How I Built a Hardened Amazon Linux 2 AMI with EC2 Image Builder

Manually hardening EC2 instances is tedious, inconsistent, and easy to mess up.

So I automated the entire process — and built a hardened Amazon Linux 2 AMI using EC2 Image Builder. It includes:

• ✅ CIS benchmark controls
• ✅ IMDSv2-only access
• ✅ Auditd + CloudWatch logging
• ✅ Patch compliance automation
• ✅ Secure, reusable AMIs for production

Here's a quick preview of the image pipeline config:

aws imagebuilder create-image-pipeline --cli-input-json file://pipeline-config.json

And it tests compliance automatically with every build.

👉 Full guide in here:
🔗 https://thehiddenport.dev/posts/aws-ami-hardening