The alternative would be to open up the SSH port on security groups & connect to them using SSH private keys via either a bastion host (jump box) or a VPN connectivity to the VPCs. Session Manage is great, but what if you have a real need to use SSH? In our case, we wanted to run Ansible playbooks on several private instances at once & since Ansible tries SSH connection to the instances, it would be great if we could somehow use the machine’s local SSH client with SSM. AWS Systems Manager User Guide Still Need SSH? Session Manager provides secure and auditable node management without the need to open inbound ports, maintain bastion hosts, or manage SSH keys. You can use either an interactive one-click browser-based shell or the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI). With Session Manager, you can manage your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, edge devices, and on-premises servers and virtual machines (VMs). Session Manager is a fully managed AWS Systems Manager capability. One of the routine activities you will end up doing several times a day when working with EC2 instances, is connecting to a terminal on your instances.įor security reasons, none of our security groups have the SSH port open, and most of the instances are in private subnets anyway.ĪWS Systems Manager Session Manager is a great way to connect to your instances, especially in such restricted environments. We here at QloudX manage hundreds of Amazon EC2 instances for our clients.

Terminal session manager