I have 6 ec2 web servers on amazon linux and will be upgrading to php 7.3 soon.
It is becoming a pain to upgrade all these servers manually as there are just clones of each other (for the most part) (web servers). (apache,...etc...etc)
I use yum packages and it isn't a hard thing to install packages; but I am looking for a way to make it easier to manage these servers so I can just do it once.
I have heard of chef and other tools such as this; but I want to use something super simple and free
Create a base image with your application and and launch multiple instances of it. In AWS speak this means creating an AMI. Launch the desired number of instances quickly with an Auto Scaling group.
When happy with this new version, cut over to the new VMs and scale the old ones down. Cut over enough times and you can call it a blue green deployment method.
As an alternative, automate the playbook for doing the upgrade. Your choice of tools here, many things can run commands on multiple hosts.
If you are looking for a simple solution to automate the process of AMI creation then packer is your best choice
https://medium.com/@devopslearning/100-days-of-devops-day-27-introduction-to-packer-d77089ecac01
If you don't want to manage Chef/Puppet then have you explored AWS System Manager https://docs.aws.amazon.com/systems-manager/latest/userguide/ssm-agent.html
