Management and Governance
Topics
Amazon CloudWatch
Amazon CloudWatch
AWS Auto Scaling
AWS Auto Scaling
AWS Control Tower
AWS Control Tower
As enterprises migrate to AWS, they typically have a large number of applications and distributed teams. They often want to create multiple accounts to allow their teams to work independently, while still maintaining a consistent level of security and compliance. In addition, they use AWS’s management and security services, like AWS Organizations, AWS Service Catalog and AWS Config, that provide very granular controls over their workloads. They want to maintain this control, but they also want a way to centrally govern and enforce the best use of AWS services across all the accounts in their environment.
Control Tower automates the set-up of their landing zone and configures AWS management and security services based on established best practices in a secure, compliant, multi-account environment. Distributed teams are able to provision new AWS accounts quickly, while central teams have the peace of mind knowing that new accounts are aligned with centrally established, company-wide compliance policies. This gives you control over your environment, without sacrificing the speed and agility AWS provides your development teams.
AWS Systems Manager
AWS Systems Manager
AWS Systems Manager contains the following tools:
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Resource groups: Lets you create a logical group of resources associated with a particular workload such as different layers of an application stack, or production versus development environments. For example, you can group different layers of an application, such as the frontend web layer and the backend data layer. Resource groups can be created, updated, or removed programmatically through the API.
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Insights Dashboard: Displays operational data that the AWS Systems Manager automatically aggregates for each resource group. Systems Manager eliminates the need for you to navigate across multiple AWS consoles to view your operational data. With Systems Manager you can view API call logs from AWS CloudTrail
, resource configuration changes from AWS Config , software inventory, and patch compliance status by resource group. You can also easily integrate your Amazon CloudWatch Dashboards, AWS Trusted Advisor notifications, and AWS Personal Health Dashboard performance and availability alerts into your Systems Manager dashboard. Systems Manager centralizes all relevant operational data, so you can have a clear view of your infrastructure compliance and performance. -
Run Command: Provides a simple way of automating common administrative tasks like remotely executing shell scripts or PowerShell commands, installing software updates, or making changes to the configuration of OS, software, EC2 and instances and servers in your on-premises data center.
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State Manager: Helps you define and maintain consistent OS configurations such as firewall settings and anti-malware definitions to comply with your policies. You can monitor the configuration of a large set of instances, specify a configuration policy for the instances, and automatically apply updates or configuration changes.
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Inventory: Helps you collect and query configuration and inventory information about your instances and the software installed on them. You can gather details about your instances such as installed applications, DHCP settings, agent detail, and custom items. You can run queries to track and audit your system configurations.
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Maintenance Window: Lets you define a recurring window of time to run administrative and maintenance tasks across your instances. This ensures that installing patches and updates, or making other configuration changes does not disrupt business-critical operations. This helps improve your application availability.
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Patch Manager: Helps you select and deploy operating system and software patches automatically across large groups of instances. You can define a maintenance window so that patches are applied only during set times that fit your needs. These capabilities help ensure that your software is always up to date and meets your compliance policies.
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Automation: Simplifies common maintenance and deployment tasks, such as updating Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). Use the Automation feature to apply patches, update drivers and agents, or bake applications into your AMI using a streamlined, repeatable, and auditable process.
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Parameter Store: Provides an encrypted location to store important administrative information such as passwords and database strings. The Parameter Store integrates with AWS KMS to make it easy to encrypt the information you keep in the Parameter Store.
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Distributor: Helps you securely distribute and install software packages, such as software agents. Systems Manager Distributor allows you to centrally store and systematically distribute software packages while you maintain control over versioning. You can use Distributor to create and distribute software packages and then install them using Systems Manager Run Command and State Manager. Distributor can also use AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies to control who can create or update packages in your account. You can use the existing IAM policy support for Systems Manager Run Command and State Manager to define who can install packages on your hosts.
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Session Manager: Provides a browser-based interactive shell and CLI for managing Windows and Linux EC2 instances, without the need to open inbound ports, manage SSH keys, or use bastion hosts. Administrators can grant and revoke access to instances through a central location by using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
policies. This allows you to control which users can access each instance, including the option to provide non-root access to specified users. Once access is provided, you can audit which user accessed an instance and log each command to Amazon S3 or Amazon CloudWatch Logs using AWS CloudTrail .
AWS CloudFormation
AWS CloudFormation
You can use the AWS CloudFormation sample
templates
AWS CloudTrail
AWS CloudTrail
With CloudTrail, you can get a history of AWS API calls for your account, including API calls made using the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, command line tools, and higher-level AWS services (such as AWS CloudFormation). The AWS API call history produced by CloudTrail enables security analysis, resource change tracking, and compliance auditing.
AWS Config
AWS Config
With AWS Config, you can discover existing and deleted AWS resources, determine your overall compliance against rules, and dive into configuration details of a resource at any point in time. These capabilities enable compliance auditing, security analysis, resource change tracking, and troubleshooting.
AWS OpsWorks
AWS OpsWorks
AWS Service Catalog
AWS Service Catalog
AWS Trusted Advisor
AWS Trusted Advisor
AWS Personal Health Dashboard
AWS Personal Health Dashboard
AWS Managed Services
AWS Managed
Services
AWS Console Mobile Application
The AWS Console Mobile Application
The Console Mobile Application allows AWS customers to monitor resources through a dedicated dashboard and view configuration details, metrics, and alarms for select AWS services. The Dashboard provides permitted users with a single view a resource's status, with real-time data on Amazon CloudWatch, Personal Health Dashboard, and AWS Billing and Cost Management. Customers can view ongoing issues and follow through to the relevant CloudWatch alarm screen for a detailed view with graphs and configuration options. In addition, customers can check on the status of specific AWS services, view detailed resource screens, and perform select actions.
AWS License Manager
AWS License Manager
AWS License Manager integrates with AWS services to simplify the management of licenses
across multiple AWS accounts, IT catalogs, and on-premises, through a single AWS account.
License administrators can add rules in AWS Service Catalog
AWS Well-Architected Tool
The AWS Well-Architected Tool
To use this free tool, available in the AWS Management Console, just define your workload and answer a set of questions regarding operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization. The AWS Well-Architected Tool then provides a plan on how to architect for the cloud using established best practices.