AWS Management Tools Blog

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 […]

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 […]

On June 1st, AWS Config announced support for Amazon CloudWatch alarms. CloudWatch alarms are used on any of your CloudWatch metrics to send notifications or take other automated actions. You can now start tracking the current as well as historical configuration of your alarms and get notified via Amazon SNS when your alarm configuration changes. […]

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. […]