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Q-Bits: Setting Up KMS Keys with Amazon Q Developer

Q-Bits: Setting Up KMS Keys with Amazon Q Developer

This blog post explores how Amazon Q Developer can help with the management of AWS KMS encryption keys.

Frank Allotta
Amazon Employee
Published Jan 23, 2025
Last Modified Jan 24, 2025
Welcome to another installment of Q-Bits, our regular series showcasing cool ways Amazon employees are leveraging Amazon Q Developer. Today, we're diving into how Amazon Q Developer can assist with Setting Up KMS Keys.

Managing Encryption with Amazon Q Developer

AWS Key Management Service (KMS) is a managed service that simplifies the creation and control of encryption keys used to secure your data. It provides centralized key management, allowing you to create, import, rotate, disable, delete, and define usage policies for encryption keys that encrypt your data across AWS services and within your applications. KMS integrates with AWS CloudTrail to provide logs of all key usage, helping you meet compliance and regulatory requirements.
KMS offers different types of keys: AWS managed keys (created and managed automatically by AWS services), customer managed keys (created and managed by you), and custom key stores (allowing you to generate keys in AWS CloudHSM clusters). The service handles key storage, backup, and rotation while enforcing strong security policies through key policies and IAM policies.
In this Q-Bit, I will show how Amazon Q Developer helps me generate KMS key policies, explains rotation and aliases, demonstrates integration with other AWS service for encryption, and provides AWS CLI examples for key management and grants.

Generating KMS Key Policies

Amazon Q Developer can assist in creating and managing KMS key policies. In the following example I use the Amazon Q Chat feature that is part of the Amazon Q Developer extension for Visual Studio Code. I provide a prompt to Amazon Q Chat to explain KMS Key Polices. I also craft the prompt to only output on paragraph for brevity, provide and example policy, and the cli command used to create the policy.
Amazon Q Developer can also be utilized inline while I code to create KMS key policies. As seen in the Python example below, when I type a comment with the intent of creating a KMS key policy, Amazon Q Developer will provide a Python based code suggestion to create a KMS key policy.

KMS Key Rotation and Aliases

Amazon Q Developer can also explain key rotation concepts and help implement automatic key rotation. In the following example I prompt Amazon Q Chat to explain key rotation but to keep the output to one paragraph for brevity. I also ask for an example. As shown in the output I get an explanation of key rotation and aliases, and the cli commands for both automatic and manual rotation.

AWS KMS Integration with Other Services

Amazon Q Developer can demonstrate how to implement encryption with other AWS services as well. For example if I wanted to know how to integrate AWS KMS with Amazon S3 Buckets I could prompt Amazon Q Chat to demonstrate AWS KMS key integration with S3 and provide an example. In the output Amazon Q Chat shows us how to create the key, create a key alias, create the S3 bucket, and finally configure encryption with KMS.
While the example shows how Amazon Q Developer can demonstrate how to implement encryption with S3, it is fully capable of demonstrating integration with other services such as EBS Volumes, RDS, Secrets Manager, Lambda, DynamoDB, and many others.

CLI Examples for Key Management and Grants

Finally, Amazon Q Developer can provide various CLI examples for managing KMS keys and creating KMS grants. As I did in the previous examples, I prompt Amazon Q Chat to provide AWS CLI examples. To limit the output I ask for CLI examples for creating a KMS Key, key alias and creating a KMS grant. In the output I see the commands I ask for as well as a list of additional useful commands.

Conclusion

Amazon Q Developer can be a powerful tool when managing AWS KMS keys. Whether I'm looking for explanations of AWS KMS product features, code suggestions for creating keys and policies, AWS CLI commands to create and manage keys, or even best practices when managing AWS KMS keys; I can always count on Amazon Q Developer.
I hope you enjoyed this installment of Q-Bits. If you're looking for more cool ways Amazon employees are leveraging Amazon Q Developer, be sure to click on the Q-Bits tag above.
 

Any opinions in this post are those of the individual author and may not reflect the opinions of AWS.

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