1.2.1. Shared Responsibility: AWS's Role

💡 First Principle: AWS is responsible for "security of the cloud," protecting the underlying infrastructure: hardware, software, networking, and facilities.

AWS's responsibility in the Shared Responsibility Model is to protect the infrastructure that runs all of the services offered in the AWS Cloud. This "security of the cloud" includes protecting the global infrastructure (Regions, Availability Zones, Edge Locations) and the hardware, software, networking, and facilities that run AWS services.

Key AWS Responsibilities ("Security of the Cloud"):

• Physical Security: Data centers, hardware, networking components.
• Global Infrastructure: Regions, Availability Zones, Edge Locations.
• Managed Services: Underlying infrastructure for RDS, DynamoDB, S3, Lambda, etc. (including patching and security configuration of these underlying hosts).

Scenario: An organization is concerned about the physical security of the data centers where their EC2 instances and S3 buckets reside.

⚠️ Common Pitfall: Believing that since AWS manages physical security, data encryption is also automatically handled by default across all services. While some services offer default encryption, customers often need to enable or configure it (e.g., KMS encryption for S3).

Key Trade-Offs:

• Abstraction vs. Visibility: Customers benefit from AWS abstracting away the underlying infrastructure but have limited direct visibility into AWS's internal security controls, relying instead on compliance reports and certifications (e.g., via AWS Artifact).

Reflection Question: How does AWS's "security of the cloud" responsibility, by managing the physical security and underlying infrastructure of its global data centers, enable customers to focus on their applications rather than the physical environment?