All 7 AWS Systems Manager questions
More in AWS Systems Manager
What is Systems Manager Session Manager, and how does it improve the security of accessing EC2 instances compared to traditional SSH? How does Systems Manager Patch Manager automate the process of keeping instances up to date with the latest security patches? What are Systems Manager Automation documents, or runbooks, and how do they help standardize common operational procedures? How does Systems Manager Inventory help maintain visibility into the software and configuration details installed across a fleet of managed instances? How can Systems Manager State Manager ensure that instances remain in a consistently defined configuration state over time, even after reboots or scaling events? How can Systems Manager be integrated with AWS Config and Security Hub to build a comprehensive automated compliance remediation pipeline?
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What is AWS Systems Manager and what operational tasks does it help automate across your AWS resources?

Beginner

Answer

AWS Systems Manager is a management service that gives you visibility and control over your infrastructure on AWS, providing capabilities such as running commands remotely across many instances at once, managing configuration and patching, storing parameters and secrets, and organizing operational data, all from a single unified interface, reducing the need for manual, one off operational work across your fleet of resources.
aws ssm send-command --instance-ids i-1234567890abcdef0 --document-name AWS-RunShellScript --parameters commands='["sudo yum update -y"]'
Real-world example A systems administrator uses Systems Manager to simultaneously apply a security patch across two hundred EC2 instances with a single command, rather than manually connecting to and updating each instance individually.

Common follow-ups: What are Systems Manager documents and how do they define automated actions?;Does using Systems Manager require an agent installed on managed instances?

EC2 & Compute;AWS CLI & SDKs
All 7 AWS Systems Manager questions