Here is a list of tools that make life easier when working with AWS.

It’s forever a work in progress.

Unless otherwise stated, the tool works with AWS directly in some way. Some of the tools are for supporting services such as external identity providers or continuous integration services.

Things I use and recommend

• EC2Instances.info, now hosted by Vantage, is still the easiest way to compare instance specs and prices. AWS has so many instance types, and one of the more esoteric ones might be cheaper than the general purpose ones for your use case. This tool makes it easy to discover, for example, that the cheapest instance with 16GB of RAM is the x2gd.medium. That’s almost half the hourly on-demand price of the t3.xlarge that I would probably have chosen out of convenience if I didn’t have this tool.
• AWS CLI version 2. I call this out separately from V1 because it’s unfortunately a different installation experience and more difficult to keep updated. There is an ongoing debate on the Github project about how to resolve this. It’s worth installing it just for the built-in SSO login support.
• aws-gate simplifies the use of Session Manager to use SSH to connect to resource in your VPC without opening any public access to your network. All the access is proxiewd through AWS APIs and controlled with IAM permissions. I added the aws-gate ssh -L option to make it easy to establish a tunnel to other VPC resources with zero client-side configuration.
• saml2aws automates the single-sign-on process for various third-party SSO providers. I can vouch for its utility in integrating JumpCloud. I improved the JumpCloud experience by making it fail correctly when a 401 response does not prompt for MFA.
• AWS SAM CLI is the best way to deploy CloudFormation stacks, even if you don’t use any of the SAM syntax. The “deploy” command is used instead of the standard CLI’s create-stack and update-stack commands and provides a synchronous experience. The command paints status updates on your resources until the final state of the stack is known. You no longer need to check the CloudFormation console or poll the stack status to know whether your stack deployed properly.
• jccli. A command line client used to administrate the hosted JumpCloud identity provider service. If you need to list users and groups, it might be faster to use this than clicking through the JumpCloud console.
• Pipelines. A local pipeline runner for Bitbucket pipelines. Need to test the setup of CloudFormation stack from scratch in a pipeline? That can consume several of your precious build minutes. Save them by running the pipeline locally before committing wasteful errors.
• clustergit is great for making sure all your git repos are synced to the remotes. You just run clustergit in the parent folder and you get a status report for each repo to show you what you still have to commit. Then it can push everything up in parallel.
• crudini - AWS CLI config files are written in INI file format, so you can use crudini to script changes to them or actions based on them.
• awsls is a simpler way to list the resources of a certain type in an AWS account. Now you don’t have to look up the API call for listing for each resource type, because this tool knows how to do it for you.
• AWS Config Rules Repository are the conformance pack templates that you can see in the AWS Config console. You can’t deploy to a an organization using the console. You need to use the CLI. And so you should clone this repo and pass the local path of your chosen conformance pack template to the put-organization-conformance-pack API.
• AWS Service Matrix shows which services are available in which regions in a relatively easy to read format. Surprisingly few services are available everywhere. “It is worth noting that while a service may be supported in a particular region, this does not mean all features of that service will be availalbe. You should always check with the relevant product pages to determine the finer details.” For example, the StackSets feature of CloudFormation is not broken out. * MAMIP (Monitor AWS Managed IAM Policies) automates the retrieval of new AWS Managed IAM Policies make it easier to monitor and get alerted when changes occur using “Watch” feature of Github or Twitter Account. * AWS Config Resource Schema property files define the properties and types of the AWS Config resource configuration items (CIs) that are searchable using the SelectResources API. You’ll need to consult this to use AWS Config’s advanced SQL queries. *
• Search Public Buckets a free tool that lists open s3 buckets and helps you search for interesting files. Don’t be on this list.
• s5cmd is a very fast S3 and local filesystem execution tool. It comes with support for a multitude of operations including tab completion and wildcard support for files, which can be very handy for your object storage workflow while working with large number of files.
• Steampipe exposes APIs and services as a high-performance relational database, giving you the ability to write SQL-based queries to explore dynamic data. Mods extend Steampipe’s capabilities with dashboards, reports, and controls built with simple HCL.
• AWS SAML Search allows auto-complete searching of accounts/roles on the AWS SAML login form. It makes logging in with the keyboard so much more convenient. * Jason Stitt’s workflow for packaging private Python packages using Poetry to CodeArtifact. I have adapted these instructions to maintain my own Python packages.
• aws-sso-util smooths out the rought edges of AWS SSO.
• botocove is a Python decorator to run against a selection of AWS accounts, or all AWS accounts in an organization, concurrently. I am also a maintainer of this tool.
• aws-sso-cli is a powerful tool for using AWS SSO for the CLI and web console. It’s like aws-sso-util but even more powerful. It does something I can’t do using the stock AWS CLI: log into the same AWS SSO instance as two different SSO users at the same time. You may need to do this if a client gives you multuple AD users each with access to a different set of AWS accounts via AWS SSO. * Step by step guide to setup port forwarding to remote host by Peter Chan makes a good complement to the official documenation.

Things I haven’t tried yet

I may have tried these but not updated the list yet.

