Customising AWS Control Tower with Account Factory Customisations

2022-12-30 6 min read Walkthroughs Adam Divall

At AWS re:Invent this year Account Factory Customisations was released. This post will walk you through how to configure and use the new functionality as in my opinion the documentation isn’t particularly clear as to how things work and there were also issues with the implementation steps when I first implemented it.

Use Case

For my specific situation that I’m utilising this for I want to deploy a VPC that leverages the Amazon VPC IP Address Manager (IPAM) for obtaining an IP CIDR Range since I don’t want to have to manually enter one each time and run the risk of overlapping address space. As part of my pre-requisties I’ve already written some automation using CloudFormation to not only setup VPC IPAM for delegated administration in my Organization, but I’ve also set up VPC IPAM so that I have seperate IPAM Pools for different regions and also different environments within those regions. This post won’t go into the details of the automation or the details of the CloudFormation Template that I’ll deploy either but how the Solution ultimately works.

Customising AWS Control Tower with CfCT

2022-09-22 9 min read Walkthroughs Adam Divall

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.

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

2022-09-06 6 min read Walkthroughs Adam Divall

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

2022-09-05 8 min read Walkthroughs Adam Divall

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

2022-09-04 5 min read Walkthroughs Adam Divall

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.