AWS Cloud Operations & Migrations Blog
Tag: Configuration Management
Manage EC2 Launch Templates at scale during rehost migrations with AWS MGN
Many customers rehost their environments to AWS using AWS Application Migration Service (MGN), and have to prepare future-state configuration for every server they are migrating within each migration wave. When a migration wave includes multiple servers, customers have to manually configure multiple EC2 Launch Templates in the AWS console. For each server migrated using AWS […]
Reinventing automated operations (Part II)
The first post in this series, Reinventing automated operations (Part I), covered the importance of operations in the cloud and how deferring the creation of an operations plan can slow down your migration. In this post, I’ll share the primary mechanism of iterative improvement (aka flywheel) that AWS Managed Services (AMS) uses to increase operational […]
Use AWS Control Tower lifecycle events to automate configuration of AWS accounts for ServiceNow IT operations management
Several organizations that I work with use ServiceNow’s IT Operations management capabilities for their on-premises infrastructure and want to leverage the same capabilities for their AWS environment as well. Some of the core capabilities of ServiceNow’s IT Operations management are ServiceNow Discovery, Event Management and Cloud Management. Currently, customers who want to enable ServiceNow’s Cloud […]
Reinventing automated operations (Part I)
This is the first in a two-part series that covers lessons learned at AWS Managed Services (AMS) as we help customers and partners achieve operational excellence on AWS. To create a secure and consistent cloud operating model, you need both operational experience and AWS skills. In my conversations with customers, it is common for experienced […]
Decision-making framework for configuration with AWS AppConfig
In this blog post, we show you how to separate configuration from code, explain the differences between dynamic and static configuration, and help you determine which values to use in your dynamic configuration. We also share processes to keep bloat down in your application configuration. Finally, we introduce you to AWS AppConfig, which allows you […]
AWS Management and Governance at Re:Invent 2020
AWS re:Invent is always an exciting time of the year to engage with our customers to learn, and share information about our services and features. Due to the current pandemic, re:Invent is pivoting to a free and virtual format presented across 3 weeks from November 30 to December 18 this year. Yes, you read that […]
Deploying application configuration to serverless: Introducing the AWS AppConfig Lambda extension
At AWS, we feel strongly that separating application configuration from application code is a best practice. Being able to deploy configuration independently from code makes it possible to build services like Service Quotas and launch new services and features right as we announce them. If we didn’t separate these, even a simple configuration change would […]
Automating Amazon CloudWatch Alarms with AWS Systems Manager
Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and observability service built for DevOps engineers, developers, Site Reliability Engineers (SRE), and IT managers. CloudWatch provides you with data and actionable insights to monitor your applications, respond to system-wide performance changes, optimize resource utilization, and get a unified view of operational health. Are you looking for an automated way […]
Keeping Ansible effortless with AWS Systems Manager
Ansible is a powerful tool because it lets you handle many complicated tasks with minimal effort. Some time ago, I published running Ansible playbooks using Systems Manager blog when the first version of the AWS Systems Manager (SSM) document was released, which enabled support for Ansible. In that blog, I discussed the tight integration of […]
Using State Manager over cfn-init in CloudFormation and its benefits
Introduction If you have deployed Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) instances via AWS CloudFormation, you most likely want to install software or configure the operating system of the instance. To accomplish this, you may have used cfn-init, one of the CloudFormation helper scripts available to AWS customers since February 2012. However, since that time AWS […]