From what I can tell, it's a combination of a few useful tools:
1) Configuration monitoring – if an app is running on six identical servers, and all of the sudden one box has a different config file sitting on it, or somebody installs updates that they weren't supposed to, I'd like an email about that.
2) A "source of truth" for your cloud resources. Smarter people than I have articulated our need for this at my employer, but the simplest way I know of to describe it is that you can query the configuration of your boxes to figure things out. "Show me all the boxes running Nginx 1.6," for example, or "Show me all the boxes that haven't gotten the latest Bash update." Not sure how it does that, but it seems to be in there.
I don't think AWS Config handles either of your examples. It records the state of various AWS resources, not the state of the software/environment running within an EC2 instance.
Comments
From what I can tell, it's a combination of a few useful tools:
1) Configuration monitoring – if an app is running on six identical servers, and all of the sudden one box has a different config file sitting on it, or somebody installs updates that they weren't supposed to, I'd like an email about that.
2) A "source of truth" for your cloud resources. Smarter people than I have articulated our need for this at my employer, but the simplest way I know of to describe it is that you can query the configuration of your boxes to figure things out. "Show me all the boxes running Nginx 1.6," for example, or "Show me all the boxes that haven't gotten the latest Bash update." Not sure how it does that, but it seems to be in there.
I don't think AWS Config handles either of your examples. It records the state of various AWS resources, not the state of the software/environment running within an EC2 instance.