Security best practices

Security is one of the important aspects when you move to the AWS cloud. It includes authentication, authorization on cluster resources, protecting data at rest and in transit, and finally, protecting infrastructure from unauthorized access. We have discussed these topics in detail in Chapter 7, Understanding Security in Amazon EMR.

The following are a few of the general best practices that you can follow while implementing security:

• Follow the least privilege principle of AWS and provide the minimal required access to your cluster.
• Avoid using the same AWS IAM role for multiple clusters; rather, create use case or cluster-specific roles to reduce the blast radius.
• If you do not have a specific EMR release dependency, then prefer to use the latest EMR release, which has all the security patches integrated.
• It's better to consider all security aspects from the very beginning, as implementing it later is more complex and expensive...