AWS Config
💡 Definition
AWS Config is a service that enables you to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of your AWS resources. Config continuously monitors and records your AWS resource configurations and allows you to automate the evaluation of recorded configurations against desired configurations.
🔑 Key Concepts
- Configuration Recorder: Discovers existing and new resources and records their configuration changes.
- Configuration History: Provides a timeline of configuration changes for each resource.
- Configuration Snapshot: A complete inventory of all resources and their configurations at a specific point in time.
- Config Rules: Pre-built or custom rules to evaluate if your resource configurations comply with internal guidelines or regulatory standards.
- Compliance: Helps you achieve and maintain compliance by continuously assessing configurations.
⚙️ How it Works
- Enable Config: Turn on Config in a Region.
- Record Changes: Config automatically records all changes to supported AWS resources.
- Evaluate Rules: Config Rules continuously check if resources are compliant.
- Audit: Use the history and snapshots for auditing and troubleshooting.
🎯 Use Cases
- Security Analysis: Alerting on non-compliant configurations (e.g., S3 bucket made public).
- Compliance Audits: Providing historical configuration data to auditors.
- Troubleshooting: Identifying when a resource configuration changed and potentially caused an issue.
- Change Management: Tracking all changes to your AWS environment.
💰 Pricing Model
- Configuration Items: Charged per Configuration Item recorded per month.
- Config Rules Evaluations: Charged per active rule per month, and for evaluation executions.
📝 Exam Tips (CLF-C02)
- Key for auditing configurations and change management.
- "Time machine" for your AWS resource configurations.
- Focuses on "what" your resources look like and how they "changed over time".
- Complements CloudTrail (which focuses on "who did what").
See Also: * CloudTrail * CloudWatch * Shared Responsibility Model