Book Image

AWS: Security Best Practices on AWS

By : Albert Anthony
Book Image

AWS: Security Best Practices on AWS

By: Albert Anthony

Overview of this book

With organizations moving their workloads, applications, and infrastructure to the cloud at an unprecedented pace, security of all these resources has been a paradigm shift for all those who are responsible for security; experts, novices, and apprentices alike. This book focuses on using native AWS security features and managed AWS services to help you achieve continuous security. Starting with an introduction to Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) to secure your AWS VPC, you will quickly explore various components that make up VPC such as subnets, security groups, various gateways, and many more. You will also learn to protect data in the AWS platform for various AWS services by encrypting and decrypting data in AWS. You will also learn to secure web and mobile applications in AWS cloud. This book is ideal for all IT professionals, system administrators, security analysts, solution architects, and chief information security officers who are responsible for securing workloads in AWS for their organizations. This book is embedded with useful assessments that will help you revise the concepts you have learned in this book. This book is repurposed for this specific learning experience from material from Packt's Mastering AWS Security, written by Albert Anthony.
Table of Contents (9 chapters)

EC2 Security


An EC2 instance comprises many components: the most prominent ones are the Amazon Machine Image (AMI), the preconfigured software template for your server containing the operating system and software; the hardware including the processor, memory, storage, and networking components based on your requirements; persistent or ephemeral storage volumes for storing your data; the IP addresses, VPCs and virtual and physical location for your instance, such as its subnet, availability zone, and regions, respectively.

When an instance is launched, it is secured by creating a key pair and configuring the security group, a virtual firewall for your instance. In order to access your instance, you will be required to authenticate using this key pair, as depicted in the following figure:

Figure 1: AWS EC2 security

EC2 instances interact with various AWS services and cater to multiple scenarios and use cases across industries, and this universal usability opens up a host of security vulnerabilities...