Compute Optimizer is now enabled in the management account of Stax-managed AWS Organizations as part of Stax Assurance. All accounts within the AWS Organization are opted in to the service.

EC2, EC2 AutoScaling, EBS, and Lambda recommendations are exported to the logging account weekly. The recommendations are exported on Sundays at 2200 UTC (0900 Monday AEDT).

Access the Compute Optimizer Dashboard in the logging account to see Compute Optimizer's recommendations.

An update has been applied to the Rules module to improve collection accuracy:

• Fixed an issue with how Stax implements rule result collection in the Rules module, where resources were not being accurately matched against Rules. This was resulting in false negatives and false positives for a small number of resources.

These changes have been applied automatically by Stax. There is no impact to service expected as a result of this update. You may notice a small change in the number of resources accurately passing or failing.

Should you experience any issues, please raise a support case.

Stax now supports disabling invitations for local users. A local user is one which does not authenticate via a configured Single Sign-On Identity Provider (SSO IdP).

By default, administrators of a Stax tenancy can invite users directly to Stax, at which point they can create a password and log into Stax. Alternatively, administrators can grant users access to Stax via the organization's SSO IdP. Users logging in to Stax via Single Sign-On are created just-in-time and do not need to be invited to Stax first.

If you wish to disable the ability for administrators to invite new local users to Stax, please raise a support case.

See Enforce Single Sign-On for more detail.

For Stax-managed AWS Organizations with an account ownership model whereby the management account is owned by a reseller, AWS Backup can now be configured in member accounts.

For those with customer-owned management accounts, AWS Backup has been configurable for some time. If AWS Backup is already enabled, no change has been made.

If not already enabled, the cross-account feature of AWS Backup has been enabled for all member accounts in Stax-managed AWS Organizations. This allows for secure copying of backups across one or more AWS accounts in your AWS Organization.

Stax Permission Sets now supports increased limits for Permission Sets and Assignments. The maximum number of Permission Sets is now 50. Previously this limit was 10. The maximum number of Assignments for a Permission Set is now 100. Previously this limit was 50.

To get started, see Permission Sets in the docs.

Permission Sets allows for fine-grained control of permissions when users log in to Stax-managed AWS accounts. The feature has been accessible in Preview Mode for some time, but is now generally available.

See Permission Sets to get started.

Limited access to the Management account is now available for Stax-managed AWS Organizations using an account ownership model in which the management account is owned by a reseller. The account is available and can be logged into from the list of Stax-managed AWS accounts in the Stax Console.

This change allows for configuration and visibility of services that are only available in the Management account of AWS Organizations.

For information on the Management account, see Foundation Accounts.

To enable users to access the Management account, grant access by assigning one or more of the three built-in roles to a group of users. See Manage Groups for specific guidance. At this time, the Permission Sets feature is not supported for the Management account.

Stax's new Public Exposure Rule Bundle contains Rule definitions designed to help you monitor your environment for common misconfigurations that can cause resources and information to be inadvertently exposed.

Combined with Real-Time Rule Alerts and Notifications, this Bundle allows you to be easily notified when a resource enters a state of non-compliance. Rules provided by this Bundle aim to provide guidance around keeping private your EC2, EBS, RDS, ElasticSearch, and other native AWS resources.

Add the Bundle to Stax to get going. Once added, Stax will perform an initial evaluation and populate the Rules page with new results. You can filter the page to show only results from the Public Exposure Bundle if preferred.

Stax is aware of the recently disclosed vulnerability in the open-source Apache Log4j library, tracked as CVE-2021-44228 and referred to as "Log4Shell". Stax's engineering team has performed thorough analysis of the Stax codebase with regards to this issue. Stax can confirm that it is not vulnerable to this exploit.

If you have any questions regarding this notice, please raise a support case.

Stax has updated the SNS topics are not exposed Rule to allow SNS topics shared with a specific AWS Organization or AWS Account to pass the Rule. This means that the Rule will only fail for SNS topics that are shared with no limitations.

The Rule now checks for the existance of a condition checking for a condition restricting access to a specific aws:PrincipalOrgId or aws:PrincipalAccount.