Tag: Systems Manager Automation

As organizations migrate workloads to the cloud, they want to ensure their teams spend more time on tasks that move the organization forward and less time managing infrastructure. Installing patches and configuring software is what AWS calls undifferentiated heavy lifting, or the hard IT work that doesn’t add value to the mission of the organization. […]

The first post in this series, Reinventing automated operations (Part I), covered the importance of operations in the cloud and how deferring the creation of an operations plan can slow down your migration. In this post, I’ll share the primary mechanism of iterative improvement (aka flywheel) that AWS Managed Services (AMS) uses to increase operational […]

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 […]

One of the security best practices that is time-consuming to manage is enforcing IAM access key rotation for IAM users. Access keys give IAM users the ability to connect to Amazon EC2 instances. Therefore rotating these regularly (for example, every 90 days) is one of the key steps in protecting your resources from unauthorized access. […]

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. […]

Instances might have to call certain API actions or access certain resources during an AWS Systems Manager Automation execution. What if you don’t want to apply the additional permissions to the instance’s existing instance profile? In this post, I show you how to provide temporary permissions to instances when executing an Automation within the document […]

Introduction Enterprises today continue to face challenges maintaining an inventory of all of their infrastructure. They need to ensure timely patching of their servers spread across their on-premises and cloud environments using the same set of tools. In this guest blog post, Divya Elaty, VP, Cloud Engineering at Moody’s, and Sarat Guttikonda, Global Solutions Architect […]

AWS Systems Manager Automation simplifies common administrative and maintenance tasks of AWS resources. Using Systems Manager Automation, you can execute predefined tasks/workflows in the form of AWS Systems Manager documents (SSM documents) that you can write yourself or use community published documents. A SSM document defines the actions that Systems Manager performs on your AWS […]

Update 01/2023: AWS Systems Manager announces Patch Policies, enabling cross account and cross Region patching. Patch Policies provide a user experience in a single console to easily define and enforce patch compliance across accounts and Regions with a few clicks. For more information, see Centrally deploy patching operations across your AWS Organization using Systems Manager […]