FedRAMP

Compliant infrastructure shouldn’t

be so hard

Getting to FedRAMP is notoriously slow and expensive. The technical requirements alone are hard enough to fulfill with hundreds of NIST 800-53 controls to account for. But proving you’ve met them, with full audit trails and documented consistency across environments, is where most projects stall.

‍

Typical challenges of FedRAMP

DIY sprawl and config drift

Homegrown Terraform and ClickOps lead to inconsistent environments and failures in boundary protection, logging, and encryption enforcement.

Audit complexity

Lacking automated logs and change history makes it painful to prove control implementation—especially under a Third-Party Assessment Organization’s (3PAO) microscope.

Security control overload

Encryption, RBAC, log retention, vulnerability scanning, and network isolation often turn into a tangled mess of half-documented infrastructure.

FedRAMP baselines keep changing

Keeping up with Moderate/High baselines, evolving FIPS encryption standards, and AWS service updates stretches thin teams even thinner.

Hard to self-manage

Even well-resourced teams struggle to maintain secure, compliant environments without falling behind on patching, remediation, or documentation.

Gruntwork accelerates your

compliance journey

We give DevOps engineers reusable patterns to build on, so you can customize them for your workloads (e.g. EC2, ECS, EKS). Our IaC components are built to provide a clear audit trail, consistent environments, and detect and remediate drift.

And you own the infrastructure. It’s deployed in your accounts, under your control, and you get the code.

Key capabilities:

Actually-easy audits

Gruntwork Pipelines provide a complete, inspectable trail for every change. See what changed, who approved it, when it was tested, and when it hit prod, all on the same PR.

Drift detection and automatic remediation

Make sure whatever’s running matches what’s declared. Run drift detection as often as you like and get pull requests to automatically report and resolve drift.

Modular, production-ready OpenTofu/Terraform

Enforce consistency and reduce custom development with pre-built modules for VPCs, IAM, security, and more.

Private, segmented network topologies

Enforce boundary protection via private subnets, NAT gateways, NACLs, and security group defaults that reduce audit surface area.

Centralized access control and logging

Enforce RBAC with IAM roles, monitor access via CloudTrail, and centralize logs for FIPS-validated retention and review.

Gruntwork helps you cover the infrastructure backbone of FedRAMP Moderate/High baselines. Pipelines enforce change control, Account Factory enforces environment consistency, and Drift Detection catches config issues before your auditors do.

Case Study

Clara Copilot's path toward

FedRAMP

Clara Copilot, a dual-use AI startup serving U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), needed infrastructure they could trust to handle national security workloads—without a full DevOps team.

Before Gruntwork

One-person DevOps team, who was also an exec

Juggling infra with HR, compliance, and fundraising

Some Terraform, but mostly ClickOps and untracked scripts

Basic AWS setup with inconsistent configs across envs

No clear path to enforce NIST 800-53 or 800-171 compliance

With Gruntwork

Used IaC modules from Gruntwork’s Service Catalog

Rapidly deployed consistent envs using tested, minimal config patterns

Laid a strong foundation for future FedRAMP and CUI compliance

Audit readiness and dev confidence

Outcomes

A faster start toward NIST 800-53 and 800-171 alignment

Confidence with DoD stakeholders during early-stage security evaluations

Eliminated guesswork with prescriptive IaC patterns for DNS, ECR, IAM, and more

Didn’t need to hire a full-time DevOps engineer during a critical growth phase

"Gruntwork put us in a strong position for FedRAMP authorization. The infrastructure is standardized, auditable, and aligned with the NIST controls we need for 800-53 and 800-171. That’s taken a huge burden off my plate.”

Tyson Myhres, Co-Founder & CTO

‍

What sets

Gruntwork

apart

Faster than DIY

Deploy FedRAMP-aligned infrastructure foundations in hours instead of months of internal debate and rewrites.

More control than PaaS

Gruntwork runs in your AWS accounts. No lock-in, no shared tenancy, no opaque platforms.

Cheaper than compliance consultants

Avoid six-figure infrastructure rewrites and slow handoffs. Gruntwork ships with ongoing updates and engineering support.

Built for real DevOps teams

Technical documentation, expert support, and flexibility for engineers — not buzzwords for sales and marketing.

Who Gruntwork is for

DevOps engineers at SaaS companies targeting federal contracts

Teams pursuing FedRAMP Moderate or High with limited internal resources

Startups scaling beyond sandbox environments

Mature orgs modernizing legacy environments for NIST alignment

Let’s discuss how Gruntwork can help

We’ll start by asking about your current infrastructure needs and goals. Then we’ll show you what’s possible with Gruntwork.

Thank you! Your submission has been received!

Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.

Thousands of engineers build with Gruntwork

Frequently Asked Questions

FAQ

Gruntwork and FedRAMP compliance

Who Gruntwork is for

Platform

Services

Open Source

Resources

Company