• Leapp
• Bees with Machine Guns
• Scout Suite is an open source multi-cloud security-auditing tool, which enables security posture assessment of cloud environments.
• Parliament
• Former2
• https://github.com/turnerlabs/antiope
• https://github.com/jckuester/awsweeper, by the author of awsls, for cleaning out an AWS account.
• https://github.com/iann0036/sdk-iam-map
• https://github.com/iann0036/cfn-stack-rename
• See CloudSecList docs for exmaple of using mkdocs to build a wiki-style website. I’d like my site to look more like that.
• aws-allowlister automatically compiles an AWS Service Control Policy that ONLY allows AWS services that are compliant with your preferred compliance frameworks.
• aws_public_ips is a tool to fetch all public IP addresses (both IPv4/IPv6) associated with an AWS account.
• cloudlist is a multi-cloud tool for getting Assets (Hostnames, IP Addresses) from Cloud Providers.
• iamlive generates a basic IAM policy from AWS client-side monitoring (CSM)
• mega-linter Mega-Linter is an 100% Open-Source tool for CI/CD workflows that analyzes consistency and quality of different languages and formats.
• ConsoleMe is a web service that makes AWS IAM permissions and credential management easier for end-users and cloud administrators.
• Weep is a CLI utility for retreiving AWS credentials from ConsoleMe.
• https://github.com/aws-cloudformation/awesome-cloudformation
• Quail provides a user interface where your team can select configure their EC2 instance and provision it with a click of a button in any supported region or account. And you don’t have to worry about cleaning them up - Quail handles that for you, too!
• rpCheckup is an AWS resource policy security checkup tool that identifies public, external account access, intra-org account access, and private resources. It makes it easy to reason about resource visibility across all the accounts in your org.
• Introspector is a tool and schema for importing cloud infrastructure configuration. The goal is to unlock the expressive power of SQL and relational databases to ask questions about what is currently deployed in your cloud.
• actions2aws “is a GitHub action that can grant your workflows access to AWS via an AWS IAM role session. This means no need to store long-lived credentials in GitHub and comes with a few other benefits.” It looks like basically you need to store Github credentials in AWS Secrets Manager instead.
• SSM Tree is a tool that provides a tree visualization of the parameters hierarchy from AWS System Manager Parameter Store.
• aws2-wrap makes it easier to use AWS Single Sign On credentials with tools that don’t understand the sso entries in an AWS profile. * IAM Access Analyzer Policy Validation helps you to construct IAM policies and SCPs that take advantage of time-tested AWS best practices. It’s like Parliament, but built into AWS.
• Principal Mapper models the different IAM Users and Roles in an account as a directed graph, which enables checks for privilege escalation and for alternate paths an attacker could take to gain access to a resource or action in AWS.
• Bucket Stream find interesting Amazon S3 buckets by watching certificate transparency llogs.
• s3audit Checks the settings for all S3 buckets in an AWS account for public access
• cloudtrail-parquet-glue is terraform module that builds a Glue workflow to convert CloudTrail S3 logs to Athena-friendly Parquet format and make them available as a table using a Glue Crawler.
• aws-export-credentials gets AWS credentials from a profile to inject into other programs.
• Audit Manager launches an assessment that continuously collects and organizes relevant evidence from your AWS accounts and resources, such as resource configuration snapshots, user activity, and compliance check results. * The CloudFormation Command Line Interface (CLI) is an open-source tool that enables you to develop and test AWS and third-party extensions, such as resource types or modules, and register them for use in AWS CloudFormation * IAM Access Analyzer now generates least-privilege permissions based on access activity.
• Access Analyzer - Batch Policy Validator analyzes using AWS Access Analyzer - Policy Validation all your account customer managed IAM policies. * [Assisted Log Enabler]/(https://github.com/awslabs/assisted-log-enabler-for-aws) Find resources that are not logging, and turn them on. Supports VPC Flow Logs, CloudTrail, EKS Audit and Authenticator Logs, S3 Access Logs, and Route 53 Query Logs.
• yor is an open-source tool that helps add informative and consistent tags across infrastructure-as-code frameworks such as Terraform, CloudFormation, and Serverless.

• llama’s goal goal is to make it easy to outsource compute-heavy tasks to Lambda, with its enormous available parallelism, from your shell. Llama includes llamacc, a drop-in replacement for gcc or clang which executes the compilation in the cloud, allowing for considerable speedups building large C or C++ software projects. * IAM Policy Validator for AWS CloudFormation is a command line tool that takes a CloudFormation template, parses the IAM policies attached to IAM roles, users, groups, and resources then runs them through IAM Access Analyzer validation checks.

• cfn-config
• autostacker24
• https://github.com/okigan/awscurl
• https://github.com/k1LoW/awspec
• https://github.com/toniblyx/prowler

• Disposable Cloud Environment https://dce.readthedocs.io/en/latest/quickstart.html

• https://github.com/DavidMuller/aws-requests-auth
• https://github.com/nordcloud/cognitocurl
• https://github.com/aws-cloudformation/cloudformation-guard
• https://github.com/common-fate/iamzero

• https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/implementations/customizations-for-aws-control-tower/

