AWS Security

by Dylan Shields

Running your systems in the cloud doesn’t automatically make them secure. To create secure applications and infrastructure on AWS, you need to understand the tools and features the platform provides and learn new approaches to configuring and managing them. Written by security engineer Dylan Shields, AWS Security provides comprehensive coverage on the key tools and concepts you can use to defend AWS-based systems. You’ll learn how to honestly assess your existing security protocols, protect against the most common attacks on cloud applications, and apply best practices to configuring Identity and Access Management and Virtual Private Clouds.

Genres: Technology

425 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2020

Reviews

[Geroen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Decent, but very lightweight and high-level. This book will explain you SOME OF the basics of AWS security. IAM and VPC are covered, though don’t go fully in-depth. Anything beyond that is often too simple explained (eg. Data at rest encryption is just one paragraph) or simply lacking (Inspector is covered, though briefly and incomplete, all the while ECR’s scanning capabilities are nowhere to be found - IAM is covered, but nothing on Cognito nor IAM Identity Center - although the use case for it is broadly mentioned, Detective is nowhere to be found - etc etc).

If you are just starting out on AWS, maybe this book is good for you. It may also not be, considering you can find much of the information, and even more, in online free workshops provided by AWS. The content is generally just scratching the surface.
If you are already at intermediary level or beyond, there is probably nothing here for you to find.

As a caveat: AWS tech evolves very high paced. This book was released Aug 2022, in Oct 2022 I could already find parts which were … not exactly how you’d implement it in the current state of the tools.

[PRASHANNA RAI · Rating 4 out of 5]

All the basics are very well explained by Dylan. The way the book is designed is really good. Very easy to understand the concepts of an absolute beginner like me. Thank You, Dylan. Highly recommended to anyone who is looking for a beginning in the AWS Security journey. Happy learning!

[Lucas Baiocchi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cloud Secure™️

[Alex Ott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Between 3 & 4. Good overview of main components but often a bit lightweight.

[Werner Dijkerman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Security is one of these things that people/projects/companies only do with it, after they have build something or somewhere at the end of the project. And I believe even the author mentions something similar in this book as well, but compares it with baking a cake. Security is one of the ingredients of what you will be making, like it is a fundamental part of the thing (cake) you build (bake). And not that cherry on top of it. How many times do we see data breaches (Just follow Troy Hunt on twitter to get an idea).

The book is very well written and explains a lot of the AWS Security related services very well. Especially the IAM part if very good, clear and actually goes very deep in explaining the possibilities and what you can do with it. Also very nice to see about usecases when working with multiple AWS accounts and how IAM can work with that.

Altough other services like Cloudtrail, Config and Guardduty are explained in the book, I think it would be more interesting if it went a bit deeper as the chapters seems more high level and explaining some basic things. I would have loved to see some more in depts use cases with these services and even how it all works together with for example a Landing Zone setup where you have multiple AWS Accounts (Cross accounts). And an Landing Zone is already preferred from a security p.o.v., so unfortunately this is not part of the book. If you have a single AWS Account, then this book is definitively for you!

Even though the wanted-to-see-things, it was a very good book and helped me with my work. Happy to have bought it! An 7/10.