AWS Day-to-Day Operational Tasks

This guide outlines common daily tasks for a Cloud Engineer or SysOps Administrator working with AWS.

1. Monitoring and Observability

• CloudWatch Dashboards: Review custom dashboards for key metrics like EC2 CPU utilization, RDS connections, and ALB latency.
• Alarms: Check the status of CloudWatch Alarms. Investigate any "In Alarm" states (e.g., HighCPU, DiskSpaceLow).
• CloudTrail: Review CloudTrail logs for unauthorized API calls or unexpected changes to resources (e.g., a Security Group rule change).

2. Security and Compliance

• Trusted Advisor: Check AWS Trusted Advisor for security recommendations (e.g., "Security Groups - Specific Ports Unrestricted", "IAM Use").
• IAM Management: Rotate IAM access keys that are older than 90 days. Ensure MFA is enabled for all users with console access.
• Patching: Use AWS Systems Manager (SSM) Patch Manager to verify compliance of EC2 instances and schedule maintenance windows for OS updates.

3. Cost Optimization

• Cost Explorer: Review daily spend in Cost Explorer. Filter by "Service" to see what is driving costs. Look for anomalies.
• Unused Resources: Identify and delete unattached EBS volumes, unassociated Elastic IPs, and idle Load Balancers.
• Spot Instances: Check if non-critical workloads running on On-Demand instances can be moved to Spot Instances for savings.

4. Backup and Recovery

• AWS Backup: Verify that daily backup jobs (for EBS, RDS, DynamoDB, EFS) completed successfully via the AWS Backup console.
• Snapshot Lifecycle: Ensure old snapshots are being deleted according to the retention policy to manage storage costs.

5. Support and Troubleshooting

• Support Center: Check the status of any open support cases with AWS Support.
• Personal Health Dashboard: Check for any scheduled maintenance events (e.g., EC2 hardware maintenance) that might affect your resources.