• s3wipe is a rapid parallelized AWS S3 key & bucket deleter.
• tail-stack-events is a convenient little CLI script (written in Node) to tail the latest AWS CloudFormation stack events. According to the open Github issues it doesn’t support profiles yet, but it looks promising. Like the AWS SAM CLI without being tied to SAM’s deployment model.
• awsrm simplifies deleting over 250 AWS resource types across multiple accounts and regions. It takes awsls as input.
• delete_vpc is a shell script to delete an AWS VPC and its dependencies. All the networking resources you would expect, plus EC2 instances, are listed as dependencies, but what about other services that use VPCs such as Redshift or CodeBuild to name a random couple?
• efsu is for accessing AWS EFS from your machine without a VPN. It achieves this by deploying a Lambda function and shuttling data between your machine and EFS via that function. You can use it to copy a file from EFS to your local machine!
• stackit is a CLI tool to synchronously and idempotently operate on AWS CloudFormation stacks. Provides commands up, down, tail and outputs. By glassechidna, the same author of actions2aws.
• aws-cfn-update is a utility to programmatically update CloudFormation templates. Could be useful for automating imports.
• coto is like boto3, but scraping the AWS console. There exist some administrative tasks for which there is no public API, and there exist some AWS tasks that still require the AWS Account Root User.
• bash-my-aws Bash-my-AWS is a simple but powerful set of CLI commands for managing resources on Amazon Web Services. They harness the power of Amazon’s AWSCLI, while abstracting away verbosity. The project implements some innovative patterns but (arguably) remains simple, beautiful and readable.
• cfn-events watches AWS CloudFormation stack events and wait for completion. A standalone tail command that just works.
• better-boto is a collection of helper functions to make using AWS Boto easier. For example, it added a create_or_update method to the AWS CloudFormation client. It also provides some helpers for dealing with pagination operations and some help using AWS Organizations.
• tail-stack-events is a convenient little CLI script written in Node to tail the latest AWS CloudFormation stack events.
• ThreatModel for S3. See the blog: The last S3 security document that we’ll ever need, and how to use it.
• Superwerker lets you set up a secure multi-account AWS Cloud environment in just a few clicks. It has been developed to follow the latest best practices in cloud security and efficiency, by AWS Advanced Partners who have decades of experience in the field of cloud computing.
• Change log of AWS IAM permissions * AWSUtility::CloudFormation::CommandRunner is a CloudFormation resource type that allows users to run Bash commands in any CloudFormation stack. Any output written using the command to the reserved file /command-output.txt can be referenced anywhere in your template by using !Fn::GetAtt Command.Output. See FAQ for comparison to Lambda, Custom Resources and Macros. * Pyplate is a CloudFormation macro to run arbitrary Python code in your CloudFormation templates. It is useful for generating values that are impossible using the CloudFormation intrinsic functions.
• aws-auth allows you to programmatically authenticate into AWS accounts through IAM roles in a multi-account AWS organization setup.
• aws-inventory tries to discover all AWS resources created in an account. Uses botocore’s service definition files to stay up to date.
• awsiam.info is like ec2instances.info but for IAM permissions.
• Aegea is a command line interface (CLI) that provides a set of essential commands and terminal dashboards for operators of Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounts. Aegea lets you build AMIs and Docker images using the cloud-init config management package, manage config roles, launch and monitor instances and services, and manage AWS resources including ELB, RDS, and AWS Batch. Aegea is designed to be used in conjunction with the existing functionality of the AWS CLI and boto3. * CloudWatch Custom Widgets Samples. A Custom Widget is a CloudWatch Dashboards widget that can display virtually anything you want. Custom Widgets enables you to add custom visualizations, display information from multiple sources or add custom controls like buttons to take actions directly in a CloudWatch Dashboard.
• AWS Permissions Cloud is a nicer way to view all the IAM permissions.
• awsservices.info is another version of the AWS Service Matrix.
• fck-nat is an AMI that is a cheaper NAT than the managed NAT.
• ssmsh brings bashlike commands and folder navegation to to SSM.
• gotoaws connects to your EC2 instance or ECS container without the need to open inbound ports, maintain bastion hosts, or manage SSH keys. A nice wrapper around session manager. Similar to aws-gate. Discovered in this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLtx1PUUZJQ
• AWS serverless patterns contains serverless patterns showing how to integrate services services using infrastructure-as-code (IaC). You can use these patterns to help develop your own projects quickly.
• PolicyGlass allows you to analyse one or more AWS policies’ effective permissions in aggregate, by restating them in the form of PolicyShards which are always Allow, never Deny.
• [Pacu])(https://github.com/RhinoSecurityLabs/pacu) allows penetration testers to exploit configuration flaws within an AWS account, using modules to easily expand its functionality. Current modules enable a range of attacks, including user privilege escalation, backdooring of IAM users, attacking vulnerable Lambda functions, and much more.
• Trailscraper is a command-line tool to get valuable information out of AWS CloudTrail and a general purpose toolbox for working with IAM policies. It can get CloudTrail events matching a filter from the CloudTrail API, it can download from a trail archive bucket for single-account and for organization trails, it can filter the downloaded logs, it can generate IAM policy from CloudTrail events, and extend policy by guessing matching actions. * iam-policy-json-to-terraform converts an IAM Policy in JSON format into a Terraform configuration.
