AWS Config

Reimagining AWS Config at Enterprise Scale

Overview

AWS Config is the governance and compliance foundation for AWS customers, enabling organizations to continuously assess, audit, and monitor resource configurations across complex cloud environments. Enterprise customers rely on AWS Config to understand infrastructure changes, enforce compliance policies, investigate security issues, and maintain operational visibility across thousands of cloud resources.

When I joined the initiative, AWS Config had evolved into a powerful platform, but years of feature expansion had resulted in an inconsistent user experience, fragmented workflows, and growing customer friction. Large enterprise customers consistently reported that common governance tasks were difficult to discover, complicated to execute, and inefficient at scale.

As Principal Designer, I led the strategic redesign of AWS Config, transforming the platform into a cohesive, scalable experience that simplified cloud governance while enabling rapid expansion of future capabilities.

My Role

I led product design and UX strategy across the AWS Config platform, partnering closely with Product Management, Engineering, Security, Research, and executive stakeholders.

My responsibilities included:

• Defining the long-term UX vision for AWS Config

• Leading the end-to-end redesign of the platform

• Establishing a scalable design system

• Driving customer research and validation

• Prioritizing new capabilities based on customer needs

• Aligning multiple engineering teams around a unified experience

• Measuring adoption and success after launch

The Challenge

AWS Config served some of AWS's largest enterprise customers, but the experience had become increasingly fragmented.

Customers struggled to:

• Understand complex compliance workflows

• Navigate disconnected feature areas

• Manage resources across multiple AWS accounts and regions

• Interpret large volumes of compliance and configuration data

• Take action after identifying security or compliance issues

At the same time, AWS needed a platform capable of supporting rapid innovation while maintaining consistency across an expanding product ecosystem.

The challenge extended beyond visual redesign—it required rethinking how customers interacted with cloud governance as a whole.

Design Strategy

Rather than redesigning individual screens, I approached AWS Config as a platform transformation.

Key strategic initiatives included:

Complete Platform Redesign

Redesigned every major workflow to improve discoverability, usability, and efficiency for enterprise administrators managing large-scale cloud environments.

Design System

Created a unified design language that standardized navigation, interaction patterns, visual hierarchy, and reusable components across the product.

This reduced design debt while enabling engineering teams to ship new capabilities more consistently.

Information Architecture

Simplified complex governance workflows into logical task-based experiences, making advanced capabilities significantly easier to understand and adopt.

Data Visualization

Introduced visualizations that helped customers quickly interpret compliance posture, configuration relationships, and resource health instead of relying solely on dense tables and raw data.

Major Features Delivered

During the redesign, I led the experience strategy and design for several core platform capabilities, including:

• Advanced SQL Query Editor

• Compliance Reporting

• Executive and Operational Dashboards

• Automated Remediation Workflows

• Conformance Pack Creation, Editing, and Management

• Enhanced Resource Visualizations

• Cross-account Aggregation Experiences

• Platform-wide UX modernization

Customer Research

Every major product decision was grounded in customer research.

Research initiatives included:

• Moderated usability studies

• Enterprise customer roundtables

• Customer advisory sessions

• Continuous feedback reviews

• Quarterly UX health assessments

• Accessibility evaluations

• Platform usage analysis

These insights directly informed roadmap prioritization, workflow simplification, and feature redesigns.

Business Impact

Advanced Query

One of the most impactful initiatives was redesigning the Advanced Query experience, providing customers with a SQL-based interface for querying cloud resources across their environments.

The redesign focused on making an inherently technical capability significantly easier to discover, learn, and use.

Results:

• Single-account querying launched in May 2019

• Multi-account and multi-region querying launched in March 2020

• UX redesign released January 2020

• Approximately 35,000 active subscribers

• 11 million queries executed in a single month

• 6.6% month-over-month subscriber growth

• 5,700% year-over-year growth

The redesign dramatically increased adoption while making complex infrastructure analysis accessible to a much broader customer audience.

Config Aggregator

I also led the redesign of Config Aggregator, allowing organizations to consolidate configuration and compliance data across multiple AWS accounts and regions into a unified governance view.

The redesign simplified setup, improved scalability, and made enterprise-wide visibility significantly easier.

Results:

• Redesign launched November 2019

• Approximately 13,800 active aggregator accounts

• 16,247 aggregators created

• 285% year-over-year growth

• 16.5% of aggregators configured at the AWS Organization level, enabling governance across entire enterprise environments

Leadership Impact

This project extended well beyond interface design.

As design lead, I established a long-term UX strategy that aligned product, engineering, and security organizations around a shared vision for cloud governance.

By introducing a scalable design system, research-driven decision making, and customer-centered workflows, the redesign created a platform capable of supporting future innovation while substantially improving usability, adoption, and customer satisfaction.

Key Outcomes

• Led the complete UX transformation of AWS Config

• Established a scalable platform-wide design system

• Defined the long-term product experience strategy

• Introduced multiple flagship enterprise features

• Conducted continuous customer research to drive roadmap decisions

• Increased adoption of core platform capabilities by thousands of enterprise customers

• Helped drive 5,700% YoY growth for Advanced Query

• Contributed to 285% YoY growth for Config Aggregator

• Improved the usability, consistency, and scalability of one of AWS's core governance and compliance services