Port 22 was closed. The instance didn't even need a public IP address; it just needed the SSM Agent and an outbound connection.
Every single command Sarah typed was being logged to CloudWatch and S3. If something went wrong, Alex wouldn't have to guess what happened—he could replay the entire session. Still using SSH on AWS? Check out Session Manager instead!
She showed him her screen. With one click in the AWS Console—or a simple command in the terminal—she was inside an instance. No bastion hosts, no managing .pem files, and no open inbound ports. Port 22 was closed
Whenever a new developer joined the team, Alex had to manually add their public key to dozens of EC2 instances. When someone left, he had to scrub those keys like a digital crime scene. He constantly worried about port 22 being open to the world, and his audit logs were basically a series of shrug emojis. If something went wrong, Alex wouldn't have to
Sarah used IAM policies to decide exactly who could log in. No more manual key rotations.
Once upon a time, there was a DevOps engineer named Alex. Alex spent half his life playing "SSH Key Tetris."