Add Superpowers to your Operations with AWS Systems Manager

Operations can be tough, but can be even tougher at cloud scale! There must be some way we can make it better, more engaging and dare I say it - fun! Let's have a look at what tools we have over at AWS Systems Manager what can help us overcome the Operational Overhead we may have. Look at things that can help replace our Hop Boxes, a place where we can store parameters and secrets, understand the health and status of our workloads all in a single place.

Transcript

1. Add Superpowers to your
   Operations with AWS SSM
   Darko Meszaros
   Developer Advocate - AWS
   @darkosubotica
   ln/darko-mesaros
   twitch.tv/ruptwelve
   youtu.be/ruptwelve
   

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2. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
   Agenda for today
   • What are Operations?
   • Visibility
   • Control
   • Other Tools out there
   • Wrap up
   

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3. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
   

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4. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
   So, what do you think are operations?
   
   

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5. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
   Operations with agility
   Optimize
   Analyze and reduce cost,
   improve efficiency and security
   posture
   Act
   Take operational
   action on resources
   Audit
   Audit resource configurations,
   user access, and policy
   enforcement
   Monitor
   Monitor resources
   and applications
   

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6. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
   Operations with agility
   Monitor resources and applications
   Optimize to reduce cost and improve security posture
   Manage resources and take operational action
   Audit user activity and resource configurations
   Amazon CloudWatch
   AWS Trusted Advisor
   AWS Cost and Usage Report
   AWS Cost Explorer
   AWS Systems Manager
   AWS CloudTrail
   AWS Config
   

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7. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
   A central point from which to
   manage operations
   

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8. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
   Any environment
   Operate any
   AWS or external
   resource centrally
   Open
   Agent is
   open-sourced
   on GitHub
   Multi-platform
   Windows and
   Linux support
   Automated
   Multi-account,
   multi-Region
   automation
   AWS Systems Manager
   Centrally manage cloud resources at any scale
   

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9. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
   Benefits
   Shorten the
   time to detect
   problems
   Easy to use
   Automation
   Improve
   Visibility and
   Control
   Manage Hybrid
   Environments
   Maintain
   Security and
   Compliance
   

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10. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    How it works
    AWS Systems Manager
    Systems Manager helps you
    safely manage and operate
    your resources at scale
    Group resources
    Create groups of
    resources across
    different AWS services,
    such as applications or
    different layers of an
    application stack
    Visualize data
    View aggregated
    operational data by
    resource group
    Take Action
    Respond to insights and
    automate operational
    actions across resource
    groups
    

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11. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    $(whoami) Darko Mesaroš / Darko Meszaros /
    Дарко Месарош
    @darkosubotica
    ln/darko-mesaros
    twitch.tv/ruptwelve
    youtu.be/ruptwelve
    

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12. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    Where do we start?
    
    

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13. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    A DevOps engineer!
    

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14. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    Bob
    

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15. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    Billy
    

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16. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    Brigitte
    

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17. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    Boris
    

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18. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    Boris
    
    

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19. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    The job is done, right?
    
    

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20. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    You Build It, You Run It
    “This brings developers into
    contact with the day-to-day
    operation of their software. It
    also brings them into day-to-
    day contact with the
    customer.”
    – Werner Vogels
    CTO, Amazon.com
    

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21. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    Developer
    Sandbox
    Dev Pre-Prod
    Workloads
    Security
    Security
    AWS Organizations
    Shared
    Services
    Network
    Log Archive Prod
    Team Shared
    Services
    Network Path
    Sandbox Data Center
    Orgs: Account management
    Log Archive: Security logs
    Security: Security tools, AWS Config rules
    Shared services: Directory, limit monitoring
    Network: AWS Direct Connect
    Dev Sandbox: Experiments, Learning
    Dev: Development
    Pre-Prod: Staging
    Prod: Production
    Team SS: Team Shared Services, Data Lake
    Infrastructure
    Boris
    
    

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22. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
    

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23. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    What is where, and how
    does it look like?
    

