others have hard limits that cannot be increased.
• Limiting the Blast Radius: As an AWS Account is a boundary of isolation, potential risks and threats can be contained within an account without affecting others.
• Security Controls: Workloads may have different complianye needs based on the Industry or the Geographical location. Whilst there are synergies between the different compliancy frameworks, the Security Controls that are implemented to help achieve the compliance may need to be implemented in a slightly different manner or may not be required at all.
• Billing Separation: AWS Accounts are the only real way to separate items at a billing level e.g. Data Transfer costs.

When I first started using AWS in 2016 there was no pre-packaged solution for a Landing Zone; there were several recommendations provided by AWS but in essence it was something that organizations had to build themselves.

Creating a Blog with Hugo and AWS Amplify

This post is a Walkthrough Guide of how I’ve created this Blog using Hugo and AWS Amplify.

I’m not a Developer by trade and therefore when determining on what to use for the Blog Software I had the following high-level requirements:

• Simple to Setup & Configure
• Easy to Use & Maintain on an ongoing Basis
• Cost Effective

After reviewing a number of different options following a few hours of reading on Google, I settled on Hugo. What is Hugo, you may ask? Well in short, it’s a static site generator. It allows you to create files in markdown format and using some magic it converts it into HTML.