AWS KMS Best Practices: Securing the Secret Ingredients of Your Infrastructure
TL;DR
AWS KMS gives you three flavors of encryption keys — AWS-owned, AWS-managed, and Customer Managed Keys (CMKs). For anything resembling production, CMKs are the only real choice: they give you control over rotation, deletion, cross-account access, and most critically — the ability to kill a key in an emergency. Think of KMS like a hotel’s key management system: the entrance guard has one master card, but the security manager holds the safe with all the master keys. Designing your KMS strategy right is what keeps you from handing that safe to an attacker.
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AWS Landing Zone Accelerator — When Multi-Account Governance Gets Real
TL;DR
If you’re managing more than a handful of AWS accounts with compliance requirements like HIPAA or FedRAMP, you’ll quickly outgrow IAM Identity Center and manual guardrails. AWS Landing Zone Accelerator (LZA) is an open-source CDK application that turns a set of YAML configuration files into a fully governed, multi-account, multi-region AWS environment — including networking, security controls, and OU-based policy enforcement. This post walks through a real-world design: a shared Transit Gateway architecture with Dev/Prod isolation, NACL-based traffic boundaries, and dual-region deployment for multiple workload types.
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