• Cloudtracker helps you find over-privileged IAM users and roles by comparing CloudTrail logs with current IAM policies. It can list actors, list their actions, and show which users assumed which roles. * AWS SSM Automation Runbook to Setup AWS Config with Amazon Athena and Amazon QuickSights deploys a SSM Automation runbook called Config-QuickSight-Visualization that can be used to setup AWS Config to be used with Amazon Athena and setup Amazon Quicksights to be able to create visualize dashboards. See blog post Automate AWS Config data visualization with AWS Systems Manager. * Consistent point-in-time restore for Amazon S3 buckets. In this blog post, we showed how Amazon S3 Event Notifications with EventBridge can be used to create near real-time log of S3 object changes. We also showed how you can query this log and use S3 Batch Operations to restore S3 objects to a consistent point in time.
• Flowdog is an application/framework for inspection and manipulation of network traffic in AWS VPCs. Packets routed to or from the Internet, between VPCs, between subnets can all be programmatically inspected or modified in great detail.
• https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/disabling-security-hub-controls-in-a-multi-account-environment/ * Enable Security Hub PCI DSS standard across your organization and disable specific controls * Disabling Security Hub controls in a multi-account environment * https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/mt/automate-aws-config-data-visualization-with-aws-systems-manager/
• AWS Fuzzy Finder makes the process of finding the IPs and SSH’ing into your EC2 instances super fast and easy. It will connect with AWS, automatically grab all the instances you have access to, and present them to you in a fuzzy searchable way.
• Mapping Tool lets you quickly Build and Debug AppSync & API Gateway Mapping Templates written in VTL (Apache Velocy Template Language).
• Resoto is “housekeeping for clouds”. Resoto indexes resources, captures dependencies and maps out your infrastructure in a graph so that it’s understandable for a human. The graph contains metrics for each resource. Developers and SREs can search the graph with a query language, and create alerting and clean-up workflows. Metrics can be aggregated and exported to a time series database like Prometheus. * AWS Lambda Event Resources tries to collect as many resources on AWS Lambda events from schema, examples to code libraries.
• Granted is a command line interface (CLI) application which simplifies access to cloud roles and allows multiple cloud accounts to be opened in your web browser simultaneously. It seems like a way to control Firefox containers from the command line. * BYO Organization Tool is like Botocove but in Go. It’s demo code from an AWS blog post about querying across the organization.
• Access Undenied parses AWS AccessDenied CloudTrail events, explains the reasons for them, and offers actionable fixes.
• ElectricEye continuously monitors your AWS services for configurations that can lead to degradation of confidentiality, integrity or availability. All results can be exported to Security Hub, JSON, CSV, Databases, and more for further aggregation and analysis.
• AWS Data Wrangler is Pandas on AWS - Easy integration with Athena, Glue, Redshift, Timestream, Neptune, OpenSearch, QuickSight, Chime, CloudWatchLogs, DynamoDB, EMR, SecretManager, PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLServer and S3 (Parquet, CSV, JSON and EXCEL). * Automating safe, hands-off deployments from the Amazon Builders’ Library. In this article, we walk through the steps a code change goes through in a pipeline at Amazon on its way to production. A typical continuous delivery pipeline has four major phases—source, build, test, and production (prod). We’ll dive into the details of what happens in each of these pipeline phases for a typical AWS service, and provide you with an example of how a typical AWS service team might set up one of their pipelines.
• Cloudash allows you to troubleshoot issues faster than you can open CloudWatch console. Serverless observability is hard, but it doesn’t have to be.
• The Athena Guide is Athena’s missing manual. In its own words: “Athena is an in-depth guide to Amazon Athena. Athena is a serverless query service for data on S3, but there is a lot behind that description. Here you will find articles that explain the not so obvious aspects of how to use the service to its full potential, including how and why to partition your data, how to get the best performance, and lowest cost, and how to use it as the engine for your data lake.” * open-url-in-container is a Firefox extension that enables support for opening links in specific containers using custom protocol handler. This could make it easier to automate opening different AWS sessions in containers in the browser.
• aws-ssoreporting is a “down and dirty script to report AWS SSO users and groups”. It works around the fact that the SSO’s ListUsers API doesn’t actually list users. I reported the issue and someone just shared their solution there. No response from AWS, unfortunately.
• cfplot connects to AWS, grab the output of describe_stacks and generate a horizontal waterfall diagram similar to a webpage load waterfall diagram.
• Smithy is a protocol-agnostic interface definition language and set of tools for generating clients, servers, and documentation for any programming language. It’s used to generated the SDKs for JavasScript, Go, and Rust. * A Review of the AWS Security Model. AWS have released their own security maturity model, which contains a lot of detail on their take as to how to secure your AWS estate. Does it stack up against what we’re seeing in real-world attacks, or the approaches being suggested by the rest of the AWS security community? Unfortunately, Nick Jones is not convinced, and here he lays out why. * AWS Roles Anywhere Sample Script. To use AWS Identity and Access Management Roles Anywhere for authentication to AWS from your workloads that run outside of AWS such as servers, containers, and applications, you first create a trust anchor and profile through the IAM Roles Anywhere console.
• AWS Auto Cleanup helps clean up your AWS resources, keeping your AWS accounts neat and tidy whilst reducing costs. AWS Auto Cleanup uses a combination of user-defined allowlists and time-based policies to delete resources that are no longer needed.
• aws_list_all List all resources in an AWS account, all regions, all services(*). Writes JSON files for further processing.
• aws-rotate-key rotates your AWS access key. If you still need to use IAM users, then at least it’s good to have a way to reotate the keys more easily. * How to delete a stuck custom resource is a support article fully titled “How do I delete a Lambda-backed custom resource that’s stuck in DELETE_FAILED status or DELETE_IN_PROGRESS status in CloudFormation?”. I’ll save this for the next time I work on custom resource Lambdas.
