Planning your next steps

Well, we have covered a lot of new features and services in this chapter, however, there are still a few things that I would recommend you try out on your own. First up is the Parameter Store!

The Parameter Store is yet another managed service provided by Systems Manager and is designed to store your instance's configuration data such as passwords, database strings, license codes, and so on, securely. You have the added option of storing the data either as plain text, or even in encrypted form, and later reference it in your automation documents or policy documents as variables rather than complete plain text. But that's not even the best part of it! Using Parameter Store, you can also reference your data across other AWS services such as EC2 Container Service and AWS Lambda, thus making this a centralized store for storing all your configurational and secure data.

Another important feature that I would recommend using in your environments is Resource Data Sync. Resource Data Sync enables you to store your instance's metadata collected from different Systems Manager services in a centralized location. You can configure it to collect metadata from instance operating systems, applications, Microsoft Windows updates, network configurations, and much more! This comes in really handy in production environments where you want to analyze the software and patch compliances of your instances.