Systems Manager Features

Sessions Manager

• Session Manager is a fully managed Systems Manager capability that lets you manage your EC2 instances, on-premises instances and VMs through an interactive one-click browser-based shell or through the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI).

• Some benefits:

  • Centralized access control to instances using IAM policies - Administrators have a single place to grant and revoke access to instances.

  • No open inbound ports and no need to manage bastion hosts or SSH keys.

  • One-click access to instances from the console and CLI.

  • Port forwarding - Redirect any port inside your remote instance to a local port on a client.

  • Cross-platform support for Windows, Linux, and macOS.

  • Logging and auditing session activity using CloudTrail and CloudWatch Logs.

Run Command

• Systems Manager Run Command lets you remotely and securely manage the configuration of your managed instances.

• It enables you to automate common administrative tasks and perform ad hoc configuration changes at scale.

• For example, it can be used to: install or bootstrap applications, build a deployment pipeline, capture log files when an instance is terminated from an Auto Scaling group and join instances to a Windows domain, etc.

Patch Manager

• Systems Manager Patch Manager automates the process of patching managed instances with both security related and other types of updates.

• You can scan instances to see only a report of missing patches (scan) or you can scan and automatically install all missing patches (scan and install).

• A patch baseline defines which patches are approved for installation on your instances - You can specify approved or rejected patches one by one. Also, the rejected list overrides both the rules and the approve list.

• Systems Manager Maintenance Windows let you define a schedule for when to perform potentially disruptive actions on your instances such as patching an operating system, updating drivers, or installing software or patches.

Parameter Store

• Systems Manager Parameter Store provides secure, hierarchical storage for configuration data management and secrets management.

• You can store data such as passwords, database strings, Amazon Machine Image (AMI) IDs, and license codes as parameter values.

• You can store values as plain text or encrypted data.

• You can reference Systems Manager parameters in your scripts, commands, SSM documents, and configuration and automation workflows by using the unique name that you specified when you created the parameter.