AWS Cloud Operations & Migrations Blog

Tag: Configuration Management

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 Compute Cloud (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 […]

How to execute Chef recipes using AWS Systems Manager

It’s exciting to see how many AWS customers are taking advantage of AWS Systems Manager to manage and deploy infrastructure configuration at scale. I have previously blogged about the benefits of using AWS Systems Manager with configuration management tools, including Ansible and Salt. Recent improvements to the configuration management functionality, has made the service even […]

Deploy Conformance Packs across an Organization with Automatic Remediation

AWS Config conformance packs help you manage configuration compliance of your AWS resources at scale – from policy definition to auditing and aggregated reporting using a common framework and packaging model. Many enterprises have multiple AWS accounts to manage their AWS infrastructure and demand an easy way to manage compliance policy definitions across their organization. […]

Introducing AWS Config Multi-Account, Multi-Region support for Advanced Query

I’m excited to introduce you to our latest feature addition, AWS Config Advanced Query. Advanced query, launched last year, makes it easy to query the resource configuration properties of your AWS resources for audit, compliance, or operational troubleshooting using simple SQL-like queries. With our latest release, you can now use Advanced query with configuration aggregators, enabling you […]

How to Create an AWS Cross-Account Support Case Dashboard

At AWS, our customer obsession drives us to leave no stone unturned in helping our customers achieve success. Therefore, when a customer finds an interesting way to create valuable functionality using a combination of AWS services, we want to let our other customers know about it so they can also reap the benefits. A great […]

Auto-populate instance details by integrating AWS Config with your ServiceNow CMDB

Introduction Many AWS customers either integrate ServiceNow into their existing AWS services or set up both ServiceNow and AWS services for simultaneous use. One challenge in this use case is the need to update your configuration management database (CMDB) when a new spin-up instance appears in AWS. This post demonstrates how to integrate AWS Config […]

Enhancing configuration management at Verizon using AWS Systems Manager

In large enterprise organizations, it’s challenging to maintain standardization across environments. This is especially true if these environments are provisioned in a self-service manner—and even more so when new users access these provisioning services. In this post, I describe how we at Verizon found a balance operating between agility, governance, and standardization for our AWS […]

How DocuTAP automates cloud operations using AWS Management Tools

Now that large organizations have the flexibility to quickly launch infrastructure and leverage new services, they must find the means to maintain consistent controls without restricting development velocity. In this guest post, Brian Olson, Cloud Architect at health care company DocuTAP, discusses how a combination of AWS Management and Governance services and AWS developer tools […]