Configuration Management

Configuration management is an approach to ensuring accurate and consistent configuration of your systems. While automation is concerned with carrying out tasks, configuration management is primarily concerned with enforcing and monitoring the internal configuration state of your instances to ensure they’re what you expect. Such configuration states primarily include but aren’t limited to operating system configurations and what software is installed.

As with automation in general, configuration management tools use either imperative or declarative approaches. AWS offers both approaches using two tools to help you achieve configuration management of your EC2 and on-premises instances: Systems Manager and OpsWorks.

Systems Manager

Systems Manager uses the imperative approach to get your instances and AWS environment into the state that you want.

Command Documents

Command documents are scripts that run once or periodically that get the system into...