Compliance as Code: Automating Controls on AWS
Manual compliance does not scale. When your infrastructure is 10 resources, a spreadsheet and monthly reviews might work. When it is 500 resources across multiple accounts, manual checks become a full-time job that still misses things. Configuration drift happens daily. New resources get deployed without the right tags, encryption settings, or logging configurations. By the time your next audit comes around, you are scrambling to fix months of accumulated drift.
Compliance as Code treats compliance requirements the same way you treat application code: defined in version-controlled templates, tested automatically, deployed consistently, and monitored continuously. Instead of hoping that every engineer remembers to enable encryption on every S3 bucket, you write a rule that detects unencrypted buckets and either blocks the deployment or remediates automatically. Instead of manually collecting audit evidence, you configure automated evidence collection that runs continuously.
This course is designed for engineering teams that want to build compliance into their infrastructure and deployment pipelines rather than bolting it on after the fact. You will learn how to implement compliance baselines as CloudFormation templates, write custom Config rules for your specific requirements, build automated remediation workflows, and integrate compliance gates into your CI/CD pipelines.
Key Requirements​
Why Automation Matters​
- Drift is inevitable -- Infrastructure configurations change constantly. Without automated monitoring, you will not know when a resource falls out of compliance until an auditor finds it.
- Speed of deployment -- Modern engineering teams deploy multiple times per day. Manual compliance reviews cannot keep pace without becoming a bottleneck.
- Evidence collection -- Auditors want evidence that controls were operating effectively over the entire audit period, not just on the day you prepared for the audit. Automation provides continuous evidence.
- Consistency -- Manual processes produce inconsistent results. Automated controls apply the same standards to every resource, every time.
Core Principles​
- Preventive controls -- Stop non-compliant resources from being created in the first place (SCPs, IAM permission boundaries, CI/CD gates)
- Detective controls -- Identify non-compliant resources that already exist (Config rules, Security Hub checks, custom scanners)
- Corrective controls -- Automatically fix non-compliant resources (Config auto-remediation, Lambda functions, Step Functions workflows)
- Evidence controls -- Automatically collect and organize proof that controls are working (Audit Manager, CloudTrail, Config compliance history)
What This Course Covers​
| Module | Topic |
|---|---|
| 1 | Compliance as Code principles -- design patterns for encoding compliance requirements as infrastructure code and policy |
| 2 | AWS Config custom rules for compliance -- writing Lambda-based and Guard-based custom rules for organization-specific compliance requirements |
| 3 | Automated remediation with Config and Lambda -- building remediation pipelines that automatically fix non-compliant resources with approval workflows |
| 4 | Security baseline templates using CIS Benchmarks -- CloudFormation and Terraform templates that deploy CIS-hardened infrastructure baselines |
| 5 | Compliance dashboards with Security Hub -- custom insights, cross-account aggregation, and executive reporting for compliance posture |
| 6 | Audit evidence automation with Audit Manager -- framework configuration, custom control mappings, evidence collection schedules, and report generation |
| 7 | CI/CD pipeline compliance gates -- pre-deployment policy checks with cfn-guard, OPA, and custom validators that prevent non-compliant deployments |
Complete Compliance Automation Guide
Get the complete compliance automation guide with custom Config rule templates, automated remediation Lambda functions, CIS Benchmark CloudFormation baselines, Security Hub dashboard configurations, Audit Manager framework setup, and CI/CD compliance gate implementations for sustainable compliance at scale.