AWS Management Tools Blog

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 […]

The Automation service, which is part of Amazon EC2 Systems Manager, helps you save time and the effort associated with routine management operations. Automation workflows are streamlined, repeatable, and auditable. For example, you can easily automate manual tasks such as golden image creation, baking applications into Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), or patching and updating agents. […]

This post was written by Babul Mehta, Software Development Engineer with Amazon Web Services. Amazon EC2 Systems Manager documents define the actions that Systems Manager services perform on your managed instances. Documents are essentially a series of steps executed in sequence, and can be versioned and shared across accounts (and even publicly). Systems Manager includes […]

Recently, AWS Config announced support for AWS CloudFormation stacks. You can now start tracking the current and historical configuration of your CloudFormation stacks, and get notified via Amazon SNS when your stack configuration changes. You can also use a managed AWS Config rule to check whether your CloudFormation stacks are sending event notifications to an […]

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 […]

Are you aware when someone uses your AWS account credentials to perform some activity? Are you notified in time? When you first create an AWS account, you begin only with a single sign-in identity that has complete access to all AWS services and resources in the account. This identity is called the root user and […]

AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of your AWS account. Hence, it’s crucial to monitor any changes to CloudTrail and make sure that logging is always enabled. With CloudTrail, you can log, continuously monitor, and retain events related to API calls across your AWS infrastructure. CloudTrail provides […]

With the launch of the new CloudWatch Dashboards API and CloudFormation support it is now easy to automate your CloudWatch Dashboards and make sure they monitor all the resources that you launched when creating your CloudFormation stacks. Let’s now see how you can use the new CloudWatch Dashboards API to dynamically update your dashboard as […]

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 […]

AWS now supports tagging of AWS OpsWorks Stacks application environments. Tags that you add to a stack and layer now automatically propagate down to all underlying AWS resources, including Amazon EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancing load balancers, Amazon RDS databases, Amazon EBS volumes, and Amazon ECS clusters. This benefits everyone who wants to track their […]