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AWS onboarding

AWS accounts

See how our AWS accounts work, including the list of accounts we have, how we manage our admin credentials, and how to file and escalate support tickets.

Levels of access

While we minimize interaction with AWS directly (explained below), there are different levels of AWS IAM access, provided to different roles:

  • Full administrative accounts: This is provided to the people known in our compliance documentation as the “Cloud Operations team”.
  • Read-only accounts: GSA Information Security may request and receive read-only access to AWS accounts (see Types of Users table in the SSP).

Restoring access for team members

If cloud.gov team members have lost access to their MFA application or need to reset their password, verify their identity and coordinate or pair with them.

  1. Find their user in AWS console.
  2. Delete any AWS access keys they may have in their account.
  3. Remove their MFA device.
  4. Reset their password and download the CSV from Amazon.
  5. Use the sharing secret keys process to send them their credentials.
  6. Remind them to set their two-factor authentication via MFA device.

Setting up two-factor authentication (required)

To set up multi-factor authentication (MFA):

  1. Click your account name in the upper right corner.
  2. Click ‘Security Credentials’.
  3. Scroll to the ‘Multi-factor authentication (MFA)’ section and configure your MFA application.

Changing AWS configuration

As mentioned previously, the cloud.gov team minimizes the amount of direct access and manipulation made to AWS directly, instead favoring automation and configuration-as-code through BOSH and Terraform. Terraform is used to do the bootstrapping of the AWS environment—this information can be found in the cg-provision repository. This includes:

  • EC2 instances for BOSH
  • Networking (VPCs)
  • Security groups
  • User accounts to be used by BOSH and the various brokers
  • S3 buckets for use by Cloud Foundry (the system itself, not tenants)

Any new/changed AWS configuration should be done in that repository and applied via Terraform.

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