Patent attributes
A security assessment system of a computing resource service provider performs security analyses of virtual resource instances, such as virtual machine instances and virtual data store instances, to verify that certain invariable security requirements are satisfied by the instances' corresponding configurations; these analyses are performed before the instances are provisioned and deployed. If the security checks, which can be selected by the administrator of the resources, fail, the requested resources are denied deployment. Notifications identifying the faulty configuration(s) may be send to the administrative user. A template for launching virtual resource instances may be transformed into an optimized template for performing the pre-deployment security checks, such as by storing information needed to perform the checks within the optimized template itself.