AWS Management Tools Blog

Category: Amazon Systems Manager

Manage your fleet at scale using EC2 Systems Manager

This guest post was written by Michael Baker, who works as a DevOps Engineer for the Infrastructure Engineering team at Bulletproof Introduction The Bulletproof Group Limited has spent many years investing in system automation to assist with fleet management at scale. More recently, we have spent a significant amount of time working with Amazon EC2 […]

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Reducing Configuration Drift with Amazon EC2 Systems Manager State Manager and Amazon CloudWatch Events

This post was written by Anupam Shrivastava, Software Development Engineer with Amazon Web Services. State Manager helps you automate the process of keeping your EC2 instances or virtual machines (VM) in your on-premises data center in a desired state. Some use cases for State Manager include: Ensuring that instances are joined to a Windows domain […]

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The Right Way to Store Secrets using Parameter Store

This guest post was written by Evan Johnson, who works in the Security team at Segment. The way companies manage application secrets is critical. Even today, the most high profile security companies can suffer breaches from improper secrets management practices. Having internet facing credentials is like leaving your house key under a doormat that millions […]

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Amazon EC2 Systems Manager Automation is now a Amazon CloudWatch Events Target

Today we are excited to announce a new target for Amazon CloudWatch Events: Amazon EC2 Systems Manager Automation. Through this integration, Automation workflows can be triggered by a schedule, or when specific AWS system events occur. Automation is part of Amazon EC2 Systems Manager.  Using Automation you can build workflows that are streamlined, repeatable and auditable. […]

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Maintenance Windows: Support for New Task Types Using Amazon EC2 Systems Manager

In Amazon EC2 Systems Manager, the Maintenance Windows service allows you to define a set of tasks, along with the instances where those tasks should be run and a run schedule. In this post, I talk about a new feature for Maintenance Windows—support for New Task types. Maintenance Windows now supports Systems Manager Automation documents, […]

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Improving Security through Delegated Administration with Amazon EC2 Systems Manager Automation

EC2 Systems Manager Automation simplifies common system maintenance and deployment tasks. You can create workflows to automate repetitive tasks such as systems configuration, deployment and maintenance. Workflows are authored in JSON and saved as Automation documents. Automation service operates in the context of the user that invokes the execution. Automation documents can be authored with […]

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Secure, Scalable, and Efficient Instance Management Using Amazon EC2 Run Command

This post was written by Miguel João, Cloud Software Engineer at OutSystems. The OutSystems low-code development platform allows users to create and deliver high-quality web and mobile apps a lot faster, leveraging all the advantages of visual programming with few of the drawbacks. Of course, providing this high productivity, enterprise-grade Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution can be […]

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How Cloudticity Automates Security Patches for Linux and Windows using Amazon EC2 Systems Manager and AWS Step Functions

This guest post was written by Uri Katsir, AWS Architect at Cloudticity, and Thomas Zinn, Project Manager at Cloudticity. As a provider of HIPAA-compliant solutions using AWS, Cloudticity always has security as the base of everything we do. HIPAA breaches would be an end-of-life event for most of our customers. Having been born in the […]

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Combating Configuration Drift Using Amazon EC2 Systems Manager and Windows PowerShell DSC

Configuration drift occurs when a system “drifts” or changes from its intended configuration. It is caused by having inconsistent configuration items (CIs) across environments. Amazon EC2 Systems Manager is a management service that helps you automatically collect a software inventory, apply OS patches, create system images, and configure Windows and Linux operating systems. These capabilities […]

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Organize Parameters by Hierarchy, Tags, or Amazon CloudWatch Events with Amazon EC2 Systems Manager Parameter Store

This post was written by Lusha Zhang, Software Development Engineer with Amazon Web Services. Parameter Store, part of Amazon EC2 Systems Manager, provides a centralized, encrypted store to manage your configuration data, whether plaintext data (database strings) or secrets (passwords, API keys for example). Because Parameter Store is available through the AWS CLI, APIs, and […]

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