Prox圜ommand bash -c 'aws ssm start-session -target %h -document-name AWS-StartSSHSession -parameters 'portNumber=%p'' As the AWS docs show, if you enter something like this into your ~/.ssh/config : host i-* mi-* The good news is, you can slot Session Manager right into your SSH configuration and have the ssh command transparently use it. After all, we’ve been using SSH for years. While being able to connect to virtual terminals on remote Linux machines from your local command line is great, it would be a bit nicer if we didn’t have to learn a whole new way of invoking it. Here we can see me starting a Session Manager session via the browser:Ī Session Manager session via the AWS CLI Making Session Manager a little friendlier No more cleaning up users’ keys when they move on from your company. You can control who has access to which instances using IAM roles and policies. You no longer have to manage SSH keys separately from your AWS policies.

Session Manager only relies on your instance running the Systems Manager agent, a daemon that runs by default on Amazon Linux and is easily installed on other distributions.

You do not need any firewall ports open or any bastion hosts.

While this sounds just like SSH, there are some great advantages: Session Manager allows you to open a shell on your EC2 instances, either via the browser-based AWS Console or via the AWS CLI.

What is AWS Systems Manager Session Manager?ĪWS Systems Manager (still known as “SSM” due to its former name of Simple Systems Manager - a rare naming inconsistency for AWS) is a set of tools that lets you view, control and patch your fleet of EC2 instances. If you’re an engineer, this probably sounds amazing. If you’re a network administrator or someone concerned with network security, you’re probably thinking this sounds terrible. You then tell sshuttle which remote host you want to use and it will connect via SSH and run some more Python on the remote host, creating a tunnel across which you can access arbitrary ports on hosts on the remote network. It is written in Python and you install it on your client machine, typically with pip. Sshuttle is a lightweight VPN that can run anywhere you have an SSH connection. Airwalk was recently asked whether it would be possible to use sshuttle with Session Manager, a part of AWS Systems Manager, so I decided to find out.

Terminal session manager