AWS Cloud Operations & Migrations Blog
Tag: EC2 Systems Manager
Organize Parameters by Hierarchy, Tags, or Amazon CloudWatch Events with Amazon EC2 Systems Manager Parameter Store
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 […]
Windows AMI Patching and Maintenance with Amazon EC2 Systems Manager
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. […]
Amazon EC2 Systems Manager Documents: Support for Cross-platform Documents and Multiple Steps of the Same Type
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 […]
Running Salt States Using Amazon EC2 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 […]
Join a Microsoft Active Directory Domain with Parameter Store and Amazon EC2 Systems Manager Documents
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 […]
Using Microsoft PowerShell DSC with Amazon EC2 Systems Manager
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 […]
Automate Running Tasks Using Amazon EC2 Systems Manager Maintenance Windows
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 […]
Getting Started with Patch Manager and Amazon EC2 Systems Manager
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. […]
Running Ansible Playbooks using EC2 Systems Manager Run Command and State Manager
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 […]
More Automation Actions for Amazon EC2 Systems Manager
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 […]