omnissm

OmniSSM - EC2 Systems Manager Automation

Automation for AWS Systems Manager using hybrid mode. Using hybrid mode for ec2 instances brings a few benefits.

• No instance credentials needed
• Centralized management of servers across numerous accounts.
• Facilitate cross cloud/datacenter usage of SSM

Switching from ec2 to hybrid mode, does mean we have to reproduce a bit of functionality

• Secure instance registration.
• Instance deactivation/garbage collection on delete.
• Instance metadata enrichment.

We provide a few bits of automation tooling to enable seamless hybrid mode.

• A register api via api gw lambda for registering cloud instances. We handle secure introductions via cloud instance identity document signature verification.

• a host registration/initialization cli for interacting with the register api and initializing ssm-agent on instance boot.

• a custom inventory plugin for collecting process information.

• a config subscriber for enriching a ssm instance with tags and cloud inventory, and deleting/gc instances from ssmo.

• an sns topic subscriber for enriching instances that are registering after a config event has already fired (ie slow boot).

Client Configuration

The OmniSSM agent is configured by environment variables as well as a YAML configuration file and command-line flags. OmniSSM checks for the file omnissm.yaml in either /etc/omnissm/ or the current directory at runtime.

Parameters:

Either the register endpoints map, or the single register endpoint override must be set.

Links

• Hybrid SSM Manual Install https://amzn.to/2Hlu9o2
• EC2 Instance Identity Documents https://amzn.to/2qLuGt9
• Google Instance Identity https://bit.ly/2HQexKc

Todo

• scale testing
• test with large cfg messages
• sns subscriber for slow boot instances
• systemd timer example for initialize & inventory
• custom inventory output directly to agent pickup location
• osquery inventory example