Category: AWS Systems Manager

This is the second post in a two-part series about AWS Systems Manager Incident Manager. In the first post, we covered onboarding steps like creating contacts, an escalation plan, and a response plan in Incident Manager. In this post, we discuss the integration between Incident Manager and Amazon CloudWatch and how Incident Manager components manage an […]

There are times when you need fairly large storage volumes for use cases that are infrequent but needed recurrently. For example, one AWS customer needed to have multiple terabytes of Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes available for taking MSSQL full backups. The backup job was scheduled as a weekly task but the customer […]

Customers have been using AWS Systems Manager Automation documents for years to define to define a sequence of actions to take on their AWS infrastructure such as invoking an AWS Lambda function or copying an Amazon Machine Image (AMI). These documents, now referred to as runbooks, are simple to use, yet powerful. The aws:executeScript action […]

In this post, we will show you how to configure AWS Systems Manager OpsCenter to aggregate security findings from AWS Security Hub into OpsCenter as operational issues. OpsCenter helps operations engineers and IT professionals reduce issue resolution time by providing a central place to view, investigate, and resolve security issues.  AWS Systems Manager Explorer provides […]

While deploying critical changes to large-scale applications, unexpected errors can render the application unavailable to end users until the changes are manually rolled back. As a best practice, many Amazon teams use AWS AppConfig to deploy application configuration changes. AWS AppConfig is a capability of AWS Systems Manager that you can use to create, manage, […]

In this blog post, I show you how to set up public holidays calendars using AWS Systems Manager Change Calendar and suspend your AWS CodePipeline pipelines during the critical holidays in these calendar events. For example, let’s say an application release pipeline in your AWS account builds and deploys a new version of the application […]

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 […]

If you’re a cloud operations engineer, you have the financial and operational responsibility to implement a monitoring, tracking, and resolution process to keep a fleet of EC2 instances healthy while staying within budget. In this blog post, I show how you can quickly detect, track, troubleshoot, and resolve operational issues at scale with Amazon CloudWatch, […]

Most enterprises find it hard to maintain control of the commercial licensing of Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, and IBM products due to limited visibility. They wind up over-provisioning licenses to avoid the headache with third party license providers or under-provisioning licenses, only to be faced with steep penalties. If your enterprise uses AWS, you can address this […]

AWS AppConfig enables you to manage and quickly deploy application configurations without doing time-consuming code deployments. With AWS AppConfig, you can create an application configuration, validate it to make sure it is free of syntax or semantic errors, and deploy it to your targets at a controlled rate at runtime. If AWS AppConfig encounters errors […]