Track configuration changes with AWS Config

To record and evaluate configurations of your AWS resources, you can use AWS Config, which provides you with a detailed view of the configuration of your distributions. This includes how the resources are related to one another and how they were configured in the past, so you can review changes over time.

You can also use AWS Config to record configuration changes to your CloudFront distribution settings. You can capture changes to distribution states, price classes, origins, geographic restriction settings, and Lambda@Edge configurations.

Note

AWS Config does not record key–value tags for CloudFront streaming distributions.

Contents

• Set up AWS Config with CloudFront
• View CloudFront configuration history
• Evaluate CloudFront configurations with AWS Config Rules

Set up AWS Config with CloudFront

When you set up AWS Config, you can choose to record all supported AWS resources or record only some specified resources, such as recording changes for CloudFront only. For a list of supported CloudFront resources, see the Amazon CloudFront section of the Supported Resource Types topic in the AWS Config Developer Guide.

Notes

• To track configuration changes to your CloudFront distribution, you must sign in to the CloudFront console in the US East (N. Virginia) AWS Region.

• There might be a delay in recording resources with AWS Config. AWS Config records resources only after it discovers the resources.

Console

To set up AWS Config with CloudFront

1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the AWS Config console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/config/.

2. Choose Get Started Now.

3. On the Settings page, for Resource types to record, specify the AWS resource types that you want AWS Config to record. If you want to record only CloudFront changes, choose Specific types, and then, under CloudFront, choose the distribution or streaming distribution that you want to track changes for.

   To add or change which distributions to track, choose Settings on the left, after completing your initial setup.

4. Specify additional required options for AWS Config: set up a notification, specify a location for the configuration information, and add rules for evaluating resource types.

For more information, see Setting up AWS Config with the Console in the AWS Config Developer Guide.

AWS CLI

To set up AWS Config with CloudFront using the AWS CLI, see Setting up AWS Config with the AWS CLI in the AWS Config Developer Guide.

AWS Config API

To set up AWS Config with CloudFront using the AWS Config API, see the StartConfigurationRecorder API operation in the AWS Config API Reference.

View CloudFront configuration history

After AWS Config starts recording configuration changes to your distributions, you can get the configuration history of any distribution that you have configured for CloudFront.

You can view configuration histories in the following ways.

Console

For each recorded resource, you can view a timeline page that provides a history of configuration details. To view this page, choose the gray icon in the Config Timeline column of the Dedicated Hosts page.

For more information, see Viewing Configuration Details in the AWS Config Console in the AWS Config Developer Guide.

AWS CLI

To get a list of all your distributions, run the list-discovered-resources command, as shown in the following example.

aws configservice list-discovered-resources --resource-type AWS::CloudFront::Distribution

To get the configuration details of a distribution for a specific time interval, run the get-resource-config-history command.

For more information, see View Configuration Details Using the CLI in the AWS Config Developer Guide.

AWS Config API

To get a list of all your distributions, use the ListDiscoveredResources API operation.

To get the configuration details of a distribution for a specific time interval, use the GetResourceConfigHistory API operation. For more information, see the AWS Config API Reference.

Evaluate CloudFront configurations with AWS Config Rules

You can evaluate configurations against desired configurations with AWS Config Rules. For example, AWS Config Rules helps you to evaluate whether your CloudFront resources comply with common security best practices. You can choose managed rules like viewer policy HTTPS, SNI enabled, OAC enabled, origin failover enabled, AWS WAF WebACL, or AWS Shield Advanced resource policies to be triggered when the configuration changes.

Managed rules can run evaluations periodically, at a frequency that you choose. AWS Firewall Manager relies on AWS Config for automatic alerts and remediations. For more information, see Evaluating Resources with AWS Config Rules and List of AWS Config Managed Rules in the AWS Config Developer Guide.