Introduction to AWS Systems Manager. Welcome to this introduction to AWS Systems Manager to gain operational insights. In this segment, you will get an overview of AWS Systems Manager, including features and use cases. Systems Manager is a set of fully managed AWS services that enable automated configuration and ongoing management of systems at scale in a secure and reliable way across all your Linux and Windows instances running on Amazon EC2, your own data center or other cloud platforms. Its focus on automation enables configuration and management of systems where you can select the instances you want to manage and define the tasks you want to perform.

You can also define when modifications are to be applied by configuring a maintenance window. You can create and update system images, collect software inventory, apply system or application patches and configure Linux and Windows operating systems, also manage the state of your instances, all from the same console or the command line interface.

You don't have to be concerned about setting up and managing different tools for different platforms. You also don't need to configure secure shell keys, or secure shell or remote desktop ports or bastion hosts in order to establish connectivity to your instances. Systems Manager is built for cloud-type scalability, which uses agility and elasticity, allowing you to manage one or thousands of instances, no matter if they have long running or temporary workloads.

You also get AWS optimized native integration with the rest of AWS management tools, such as Identity and Access Management for access control, CloudTrail for Auditing, CloudWatch events for event driven automation, and many other AWS configuration and management tools.

There are no complex licensing models. Most of Systems Manager's functionality is available at no charge. Systems Manager provides extensive building blocks and services where you can choose to build value of your own on top of these existing services.

In short, with Systems Manager, you can use automation to manage traditional and cloud workloads by performing essential setup, maintenance and management tasks, while maintaining complete visibility and control over your entire machine farm independent of operating system, location and number of instances.