Category: AWS Systems Manager

Like Ansible, Salt is a popular tool for configuration management. As with other tools in the same category, one of the key challenges is efficiently managing the deployment and execution of the automation directives. Amazon EC2 Systems Manager is a powerful configuration management platform. One of its key benefits is that it allows customers to […]

The process of configuration management can be difficult, in particular when performed at scale. An example could be an application, running on your fleet, which uses configuration values like database connection strings or passwords. For deployment best practices, isolate application configuration portions so that you can separately deploy configuration values specific to each environment, for […]

Amazon EC2 Systems Manager is a management service that helps you automatically collect software inventory, apply OS patches, create system images, and configure Windows and Linux operating systems. These capabilities help you define and track system configurations, prevent drift, and maintain software compliance of your EC2 and on-premises configurations. By providing a management approach that […]

In Amazon EC2 Systems Manager, a maintenance window defines a specific set of tasks, along with a set of managed instances where those tasks should be run and the schedule for when the tasks should run. Each task also has a velocity and error threshold defined (for example, run the task on at most four […]

At last year’s re:Invent, AWS launched Amazon EC2 Systems Manager, which helps you automatically apply OS patches within customized maintenance windows, collect software inventory, and configure Windows and Linux operating systems. These capabilities enable automated configuration and ongoing management of systems at scale and help maintain software compliance for instances running in Amazon EC2 or on-premises. […]

If you are running complex workloads on AWS and managing large groups of instances, chances are you are using some form of configuration management. Configuration management tools are effective in automating the deployment and configuration of applications on hybrid instances. However, efficiently managing the distribution and execution of the playbooks or recipes, centrally managing the […]

Recently, AWS released five new Amazon EC2 Systems Manager Automation actions. These actions allow you to: Launch an AWS CloudFormation stack Delete the stack Insert a delay in your workflow Copy and encrypt Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) Tag AWS resources These actions extend the existing collection of actions, which can be used to orchestrate tasks […]

When you are managing instances at scale, it’s important to be able to define and apply software configurations as well as ensuring that the instances don’t deviate from the expected state. That way, you can make sure that your applications and infrastructure operate as you’d expect. State Manager, which was launched as part of Amazon […]

Bastion hosts (also called “jump servers”) are often used as a best practice for accessing privately accessible hosts within a system environment. For example, your system might include an application host that is not intended to be publicly accessible. To access it for product updates or managing system patches, you typically log in to a […]

Customers use AWS CodeDeploy to automate application deployment because it provides a uniform method for: Updating applications across development, staging, and production environments. Handling the complexity of updating applications and avoiding service downtime. However, deploying and configuring applications often requires access to secrets and configuration data, such as API keys or database passwords, in source […]