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