Streamlining Mergers with AWS: Custom Tool for Portfolio Integration

Here’s a detailed blog draft based on your AWS custom tool for merging portfolios, designed to help transition applications to a parent company’s AWS infrastructure using Well-Architected Framework, AWS Config Conformance Packs, and automated inventory checks.

Title: Streamlining Mergers with AWS: Custom Tool for Portfolio Integration

Merging applications from an acquired company into a parent organization’s AWS ecosystem is complex, especially when aligning with security, compliance, and best practice standards. In this guide, we’ll explore a custom tool that simplifies the transition by ensuring AWS best practices, conformance, and inventory compliance. This tool, leveraging Terraform and AWS’s well-architected resources, offers a comprehensive solution for a smooth integration.

Overview of the AWS Custom Tool

The tool addresses three main objectives critical to application and infrastructure integration:

1. Well-Architected Framework Custom Lens: Assesses the acquired company’s cloud infrastructure against AWS Well-Architected standards, pinpointing improvements before integration.
2. AWS Config Conformance Pack: Audits resource configurations and compliance with security and operational standards established by the parent company.
3. AWS Inventory Collection: Uses AWS Step Functions to assess the acquired infrastructure inventory and compliance, preparing resources for integration into the parent company’s environment.

Each of these components is crucial in bringing the acquired portfolio in line with the parent company’s AWS standards.

1. Well-Architected Review Custom Lens

The Well-Architected Framework (WAF) provides a structured method to evaluate and improve AWS workloads across operational excellence, security, reliability, performance, and cost optimization. With this custom tool, the Well-Architected Framework’s Custom Lens is integrated into the evaluation workflow, comparing the acquired infrastructure against best practices.

Steps:

• Define the acquired workload in the Well-Architected Tool in AWS.
• Apply a Custom Lens that includes specific security, performance, and operational questions developed by the parent company’s SRE team.
• The Custom Lens results in an improvement plan, highlighting high, medium, and low-risk areas. This plan can guide remediation tasks before migration.

This step ensures the merging company aligns with the parent company’s core principles, reducing operational risks during and after migration.

2. AWS Config Conformance Pack

AWS Config continuously monitors configurations to check for security and compliance against specific standards. This custom tool leverages AWS Config Conformance Packs to enforce the parent company’s best practices and create a compliance report.

Key Steps:

• Deploy the Custom Conformance Pack: Using AWS Config, the tool assesses resources like IAM roles, network configurations, and encryption standards. A pre-defined Conformance Pack aligns with the parent company’s best practices, and any non-compliant resources are flagged.
• Multi-Region Deployment: AWS Config Conformance Packs are regional. The tool deploys conformance packs across selected regions to ensure all in-scope accounts and resources are covered.
• Generate a Remediation Backlog: The Conformance Pack results in a backlog of non-compliant resources that require remediation. This step allows for correction before migration, minimizing post-migration issues.

Using AWS Config Conformance Packs enables centralized compliance monitoring, essential for a secure and smooth migration process.

3. AWS Inventory Collection with Step Functions

The final component uses AWS Step Functions to orchestrate a workflow for gathering an inventory of AWS resources across the acquired accounts. By collecting this data, the tool can generate a compliance report that aligns with the parent company’s regulatory and operational standards.

Steps:

• Automated Inventory Collection: AWS Step Functions runs a workflow to capture details about EC2 instances, VPCs, S3 buckets, and IAM configurations, among other resources.
• Centralized CloudTrail Logging: CloudTrail data is collected from a centralized S3 bucket, providing a historical record of API calls and changes to resources.
• Compliance Checks: Inventory data is assessed against platform regulations and compliance standards, providing insights into resources that need modification or removal.

This automated inventory collection ensures no resource is overlooked, and each is thoroughly vetted against platform-specific compliance standards.

Deployment and Configuration Steps

Pre-requisites:

• Set up AWS CLI and Terraform.
• Collect AWS account IDs, regions, CloudTrail configuration, and other details.
• Use the /terraform.tfvars file to configure specific variables like Hub and Spoke accounts, S3 buckets, and IAM roles.

Amazon QuickSight Setup: QuickSight provides dashboards for visualizing the tool’s outputs:

• Configure QuickSight in the Hub account for visualization.
• Grant access to relevant S3 buckets and IAM permissions to QuickSight, allowing it to analyze data from AWS Config and CloudTrail.

Deployment:

1. Run terraform init, terraform plan, and terraform apply to deploy the infrastructure.
2. Execute the AWS Step Function to begin inventory collection.
3. Deploy dashboards using the provided CloudFormation templates for easy monitoring and reporting.

Using the Tool’s Output

Once the infrastructure and workflows are operational, the tool provides a centralized way to track compliance and configuration across the merged accounts:

• QuickSight Dashboards: Displays key metrics from the Well-Architected Framework review, Conformance Pack compliance, and Inventory Collection. The dashboards offer a snapshot of areas needing remediation and highlight compliance risks.
• Regular Inventory Updates: The tool schedules inventory collection every 12 hours, updating dashboards and compliance reports automatically.

By proactively identifying misconfigurations and compliance gaps, the custom tool provides a structured, auditable path for integration, significantly reducing potential risks and misalignments.

Troubleshooting Tips

• Data Collection Issues: If inventory data fails to populate, ensure the AWS Step Function has the correct IAM permissions and CloudTrail data access.
• QuickSight Permissions: Use the specified IAM role and update S3 permissions for successful QuickSight integration.
• AWS Config Region-Specific Compliance: Ensure that the Conformance Pack is deployed in all necessary regions, as AWS Config is regionally scoped.

Conclusion

This AWS custom tool streamlines portfolio mergers by establishing a structured path for compliance, inventory assessment, and configuration alignment. Leveraging the Well-Architected Framework, AWS Config Conformance Packs, and automated inventory with Step Functions, this approach minimizes risks and ensures all resources meet the parent company’s standards before integration.

The end result is a compliant, secure, and well-architected environment ready for seamless integration, significantly simplifying the merger process and safeguarding the operational stability of the parent company’s AWS infrastructure.

This guide provides a high-level overview of implementing and using the AWS custom tool to integrate portfolio applications while maintaining security and compliance across multiple AWS environments.