Securing Amazon EC2 Instances: AWS Elastic Compute Cloud

What you'll learn

• Address the threat categories facing Amazon EC2 instances and the possible consequences of an attack

• Apply the range of security tools AWS provides to help us protect our Amazon EC2 instances

• Configure instance security groups, IAM roles, and VPC design to provide optimal protection

• Integrate general server security best-practices and the AWS Shared Responsibility Model with your infrastructure design

Requirements

• Besides basic familiarity with using Amazon EC2 instances, no prerequisite knowledge is needed for this course.

• Comfort with the AWS CLI will be helpful and familiarity with Linux is a bonus.

Description

Worried that you don't know enough to properly protect the workloads you've got running on Amazon's EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)? Confused by all the many parts involved with ensuring everything's secure (including security groups, ACLs, IAM roles and policies, and VPC configurations)?

You definitely need to make sure you're not missing any important details. But that's something you definitely can do!

Being able to provision and launch a fully-functioning, enterprise-quality cloud server in just a minute or two with no up-front costs is something we could barely have imagined even a decade ago. But all that cloud goodness doesn't change an admin's primary responsibility: to protect infrastructure from attack. The easier Amazon EC2 makes it to push out more and more applications, the more we're exposed to a lot of hostile - and scary - threats.

If you're responsible for Amazon EC2 instance workloads - or even if you're just considering the possibility - you need to understand what defensive skills and tools are available and how you can use them.

This course will review the current threat landscape and some general server security best practices. I'll introduce you to the significant security measures AWS themselves have taken on our behalf, and how to make the best use of their security groups, IAM roles, and VPC design architectures. We'll also learn about how AWS offers networking tools like VPNs and instance connectivity to help us push back against the bad guys.

I've also included everything you might need to follow along with the practical demos on your own laptop or work station. Successfully completing all the videos, reading content, test-yourself quizzes, and demos yourself will leave you with a strong sense of what you can and should be doing to protect your application instances.

Who this course is for:

• Project managers planning application deployments

• AWS solution architects looking to make sure they're not missing anything important

• Application developers and admins responsible for infrastructure health

• Individuals looking to safely introduce themselves to core AWS tools - in particular Amazon EC2