• AWS Lambda Typing provides type hints for AWS Lambda event, context, and response objects. * AWS Lambda Powertools for Python is a suite of utilities for AWS Lambda Functions that makes tracing with AWS X-Ray, structured logging and creating custom metrics asynchronously easier. Include typing for Lambda context.
• imds-credential-server runs a server compliant with the EC2 IMDSv2 interface in order to vend AWS credentials, primarily to export credentials into locally-run containers. * S3 Intelligent-Tiering: What It Takes To Actually Break Even shows how to analyze S3 storage classes based on the break-even costs compared to S3 standard. * What You Need to Know About Ransomware in AWS describes a talk from AWS re:Inforce about ransomware attacks in AWS and how to avoid them. * AWS Limit Monitor Solution is a reference implementation that provides a foundation for monitoring AWS service limits. Customers can leverage the solution to monitor limits across services supported by Amazon Trusted Advisor; in multiple regions and multiple AWS accounts. The solution integrates with Amazon SNS and Slack to notify customers for service limits approaching thresholds. * Customizations for AWS Control Tower Solution combines AWS Control Tower and other highly-available, trusted AWS services to help customers more quickly set up a secure, multi-account AWS environment based on AWS best practices.
• AWS Simple EC2 CLI: In order to launch a new EC2 instance, customers need to specify a lot of options, and it can be a slow and overwhelming task. It requires users to have an initial network stack (VPC-Id/Subnet-Id/Security-Groups), remote login, and many more. Often times, we require EC2 instance for adhoc testing for a short period of time without requiring complex networking infrastructure in place. AWS Simple EC2 CLI aims to solve this issue and make it easier for users to launch, connect and terminate EC2 instances with a single command.
• IAM Floyd is an AWS IAM policy statement generator with fluent interface. # How to passively discover AWS tools
• CloudFormation Seed is a script to automate CloudFormation deployments.
• Sceptre is a tool to drive AWS CloudFormation. It automates the mundane, repetitive and error-prone tasks, enabling you to concentrate on building better infrastructure.
• AWS Role Extension (AWS RolEx) is a way to type to filter the SAML role selection page. I prefer aws-saml-search, but this is prettier if you like cats.
• BeSA This is a unique opportunity for you to be mentored by AWS Solution Architects to acquire skills to become a Solutions Architect. Many people reach out to us to get started on learning AWS to become Solutions Architect, or, simply need help with achieving certifications for career progression. In this free pilot program, we will focus on technical and behavioural concepts for becoming a successful Solutions Architect, help you upskill for certifications, and provide interview coaching support for opportunities inside and outside AWS. * AWS Insights Mod for Steampipe is an AWS dashboarding tool that can be used to view dashboards and reports across all of your AWS accounts. Dashboards are available for 15+ services, including CloudTrail, EC2, IAM, RDS, S3, VPC, and more. Discovered via Nsikan Essien’s article on InfoQ: Accelerated Multi-Account Auditing and Compliance in AWS with Steampipe, HCL and SQL.
• https://github.com/awslabs/aws-lambda-web-adapter * Baseline Environment on AWS (BLEA) is a set of reference CDK template to establish secure baseline on standalone-account or ControlTower based multi-account AWS environment. This solution provides basic and extensible guardrail with AWS security services and end-to-end sample CDK code for typical system architecture.
• Scarr: If you want to set up a production-grade flat file site, a reasonable way to accomplish this would be to load your files to S3, put cloudfront in front of that for caching, use route53 for domain registration + DNS, and ACM for your TLS certificate. This tool automates all of that from registering the domain to uploading files.
• AWS Jam puts your skills to the test. Solve challenges that emulate real AWS use-cases across a variety of subject matters. Work to complete challenges across common AWS use-cases and operational tasks to earn points. Compete with rivals for the coveted top place on the leaderboard.
• cloudtrail2sightings converts cloudtrail data to MITRE ATT&CK Sightings. This project assumes any Cloudtrail data it processes to be from an incident, or from known attacks on your environment. For generating Cloudtrail data attached to known attack techniques, you can use stratus-red-team or from flaws.cloud public dataset of logs from attacks in this environment.
• Incident Response in AWS is a post by Chris Farris intended to help those already familiar with the principles of Incident Response to understand what to do when the incident involves the AWS Control Plane.
• aws-keys-sectool does something obvious in hindsight: making sure that any long-lived credentials on your machine are access restricted to your own IP address.
• Amazon Ion is a richly-typed, self-describing, hierarchical data serialization format offering interchangeable binary and text representations. The text format (a superset of JSON) is easy to read and author, supporting rapid prototyping. The binary representation is efficient to store, transmit, and skip-scan parse. The rich type system provides unambiguous semantics for long-term preservation of data which can survive multiple generations of software evolution.
• cloud-nuke a CLI tool to delete all resources in an AWS account.
• chamber is a tool for managing secrets. Currently it does so by storing secrets in SSM Parameter Store, an AWS service for storing secrets. For detailed info about using chamber, read The Right Way To Manage Secrets. * How to get started with OrgFormation. OrgFormation is a community driven Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool for managing AWS Organizations. It’s open source on GitHub and available on NPM. With IaC you reduce the friction that engineers experience when creating new accounts. You can also set up rules and guidelines for your whole AWS organization. OrgFormation has many features, like restricting unused regions and large EC2 instances, offering a nice login experience with AWS SSO, and managing service quotas via code. In this article we will set up an OrgFormation CI/CD pipeline. It will help us with creating accounts, setting up billing alerts, and using AWS SSO to sign in to accounts.