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24. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    

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25. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    Collect information about your instances and the
    software installed on them.
    Collect data about:
    Inventory
    • Applications
    • AWS components
    • Files
    • Network configuration
    • Windows updates
    • Instance details
    • Services
    • Tags
    • Windows Registry
    • Windows roles
    • Custom inventory
    

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26. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    Insights Dashboard
    Automatically aggregates and displays operational data
    for each resource group through a dashboard.
    • View compliance history and change tracking for
    Patch
    • Customize Systems Manager Compliance to create
    your own compliance types
    • Remediate issues by using Systems Manager Run
    Command, State Manager, or Amazon CloudWatch
    Events
    

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27. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    Explorer
    Explorer is a customizable dashboard, providing key
    insights and analysis into the operational health and
    performance of your AWS environment.
    • Sync data across your AWS Organization
    • OpsItems
    • Non-compliant instances for patching
    • Managed Instances
    • Instance Count
    • Instance by AMI
    

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28. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    You cannot measure what you do not see
    • Insight into what is running in your workload
    • Understand the operational health
    • Multi-Account/Hybrid
    

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29. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    How do you react to is
    events?
    

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30. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    View, investigate, and resolve operational work items
    (OpsItems) related to AWS resources.
    • Integrated with Amazon CloudWatch Events
    • Create CloudWatch Events rules that automatically
    create OpsItems
    • Easy remediation using runbooks
    • Runbooks can be associated with OpsItems
    • Designed to complement your existing case
    management systems
    OpsCenter
    

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31. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    Enough talk – I want action!
    

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32. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
    

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33. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    

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34. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    Stay in control, but keep
    moving fast at scale?
    

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35. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    

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36. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    Safely automate common and repetitive IT operations
    and management tasks.
    • Execute Python
    • Execute PowerShell
    • Optionally require approvals
    • Call AWS APIs
    • Run commands on EC2 Instances
    • Run a combinations of these actions
    • Trigger via CloudWatch Events or execute using the
    AWS Management Console, CLI and SDKs
    Automation
    

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37. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    ▶
    
    

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38. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    Safe, secure remote management of your instances at
    scale without logging into your servers.
    • Automate common admin tasks
    • Install or bootstrap applications
    • Build a deployment pipeline
    • Capture Log Files
    • Join instances to a domain
    Run Command
    

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39. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    We need to limit access to our
    resources! Create a bastion-host so
    that we can have a secure point of
    access to the rest of the servers!
    ⚠
    

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40. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    
    

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41. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    Session Manager
    A browser-based interactive shell and CLI for managing
    Windows and Linux EC2 instances.
    • Grant and Revoke access with IAM policies
    • Audit user access
    • Log commands to S3 or CloudWatch
    • Port forwarding
    

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42. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    

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43. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    Select and deploy operating system and software
    patches automatically across large groups of Amazon
    EC2 or on-premises instances.
    • Automate patching
    • Use patch baselines to set rules for auto approval
    • Create exceptions to approve or reject patches
    • Schedule maintenance windows
    • Scan for compliance
    Patch Manager
    

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44. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    I was told there would be demos
    

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45. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
    

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46. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    

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47. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    Change Calendar
    Systems Manager Change Calendar lets you set up date
    and time ranges when actions you specify may or may
    not be performed in your AWS account.
    • Query the calendar using the API or CLI
    • Review changes before they're applied
    • Apply changes only during appropriate times
    • Get the current or upcoming state of the calendar
    

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48. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    

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49. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    A centralized store to manage your configuration data,
    whether plain-text data such as database strings or
    secrets such as passwords.
    • A secure, scalable, hosted secrets management
    service
    • Improve your security posture by separating your
    data from your code
    • Store configuration data and secure strings in
    hierarchies and track versions
    • Control and audit access at granular levels
    Parameter Store
    

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50. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
    

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51. © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    Takeaways!
    • Understand how is what and where is it
    • When doing something – do it at scale, but make sure to be safe doing so
    • Remove all the heavy lifting you do not need to do!
    

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52. Thank you!
    © 2020, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
    Darko Meszaros
    Developer Advocate - AWS
    @darkosubotica
    ln/darko-mesaros
    twitch.tv/ruptwelve
    youtu.be/ruptwelve
    

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