Cloud Audit Best Practices: 21 Essential AWS Services (850+ pgs.)
This Cloud Best Practices Guide is designed to help you do many types of Cloud Audits for your apps and cloud infrastructure.
850+ pages of Cloud Best Practices checklists for 21 AWS Cloud Services and over 270+ checklists.
BONUSES!!!! (recent additions, in latest update)
- EC2 instance type use cases and EC2 Spot cost optimization
- Overall AWS IAM Security checklist (in addition to security checklists for each service)
- DynamoDB Data Modeling Best Practices
- General Compliance and Organization Requirements checklist.
Software Engineers: Make improvements and show clients/managers you have followed Cloud Professional Best Practices in your infrastructure. Catch problems BEFORE they occur.
Managers, Stakeholders: Demonstrate to leadership Cloud Best Practices have been implemented to improve performance, security, cost optimization, reliability, disaster recovery and more. Find gaps in your plans early and remediate in advance.
There are 5 main sections with a total of 21 AWS services.
- Security: IAM, Cloudtrail, KMS, Cognito, Guard Duty
- Networking/Content Delivery: VPC, Route53, CloudFront, ELB, API Gateway
- Compute: EC2, EC2 Autoscaling, Lambda, Fargate
- Storage: S3, EBS, EFS
- Database: RDS, DynamoDB, Aurora, ElastiCache
These services were selected because they are core AWS services which appear in most companies' AWS cloud stacks.
Each the 21 AWS services covered has checklists for these best practices:
⭐️ Strategies: how to get the most out of the AWS service.
⭐️ Settings: settings that should usually be checked before usage for that service.
⭐️ Avoid Mistakes: a checklist to AVOID in implementation of that service.
⭐️ Operations: best practices for operational excellence.
⭐️ Security: best practices for security for the service.
⭐️ Reliability: best practices for reliability for the service.
⭐️ Performance: best practices for performance efficiency for the service.
⭐️ Cost Optimization: best practices for cost optimization.
⭐️ Compliance: best practices for general compliance and governance.
⭐️ Innovation: innovative ways to use the service
⭐️ Documentation: best practices for documentation.
⭐️ Use Cases: popular use cases with this AWS service.
⭐️ Consider alternatives if…: consider alternatives if you need these features.
⭐️ Solutions: problem-solution pairs using service features.
This guide was created to help you do Cloud Audits in your current role.
Recommendations how to use:
- Understand Your Environment: Review the guide's best practices in the context of your specific AWS environment. Make improvements and show clients/managers you have followed Cloud Professional Best Practices. Use as a foundation to further tailor the checklists to reflect the unique configurations and use cases of your tech stack.
- Incorporate Into Audits: Use the checklists as a reference when conducting cloud audits. Ensure that each checklist item aligns with your organization's compliance requirements and security policies.
- Train Your Team: Share the guide with your team members and provide training on how to apply the best practices. This will help ensure everyone is on the same page regarding cloud governance and operational excellence.
- Regular Reviews: Periodically revisit the guide to keep up with updates and changes. AWS services and best practices evolve, so it's important to keep the checklists current with the latest recommendations.
- Document Findings: When using the guide, document your findings and any gaps identified. This documentation will be valuable for creating audit reports and tracking improvements over time. Regular revisit and updated.
- Multi-Person Licenses: If you have a multi-person license, ensure that all designated users have access to the guide and understand how to utilize it. This promotes consistency and thoroughness in your cloud audits.
Cloud Audit examples (how to use this guide):
- AWS Security Review: Each service has a security review checklist. Use this to make sure you have implemented proper AuthZ, AuthN, roles, policies, encryption, and other security measures.
- Automation and DevOps: Apply checklists and convert to IaC for automation and CI/CD practices. Use this to assess effectiveness of deployment pipelines and automation scripts in monitoring Cloud Best Practices. Highlight areas for improvement to streamline workflows and enhance deployment efficiency.
- Cost Management: Use the cost optimization best practice checklists for each service to steps needed for review resource usage and cost reports. Highlight any areas where costs can be reduced and suggest actions for cost-saving.
- Performance Monitoring: Apply the performance best practices tips for each service to improve your current performance and monitoring setup. Include findings on metrics and alerts configurations, and recommend improvements based on the checklist.
- Compliance Checks: Compliance-related checklists for each service ensure that regulatory and policy requirements are factored into your infrastructure. Use suggestions to document compliance gaps and outline necessary steps for remediation.
- Disaster Recovery: Include a checklist on disaster recovery planning in your audit report. Assess the current backup and recovery processes, and suggest enhancements based on best practices.
- Resource Optimization: Review resource provisioning and scaling practices using the guide’s recommendations. Document any inefficiencies and propose optimizations to improve resource utilization and performance.
- Data Protection: Use the best practices for data protection to review encryption settings for data at rest and in transit. Document any issues and recommend actions for ensuring data is adequately protected.
- Incident Management: Include a checklist for incident management practices to evaluate your incident response processes. Document response times and incident handling procedures, and recommend enhancements for quicker resolution and better management.
note: This guide is published independently and is not affiliated directly with Amazon and Amazon AWS.
Usage rights: By purchasing this guide you have permission to incorporate these best practices checklists in your cloud audit reports for your work, job or freelance projects as long as you authored it and the report is not for resale (all other rights are reserved). For those who have purchased a multi-person guide license then it is permitted for the number of users concurrently that you purchased for under those terms. All other rights reserved by the author/publisher.
275+ Cloud Best Practices checklists for 21 AWS Cloud Services in Networking/Content Delivery, Security, Compute, Storage, Database. Over 800+ pages of content!