Book Image

AWS Security Cookbook

By : Heartin Kanikathottu
Book Image

AWS Security Cookbook

By: Heartin Kanikathottu

Overview of this book

As a security consultant, securing your infrastructure by implementing policies and following best practices is critical. This cookbook discusses practical solutions to the most common problems related to safeguarding infrastructure, covering services and features within AWS that can help you implement security models such as the CIA triad (confidentiality, integrity, and availability), and the AAA triad (authentication, authorization, and availability), along with non-repudiation. The book begins with IAM and S3 policies and later gets you up to speed with data security, application security, monitoring, and compliance. This includes everything from using firewalls and load balancers to secure endpoints, to leveraging Cognito for managing users and authentication. Over the course of this book, you'll learn to use AWS security services such as Config for monitoring, as well as maintain compliance with GuardDuty, Macie, and Inspector. Finally, the book covers cloud security best practices and demonstrates how you can integrate additional security services such as Glacier Vault Lock and Security Hub to further strengthen your infrastructure. By the end of this book, you'll be well versed in the techniques required for securing AWS deployments, along with having the knowledge to prepare for the AWS Certified Security – Specialty certification.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Creating an AMI instead of using EC2 user data

In this recipe, we will create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) with a web server and then launch an instance from that AMI. Instances from AMIs have faster boot times than instances with the same configuration defined through EC2 user data. In the Using EC2 user data to launch an instance with a web server recipe in Chapter 6, Working with EC2 Instances, we used EC2 user data to update our operating system and set up a simple web server at launch.

Getting ready

Launch an EC2 instance following the Launching an EC2 instance into VPC recipe in Chapter 6, Working with EC2 Instances. SSH into our machine and run the following commands:

sudo su
yum update -y
yum install -y httpd
systemctl...