Create "Secure" Scalable AWS Web Farm

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Building a “secure” web infrastructure that meets the evolving needs of an organization can be complex, especially with the numerous pitfalls that can leave environments open to exploitation. This project focuses on designing and building a repeatable “Infrastructure as Code” solution to tackle these vulnerabilities.

This project will feature a series of posts covering the architecture, design, and scalable implementation of a web farm with these key features:

  • Alerting
  • Auto-Scaling Web Farm
  • Data Encryption
  • Reports
  • Shared Storage

Each feature leverages components within the AWS ecosystem to achieve these goals, including but not limited to:

  • Auto-Scaling Groups
  • CloudFront
  • CloudTrail
  • CloudWatch
  • EC2
  • EFS
  • KMS
  • RDS Aurora Database
  • Route 53
  • S3

We manage and version this project as Infrastructure as Code (IaC), utilizing a CI/CD pipeline to ensure thorough review and consistency. This project specifically uses GitHub Actions to automate deployment and testing processes.

While this project incorporates compliance rules inspired by HIPAA and the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) Cybersecurity Framework, it does not ensure full HIPAA compliance. HIPAA compliance involves additional requirements beyond technical safeguards, including comprehensive policies on data access, retention, and retrieval. Furthermore, organizations must implement administrative and physical safeguards, conduct risk assessments, and establish agreements—such as Business Associate Agreements (BAAs)—with third-party vendors who handle protected health information (PHI).

For organizations in industries regulated by similar frameworks, such as GLBA (Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act) for financial data, GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) for EU personal data, CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) for California residents’ data, PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) for payment data, FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) for student records, and FedRAMP (Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program) for federal data, this project provides a foundation but is not sufficient for full regulatory compliance.

Each of these frameworks has additional requirements concerning access control, data protection, breach notification, and more. As such, achieving full compliance may require additional policies, procedures, training, risk assessments, and agreements to meet the specific demands of your chosen framework.

This project serves as a starting point to build out secure, compliant infrastructure, and we recommend consulting with compliance professionals to ensure your project aligns with the complete requirements of your regulatory framework.