Introducing EC2 Systems Manager

As the name suggests, EC2 Systems Manager is a management service that provides administrators and end users with the ability to perform a rich set of tasks on their EC2 instance fleet such as periodically patching the instances with a predefined set of baseline patches, tracking the instances' configurational state, and ensuring that the instance stays compliant with a state template, runs scripts and commands over your instance fleet with a single utility, and much, much more! The EC2 Systems Manager is also specifically designed to help administrators manage hybrid computing environments, all from the comfort and ease of the EC2 Systems Manager dashboard. This makes it super efficient and cost effective as it doesn't require a specialized set of software or third-party services, which cost a fortune, to manage your hybrid environments!

But how does AWS achieve all of this in the first place? Well, it all begins with the concept of managed instances. A managed...