AWS Associate & Security L-4
AWS Associate certifications validate foundational to intermediate cloud expertise, covering services like EC2, S3, RDS, and networking. AWS Security focuses on securing cloud environments using IAM, encryption, threat detection, and compliance frameworks. It involves implementing security best practices, such as the Principle of Least Privilege, monitoring with AWS Security Hub, and automating security responses with AWS Lambda. Both domains ensure secure, scalable, and efficient cloud operations.
Alice is a cloud engineer setting up a secure application on AWS.
First, she creates IAM (1) users and roles (7) to ensure only authorized people and services can access her resources. She uses policies (6) to define exactly what each role can and cannot do — a fine-grained control.
To monitor what’s happening in her AWS account, she enables CloudTrail (3), so every API call is logged. But that’s not enough — she wants real-time security alerts, so she turns on GuardDuty (2), which watches for suspicious activity, like unusual API usage or access from unknown IPs.
Next, she sets up her web app behind a Shield (4) service to protect it from DDoS attacks. On top of that, she configures Security Groups (10) — the virtual firewalls — to allow only necessary traffic into her EC2 instances.
Since her app stores personal user data in S3, Alice uses Macie (5) to automatically scan for PII (like emails or credit card numbers). She also enables KMS (8) to encrypt all sensitive data with managed keys.
When the app needs credentials to connect to a third-party API, Alice stores them securely in Secrets Manager (9), ensuring secrets are rotated automatically and not hardcoded in the app.
With everything in place, Alice feels confident her cloud setup is secure, compliant, and resilient against threats.