• Grayhat Warfare Public Bucket Search is a free tool that lists open s3 buckets and helps you search for interesting files.
• CloudFormation Workshop educates builders about the features of AWS CloudFormation and how to get started building quickly. A background in CloudFormation, command line, git, and development workflows is not required.
• AWS Security Survival Kit
• awsapilib is a python library exposing services that are not covered by the official boto3 library but are driven by undocumented APIs. The new coto?
• aws-error-utils makes botocore.exceptions.ClientError easier to deal with. All AWS service exceptions are raised by boto3 as a botocore.exceptions.ClientError, with the contents of the exception indicating what kind of exception happened. This is not very pythonic, and the contents themselves are rather opaque, most being held in dicts rather than as properties. The functions in this package help dealing with that, to make your code less verbose and require less memorization of ClientError contents.
• alternat is a high availability implementation of AWS NAT instances. NAT instances aren’t for everyone. You might benefit from alterNAT if NAT Gateway data processing costs are a significant item on your AWS bill. If the hourly cost of the NAT instances and/or the NAT Gateways are a material line item on your bill, alterNAT is probably not for you. As a rule of thumb, assuming a roughly equal volume of ingress/egress traffic, and considering the slight overhead of operating NAT instances, you might save money using this solution if you are processing more than 10TB per month with NAT Gateway. * Sustainable Personal Accounts promotes the idea that each AWS practitioner should have direct access to some AWS account, so as to practice almost freely on the platform and to accelerate innovation of their company. At the same time, in corporate environment there is a need for enforcing policies, for managing costs and for fostering software automation. For this reason, with Sustainable Personal Accounts (SPA), we introduce maintenance windows on AWS accounts and alerts. Central teams can customise code ran on each maintenance window, for example to set billing alerts, to deploy SIEM agents, and to purge cloud resources. * Amazon Redshift Research Project is not your typical site, with advice like “pick a good distribution key”. This is low-level, detailed, comprehensive research. If you do any kind of serious work with Redshift, the content here will blow you away. The core content are the white papers, but there are a growing number of Redshift tracking/monitoring pages. Discovered via a comment on the The Register * EBS Direct API Secuity Tooling are fun tools around the EBS Direct API to download snapshots, dump blocks, scan secrets, and diff secrets. * Amazon DynamoDB Permissions Workshop Code. Welcome to the Amazon DynamoDB Permissions workshop, the full step by step workshop can be found on dynamodb-security-101 workshop hosted in Event Box.
• Deequ is a library built on top of Apache Spark for defining “unit tests for data”, which measure data quality in large datasets. Most applications that work with data have implicit assumptions about that data, e.g., that attributes have certain types, do not contain NULL values, and so on. If these assumptions are violated, your application might crash or produce wrong outputs. The idea behind deequ is to explicitly state these assumptions in the form of a “unit-test” for data, which can be verified on a piece of data at hand. If the data has errors, we can “quarantine” and fix it, before we feed it to an application.
• AWS Data Tools offers the OrganizationDataBuilder class to build a full model of an AWS Organization. It handles recursing the organizational tree and populating any relational data between the various nodes, e.g., parent-child relationships between an OU and an account. Parallel operations are not supported, so everything runs serially.
• AWS Baseline defines esssential baseline resources that should exist in every AWS account. This project is intended to be a combination of best practices documentation with a step-by-step guide on setting up an AWS account in A Right Way™ (or at least that’s what Tim O’Guin is calling it).
• AWS Organized allows you to visualise and make changes to your AWS Organization using folders and files. Instead of making changes directly you build up a migration which can then be reviewed before being applied. * S3 Deletion Visualizer Tom Forbes had the chance to delete 1 petabyte of data spread across 1 billion objects from S3. Well, actually 940 million, but close enough to the click-baitable 1 billion. He thought it would be interesting challenge to try and visualize the execution of these deletions and possibly gain some insights into how S3 Lifecycle Policies work under the hood.
• update-aws-ip-ranges is a Lambda function that automatically create or update AWS resource with AWS service’s IP ranges from the ip-ranges.json file. You can configure which service and region to get range. You can also configure to which resources you want to create or update with those ranges. It supports WAF IPSet and VPC Prefix List.
• headless-sso runs AWS SSO login headlessly - that is, without needing to launch a GUI web browser. Supports only hardware MFA at the moment.
• awscost gives a tabular view in the console of AWS costs. It’s a lot more convenient that using the bare Cost Explorer API! * AWS CloudFormation Resource Provider Python Plugin allows you to author CloudFormation resource providers in the Python programming language. * Security Hub Score Generator is an AWS-published script for computing the security score as the Security Hub console does. For some reason the score doesn’t have an API. Maybe you could use it to build a scoreboard by running it across all the accounts in an organization.
• Execute Node.js in AWS Lambda wrapper scripts contains an example of how one might use wrapper scripts to push the expensive computations to AWS Lambda Init phase.
• AWS IP Ranges History Tracker for changes to the ip-ranges.json file.
• AWS re:Skill is a gamified AWS learning platform. * AWS Toolkit for Azure DevOps adds tasks to Azure Devops to work with S3, Elastic Beanstalk, CodeDeploy, Lambda, CloudFormation, SQS, SNS, and run commands using the AWS PowerShell module and the AWS CLI.
• AWS Break Glass Role Creates a break glass role for emergency use in order to limit production console access. Configures automatic alerts and logging of activities in the role to secure its use in production environments.
