Session Manager is a secure and audited way to manage nodes without the necessity of opening any incoming ports, maintaining bastion servers or managing SSH keys.
While working with AWS and AWS CLI, Session Manager is a vital plugin. Because to use the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) to initiate sessions with your managed nodes, you must first install the Session Manager plugin on your local machine.
You will be able to manage your Amazon Elastic Compute CloudAmazon EC2 Instances, edge devices, on-premises servers, and virtual machines – VM’s with Session Manager. For this the interactive one click browser based shell (accessible through AWS UI Console) or the AWS Command Line Interface can be used.
Note: Use the most recent version of the Session Manager CLI plugin as it will have latest and improved functionalities.
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Session Manager plugin installation on Windows
To install the Session Manager plugin with EXE installer, use the following URL to download the plugin.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/session-manager-downloads/plugin/latest/windows/SessionManagerPluginSetup.exeZipped version of the installer is available in below URL
https://s3.amazonaws.com/session-manager-downloads/plugin/latest/windows/SessionManagerPlugin.zipRun the downloaded installer, and follow the on-screen instructions.Let it install to the default directory.
%PROGRAMFILES%\Amazon\SessionManagerPlugin\bin\Session Manager plugin installation on Mac OS
Utilize the following command to download the zipped version.
curl "https://s3.amazonaws.com/session-manager-downloads/plugin/latest/mac/sessionmanager-bundle.zip" -o "sessionmanager-bundle.zip"
Unzip the package.
unzip sessionmanager-bundle.zip
Run the install command.
sudo ./sessionmanager-bundle/install -i
/usr/local/sessionmanagerplugin -b
/usr/local/bin/session-manager-pluginSession Manager plugin installation on Ubuntu
Use the following command to download the deb package.
curl "https://s3.amazonaws.com/session-manager-downloads/plugin/latest/ubuntu_64bit/session-manager-plugin.deb" -o "session-manager-plugin.deb"
Run the install command.
sudo dpkg -i session-manager-plugin.deb
Verify the Session Manager plugin installation
Run the below command in AWS CLI to verify if the plugin is installed properly
Session-manager-plugin
The below message is returned if the installation was successful.
The Session Manager plugin is installed successfully. Use the AWS CLI to start a session.Conclusion
AWS Session Manager is an important plugin to establish a session to different compute nodes. It is a pre-requisite step to many of the other actions performed on AWS. And this post serves as a reference to those articles.
For any details that is not covered in this quick setup guide, please refer to official documentation here.
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