AWS Systems Manager Customers

Before we had access to AWS tools, we had to do lots of configuration and process logging and then absorb everything into a centralized platform to understand security events after the fact. By using AWS Systems Manager and the other AWS tools, we’ve gone from zero to 100 percent real-time visibility, a night-and-day contrast with our prior security posture.

We chose AWS Systems Manager because we were looking for a robust solution for our support personnel to access Amazon EC2 instances along with capability of an audit trail. Before, we used bastion hosts, which required us to manage and maintain a host for each VPC. This process cost us engineering time, and required 20+ additional instances for the hosts. With Systems Manager, we can rid engineers of this undifferentiated heavy lifting. And as a result, we have reduced our footprint of bastion hosts per VPC, saving numerous instances. In addition, we have been able to manage critical patching of numerous Amazon EC2 instances by leveraging existing personnel, improving our security and compliance posture.

Our use of AWS Systems Manager has saved hundreds of engineer hours per year by fully automating patch management and automatically fixing broken hosts. We use Amazon CloudWatch for day-to-day autoscaling, as well as resource utilization management and tracking. With AWS CloudTrail, we can audit logs for changes, allowing us to meet compliance requirements. Using AWS Config, we can easily visualize and navigate timelines of configuration changes in our environment. Overall, the Management and Governance services have allowed us to establish secure management at scale while saving costs.

AWS Systems Manager allows us to monitor our infrastructure and empower developers, as we can enfranchise development teams to be accountable for their stacks. We use the AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store as database in conjunction with CloudFormation. EAB provides common components in every account, such as VPC, subnets, jump hosts, standard security groups for different application profiles (e.g., public HTTPS access), and more. We refer to these as our ‘universal fact database.’ These components are all recorded into Systems Manager parameters that can be incorporated as inputs into our CloudFormation templates. In addition, with Systems Manager Documents and Associations, we can handle various maintenance tasks. For example, we can apply OS patches for any server tagged as a ‘pet’ and sync IAM users with OS users.

AWS Management and Governance tools are at the core of our security framework. With AWS Systems Manager, we have been able to improve visibility into the inventory of our AWS environment. Now, we know exactly which AWS resources are being consumed by the development and application teams across our organization. We also use Systems Manager to automate our patch deployment process, which has dramatically reduced the time that administrators spend on software updates. With Systems Manager, our teams and our customers can gain peace of mind.

Amazon CloudWatch Logs has dramatically decreased the amount of time we spend troubleshooting our services. Instead of having to monitor and check all of our resources for errors individually, we can query our CloudWatch Logs, which show all the activity across our AWS environment. We use CloudFormation to create consistent environments for our users. Instead of working for weeks to create servers, configure them, and document all the configurations, we use CloudFormation templates to define our infrastructure, which has saved a significant amount of time and allowed us to automate our deployments. With Systems Manager, we no longer have to spend time checking all our AWS services individually, but have a single user interface that allows us to view and perform tasks on multiple systems at once.

Many customers want us to shepherd them through the complexity and help them best take advantage of the technology. When things go wrong, customers expect Rackspace to step in and act swiftly to solve their problem. Using AWS Systems Manager, we can do that much more quickly.