Gruntwork is a platform that helps engineering teams build secure, auditable, and production-grade AWS infrastructure using OpenTofu/Terraform. While we don't offer a turnkey compliance package or claim certification under any particular framework, we provide the infrastructure-as-code foundation that helps you implement many of the technical safeguards required by NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5.
NIST SP 800-53 is a comprehensive catalog of security and privacy controls used by federal agencies and contractors. It’s the basis for compliance efforts such as FedRAMP, FISMA, and increasingly CMMC. Gruntwork helps engineering and operations teams address the infrastructure portion of these controls—particularly the ones related to identity and access management (AC), system and communications protection (SC), auditing (AU), and configuration management (CM).
Gruntwork modules are designed to work across both commercial AWS and AWS GovCloud partitions, making them suitable for Moderate and High baseline environments. Whether you're handling Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI), preparing for a third-party audit, or just standardizing your AWS environments against federal baselines, Gruntwork gives you tested, versioned, and reusable building blocks.
Gruntwork includes:
- Infrastructure modules that implement best practices like encryption, IAM, logging, and network isolation, which map to many technical NIST 800-53 controls (e.g., SC-12, SC-28, AC-2).
- Pipelines that provide full audit trails: every infrastructure change includes proof of testing, approvals, and deployment—all tied to a single pull request. Learn more about Gruntwork Pipelines and read the docs.
- Drift Detection to automatically detect and remediate configuration drift, ensuring what’s running matches what’s declared. Read the docs on Pipelines Drift Detection.
- Account Factory to create consistent, guardrail-enforced environments across dev, staging, and prod, reducing manual work and preventing “snowflake configurations.” Learn more about Account Factory and read the docs.
While you still need to manage your own policies, documentation (e.g. SSPs), and third-party assessments, Gruntwork helps ensure your infrastructure won't be the blocker when you're working toward NIST-aligned compliance.
