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

• Open AWS Systems Manager and Select Quick setup and select the defaults

• Ensure you select all the instances.

• Systems Manager should be setup