AWS Systems Manager is a service that many administrators overlook, but if you take the time to learn its capabilities, you will find that it offers invaluable ways to group large numbers of resources together to issue batch operations quickly and efficiently. At the time of writing, it provides a quick overview of EC2 instances, S3 buckets, and RDS databases. One of its most common uses is patch management on a fleet of EC2 instances. If you have ever spent time manually patching a large number of instances, you know that it can be a tedious and error-prone process. Systems Manager solves this problem for you. But patching isn't all that it offers. In this recipe, you will learn how to take advantage of one of the newer features that has been added to Systems Manager so that you can log in to your EC2 instances directly from the console, with no key pairs or external terminal window required.