• AWS pwn is a collection of AWS penetration testing junk. Has examples of reconnaissance, exploitation, stealth, exploration, elevation, persistance, and exfiltration. * AWS Resource Providers is a community driven repository where you can find CloudFormation Resource Type Providers for different purposes (including org-formation ones). * The Hitchhiker’s Guide to PlantUML: Create Real Life AWS Diagrams shows how to recreate diagrams from the official AWS Architecture Blog using PlantUML syntax.
• AWS Icons for PlantUML provides sprites, macros, and other includes that represent AWS services and resources in PlantUML syntax.
• ADMT (A data migration tool, formerly goSync) is a data migration tool developed by Golang. It can upload data to S3, download data to local directory, copy data between buckets/prefixes, or between directories. It also supports file attributes retain in S3 uploading and downloading, attribute check, md5 check after data copy, incremental copy. It is only 10MB size and doesn’t require installation. It works well in k8s, especially in AI/ML, HPC scenarios. * AWS Fargate Right-sizing Dashboard uses CloudWatch Logs Insights to scan and analyze performance logs collected from the cluster you want to optimize.
• aws-runas is a friendly way to do AWS STS AssumeRole operations, so you can perform AWS API actions using a particular set of permissions. Includes support for IAM user credentials and SAML SSO, including MFA for both. Works off of profile names configured in the AWS SDK configuration file.
• AWS Account Controller gives self-service creation and deletion of sandbox-style accounts. Abandoned since the CloseAccount method went public, but that API is so restricted that we still need a tool like this.
• AWS Management Account Vending Machine (MAVM) Create new AWS management accounts on the fly and clean up and close accounts afterwards again. Fully automated. Special thanks for inspiration and parts of the code go to Ian McKay and his AWS Account Controller, and the awsapilib.
• Which AWS Certification exam should I sit? Tom Milner answers the question with data, showing which services the exams cover and how much overlap there is between each exam pair. Great for career path planning.
• Curso IaC con CDK en AWS is a Spanish-language course that introduces the CDK (Cloud Development Kit) and builds up to advanced development topics. It’s currently in preview and is developed by my ex-colleague Rubén García. ¡Saludos!
• IAM APE, or AWS Policy Evaluator, takes all of your AWS IAM policies attached to a User, Group, or Role object, and presents you with a single policy, summarizing all of their actual permissions, taking into account permissions, denials, inherited permissions and permission boundaries.
• Mountpoint for Amazon S3 is a simple, high-throughput file client for mounting an Amazon S3 bucket as a local file system. With Mountpoint for Amazon S3, your applications can access objects stored in Amazon S3 through file operations like open and read. Mountpoint for Amazon S3 automatically translates these operations into S3 object API calls, giving your applications access to the elastic storage and throughput of Amazon S3 through a file interface. Mountpoint for Amazon S3 is optimized for read-heavy workloads that need high throughput. It intentionally does not implement the full POSIX specification for file systems. See SEMANTICS.md for a detailed description of the client’s behavior and POSIX support.
• orgtool is a configuration management tool set for AWS Organizations written in python. This tooling enable the configuration and management of AWS Organization with code.
• Service Screener allows AWS customers to automate checks on their environment and services based on AWS best practices and provide recommendations on how to improve.
• cfn-include is a preprocessor for CloudFormation templates which extends CloudFormation’s intrinsic functions. For example, Fn::Include provides a convenient way to include files, which can be local, a URL or on an S3 bucket (with proper IAM authentication if necessary). It supports both JSON and YAML as input and output format. CloudFormation’s tag syntax for YAML (e.g. !GetAtt) is supported as well.
• Amazon Cognito Passwordless Auth demonstrates several patterns to support passwordless authentication and provides reference implementations for FIDO2 (WebAuthn), Magic Link, and SMS OTP Step Up.
• cfnctl is a CLI that brings the Terraform cli experience to Cloudformation. As the author says, “You’ll never need to use the AWS Console for managing stacks again!”. The SAM CLI already exists, but there is an opportunity to provide more detail around changesets than sam deploy --confirm-changeset currently provides.
• Automated Security Response on AWS is an add-on solution that works with AWS Security Hub to provide a ready-to-deploy architecture and a library of automated playbooks. The solution makes it easier for AWS Security Hub customers to resolve common security findings and to improve their security posture in AWS.
• Antiope is is intended to be an open sourced framework for managing resources across hundreds of AWS Accounts. From a trusted Security Account, Antiope will leverage Cross Account Assume Roles to gather up resource data and store them in an inventory bucket. This bucket can then be index by ELK or your SIEM of choice to provide easy searching of resources across hundreds of AWS accounts.
• Lambda Looter will take a list of profiles and scan through them and download the code you have access to and then process that code for secrets outputting any potential secrets to a loot directory. Even though there can be a lot of false positives it makes looking for loot much faster than scanning the code itself.
• Resource Utilization is just the first and most simple version of an account wide resource utilization metric & dashboard, to get overall insights on actually how much room for optimization is available. As a baseline, initial version considers only Amazon EC2 service CPU Utilization.
• Protonizer is a CLI tool for working with IaC in AWS Proton. Note that this is an experimental project and currently only supports generating Proton templates based on Terraform and CodeBuild provisioning. The tool also currently only supports primitive HCL data types such as strings, numbers, bools, and lists of primitive types. This is currently aligned with the Proton schema types that are supported by the Proton console.
• AWS Service Enumeration was created for service enumeration and info dumping for investigations of penetration testers during Black-Box testing. The tool is intended to speed up the process of Cloud review in case the security researcher compromised AWS Account Credentials. Yet another inventory tool!
