Aws Network Security
AWS CloudFormation AWS CloudFormation is a service that allows you to define and manage your AWS environment. With AWS CloudFormation, you define your infrastructure as code using either JSON or YAML. This textual definition, called a template, describes exactly what resources to provision and their respective configurations. You manage the collection of resources in AWS CloudFormation as a single unit called a stack. A stack is the target of create, update, or delete actions that you take with a template.
![](https://codelido.com/assets/files/2022-12-26/1672076910-465244-image.png)
When you operate a multi-region or multi-account environment, AWS CloudFormation StackSets is particularly useful. AWS CloudFormation StackSets extends the functionality of stacks by enabling you to create, update, or delete stacks across multiple accounts and regions with a single operation. Using an administrator account, you define and manage an AWS CloudFormation template and use the template as the basis for provisioning stacks into selected target accounts across specified regions.
In order to understand how AWS CloudFormation helps with network security, let’s revisit our previous example. Instead of manually creating a VPC and a connection back to the organization using a VPN, you can define the VPC and VPN using an AWS CloudFormation template. When the cross-account, administrative role is assumed, your automation tooling can call AWS CloudFormation to create these resources in the new account. Because the template is a text file, you can add it to your change and version control systems. Using your Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) tool chain, you can scan the template for undesirable elements such as security groups that are open to the world. You can trigger alerts and initiate an investigation if unapproved changes are integrated into the template.
AWS Service Catalog
AWS Service Catalog allows organizations to create and manage a curated portfolio of products. These products might be specific software, servers, or complete multi-tier architectures. AWS Service Catalog allows your organization to assert deployment consistency and governance. AWS Service Catalog uses a combination of IAM roles, termed launch constraints, and AWS CloudFormation templates to deliver fine-grained control of access and configuration during the provisioning process.
![](https://codelido.com/assets/files/2022-12-26/1672076959-107858-image.png)
Let’s revisit our example once more to demonstrate how you can continue to remove humans from the loop, improving your overall security posture. Instead of manually assuming the administrative role in the new account and launching the AWS CloudFormation template, you can instead bundle a new AWS CloudFormation template and launch constraints as a product available to the departments in an AWS Service Catalog.
Amazon Inspector
Amazon Inspector is a security service that allows you to analyze your VPC environment to identify potential security issues. With Amazon Inspector, you create assessment targets using Amazon EC2 instance tags, create an assessment template with a selected rules package, and then run the assessment. At the end of the assessment period, Amazon Inspector produces a set of findings and recommended steps to resolve potential security issues. As discussed in the Data Flow Security section of this chapter, Amazon EC2 security failures can have a material impact on the overall network security of your environment. Amazon Inspector offers a straightforward approach to understanding the posture of your Amazon EC2 instances. This information is certainly important, but you also need to understand your overall network configuration