Hello, I am Apollo Clark, a Cloud Architect, formerly with HashiCorp, with 13+ years of AWS experience, 4+ years of Azure Experience, and 3+ years of GCP experience. I've worked with the largest financial services companies in the world, and various US Dept of Defense (DoD) organizations, over the years on projects with security requirements of PCI-DSS, HIPAA, FedRAMP, and GDPR. AWS is an amazing service capable of a wide variety of uses, but with that flexibility comes a lot of complexity that is easy to misconfigure. Unfortunately, even in 2022, a lot of cloud provider services are not secure by default. This guide is a list of the most common mistakes I've seen. Many organizations adopted AWS organically, without any centralized planning, given the ease of using an oragnization credit card to spin up infrastucture in minutes, versus going through months of approval and waiting for physical hardware to be delivered, installed, configured, and made available into on-prem VMware based data centers. Whenver I