• Cloudstats ETL works from the raw AWS Cost & Usage Report (CUR). It is implemented as a series of SQL statements with no out-of-band processing. The hope is that Cloudstats gives you a clean basis for your capacity planning and efficiency work. This work is based on experience with large AWS accounts over many years. Its accuracy is not guaranteed, but there are built-in ways to check its completeness and consistency. Via Corey Quinn.
• CUDOS Dashboard is an in-depth, granular, and recommendation-driven dashboard to help customers dive deep into cost and usage and to fine-tune efficiency. Executives, directors, and other individuals within the CIO or CTO line of business or who manage DevOps and IT organizations will find the CUDOS Dashboard highly detailed and tailored to solve their use cases. Via
• Towards AWS, perhaps modelled after Towards Data Science, is a blog where Where AWS Experts, Heroes, Builders, and Developers share their stories, experiences, and solutions.
• AnsWerS is a yearly survey to collect data on the the state of AWS and related services. The data collected will be released publicly as a resource for all. Modelled after State of Serverless and State of Javascript.
• AWS Icons allows you to download, copy and paste AWS icons in SVG and PNG format for your projects.
• AWS Fargate Pricing Calculator calculates your AWS Fargate costs based on region, CPU, memory, architecture, and storage options.
• aws-service-auth-reference is a JSON-formatted scrape of the AWS Service Authorization Reference, along with a Golang program to update it. The package is updated weekly.
• CloudFormation Captain Hook promises no-code creation of CloudFormation hooks, using AWS CloudFormation GUard to validate resource properties, and storing rules in Amazon S3, AWS SSM Parameter Store, or the web. You need to whitelist your account for the beta to use it.
• Substation is a serverless data pipeline toolkit that integrates with AWS’ most popular services (S3, Kinesis, API Gateway, DynamoDB, etc.), is optimized for affordability, and is used in production by the security team at Brex.
• Amazon EC2 Image Builder Samples contains samples that demonstrate various aspects of the Amazon EC2 Image Builder service. I will use this as a base for setting up an image pipeline using CloudFormation. I tried to build it once by hand and tripped up over the semantic version contraints.
• SCPkit provides a python module to aid in Service Control Policy management in AWS accounts. This tool will merge selected SCPs into the fewest amount of policies, and optionally remove whitespace characters as they count toward the byte limit.
• specctl is a command-line based tool to extract and transform Kubernetes objects to ECS and vice versa. It has two modes, -m k2e (default) convert Kubernetes to ECS and -m e2k for ECS to Kubernetes.
• AWS SigV4 Proxy will sign incoming HTTP requests and forward them to the host specified in the Host header. Suggested as an alternative to awscurl.
• CloudGoat is a training game, Rhino Security Labs’ “Vulnerable by Design” AWS deployment tool. It allows you to hone your cloud cybersecurity skills by creating and completing several “capture-the-flag” style scenarios. Each scenario is composed of AWS resources arranged together to create a structured learning experience. Some scenarios are easy, some are hard, and many offer multiple paths to victory. As the attacker, it is your mission to explore the environment, identify vulnerabilities, and exploit your way to the scenario’s goal(s).
• Athena SQLite Driver uses Athena’s new Query Federation functionality to read SQLite databases from S3. Install it from the Serverless Application Repository: AthenaSQLiteConnector.
• Ruby on Jets allows you to create and deploy serverless services with ease, and to seamlessly glue AWS services together with the most beautiful dynamic language: Ruby. It includes everything you need to build an API and deploy it to AWS Lambda. Jets leverages the power of Ruby to make serverless joyful for everyone.
• cw is the best way to tail AWS CloudWatch Logs from your terminal.
• AwsMetricUrlHelper.py is code to generate CloudWatch URLs.
• Fun with aws-vault and 1Password shows code to plug 1password into aws vault.
• SSM Supercharged AWS SSM integration with OpenSSH + EC2 Instance Connect + sshuttle. Looks like a competitor of aws-gate.
• lsh is the Lambda shell, for running interactive commands on AWS Lambda. It’s a CLI that can install a stack with a Lambda designed for interactive use.
• The AWS Deployment Framework (ADF) is an extensive and flexible framework to manage and deploy resources across multiple AWS accounts and regions based on AWS Organizations. ADF allows for staged, parallel, multi-account, cross-region deployments of applications or resources via the structure defined in AWS Organizations while taking advantage of services such as AWS CodePipeline, AWS CodeBuild, and AWS CodeCommit to alleviate the heavy lifting and management compared to a traditional CI/CD setup. ADF allows for clearly defined deployment and approval stages which are stored in a centralized configuration file. It also allows for account based bootstrapping, by which you define an AWS CloudFormation template and assign it to a specific Organization Unit (OU) within AWS Organizations. From there, any account you move into this OU will automatically apply this template as its baseline.
• s5cmd is a parallel S3 and local filesystem execution tool.
• Performance Dashboard on AWS (PDoA) is a solution for national, municipal, and local governments to publish and visualize their data, so it can be easily shared internally and externally. This cost-effective solution presents digital service performance and other metrics in an accessible, clear, and open way. Performance Dashboard on AWS allows users to customize dashboards to visually demonstrate efficiencies achieved such as the processing of driver license applications or how citizenship statistics have changed over time. Dashboards clearly present performance data to meet the needs of data users including digital leaders, service owners, and the public.

How to passively discover tools

Watch Donne Martin’s Awesome AWS repo. It’s basically a community-maintained, all-encompassing version of this page. I don’t intend this page to replicate the breadth of Donne’s list.

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Danny Steenman curates a list of AWS tools.