leejunkim

Systems Manager

2 min read

Systems

A service that helps you manage large scale server fleets & application running on top of servers and other compute resources

  • a huge service with many capabilities built for complex compute architectures
  • Manages & automates AWS resources
  • Infrastructure management, patching, automation

Motivation

  • What if you’re not just running some batch jobs, but running a large system with 100s or 1000s of servers, maybe even a combinations of servers in the cloud AND in data centers (on-premises)?
  • Example Use Cases:
    • Running shell commands on EC2 instances across multiple regions
    • Patch management to update OS/software automatically
    • Automating security compliance for AWS resources

Main Capabilities

  • diagram
  1. Node management
    • Manages individual nodes (servers)
    • Helps visualize, group, and manage the fleet of servers
    • allows to connect to different servers via session manager
      • servers include the ones in your local data center!
      • session manager - one of the connection options you see when you try to connect to an EC2 instance
    • Allows you to orchestrate patches and server-wide commands & apply patches to multiple servers at once
  2. Operations management
    • Help with day to day operations
    • manage incidents, so if problems arise you can solve it from there
    • fleet monitoring
    • even set up automation, so you have certain solutions for certain problems when they arise
  3. Application Management - Parameter store & App Config
    • manage application parameters in one central place
      • it’s common that the code that makes an app needs certain params (ex. username of user who wants to connect)
    • if a value changes, you can use a parameters store
      • the the application can automatically reach to this and get the data from there
    • AppConfig
      • manage application wide configuration - you can set certain values which can be pushed into the app code, without redeploying
  4. Change management
    • Makes fleet changes & updates EASY
    • allows automating change requests

Parameter store

  • Basically a secure place to store configuration values that your applications need, like:
    • API endpoints
    • database connection strings
    • Environment-specific settings
  • Instead of “hard-coding” these values directly in your application code, you store them in Parameter Store
  • When using Parameter Store, application code has to actively query that service to fetch a certain value from it

AppConfig

  • essentially builds on Parameter Store by adding a push-based configuration system
  • You can store values with it, too - but you can then also publish new versions and have your application code use those values automatically.

Graph View

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