AWS SSM is a management tool intended to give those operating in AWS more control and observability into their existing infrastructure. SSM provides functionality in the form of a number of small services that when combined together revolutionize how the monitoring, management, and orchestration of existing resources can be performed.
Vertical Relevance’s AWS Practice consists of prescriptive solutions that are often designed and built using AWS SSM services to get the most out of AWS once infrastructure has been stood up.
Several core use cases we leverage AWS SSM for:
- Security & Compliance: We’ve leveraged SSM in numerous ways whether it be monitoring and reporting back the security of an instance, the triage of an infected instance, or the patching of existing instances. SSM plays a significant role in maintaining the security of existing compute resources in AWS.
- DevOps: SSM is our tool of choice for what happens after your traditional deployment steps of a CI/CD process. Any configuration that cannot be performed prior to the deployment will leverage SSM to do so.
- SRE: Once resources have been stood up, testing components of the application or OS are critical to ensure that the system is performing as expected. By using SSM we can execute commands against an existing instance to perform those tests
We look for opportunities to simplify AWS resource management through the utilization of SSM to perform required tasks on existing infrastructure.