AWS Systems Manager
What is AWS Systems Manager
- Amazon defines as "AWS Systems Manager is a collection of capabilities for configuring and managing your Amazon EC2 instances, on-premises servers and virtual machines, and other AWS resources at scale"
- It provides the set of fully managed AWS Services & Capabilities
- It enables automated configuration & ongoing management of systems
Benefits
- Hybrid: Same set of tools for on-premise & Cloud
- Cross Platform: Works on Windows & Linux
- No extra cost.
- Scalable
- AWS Optimized
Capabilities
- Operations Management
- CloudWatch Dashboards
- OpsCenter
- Resource Groups
- Trusted Advisor & Personal Health Dashboard
- Actions & Change
- Automation
- Maintenance Windows
- Instances & Nodes
- Configuration Compliance
- Inventory Management
- Managed Instances
- Activations
- Session Manager
- Run Command
- State Management
- Patch Management
- Distributor
- Shared Resources
- System Manager Documents
- Parameter Store
How Systems Manager Works
Systems Manager Setup
-
As the first step lets set the following IAM user/roles
- Create an IAM Role for EC2 Machines with predefined policy AmazonEc2RoleforSSM
- Create a IAM user or to the existing user add the permission to the predefined policy AmazonSSMFullAccess
-
Ensure you have some ec2 machines running or create them. In this sample while creating the ec2 machines i have created the machines with following tags
- EC2 Machine 1:
- Env: Prod
- OS: Linux
- Distribution: Ubuntu
- EC2 Machine 2:
- Env: Dev
- OS: Linux
- Distribution: Redhat
- EC2 Machine 3:
- Env: Prod
- OS: Windows
- Distribution: Windows Server 2016
- EC2 Machine 1:
-
Open AWS Systems Manager and Select Quick setup and select the defaults
-
Ensure you select all the instances.
-
Systems Manager should be setup