Cfn on The IT Hollow

Using AWS CloudFormation Drift Detection

Wed, 14 Nov 2018 15:02:55 +0000

Today, AWS announced the release of the long anticipated drift detection feature for CloudFormation. This feature has been a common feature request for many of the AWS customers that I speak with to ensure their deployments are configured as expected. This post will take you through why this is an important feature and how you can use it.

Whats the Big Deal?

If you’re not familiar with it already, CloudFormation is a free service from AWS that lets you describe your infrastructure through a YAML or JSON file and deploy the configuration. Simply define your desired state and CloudFormation will deploy the resources and arrange them so that dependent services are (usually) deployed in the right order. If you’re familiar with Ansible, Chef, or Puppet, this concept of a desired state shouldn’t be new.

Quality Checking Infrastructure-as-Code

Mon, 05 Nov 2018 14:55:55 +0000

If you’ve been doing application development for long, having tools in place to check the health of your code is probably not a new concept. However, if you’re jumping into something like Cloud and you’ve been an infrastructure engineer, this may be a foreign concept to you. Isn’t it bad enough that you’ve started learning Git, JSON, YAML, APIs etc on top of your existing skill sets? Well, take some lessons from the application teams and you may well find that you’re improving your processes and reducing the technical debt and time to provision infrastructure as code resources as well.

AWS Custom Resources

Tue, 04 Sep 2018 14:00:04 +0000

We love to use AWS CloudFormation to deploy our environments. Its like configuration management for our AWS infrastructure in the sense that we write a desired state as code and apply it to our environment. But sometimes, there are tasks that we want to complete that aren’t part of CloudFormation. For instance, what if we wanted to use CloudFormation to deploy a new account which needs to be done through the CLI, or if we need to return some information to our CloudFormation template before deploying it? Luckily for us we can use a Custom Resource to achieve our goals. This post shows how you can use CloudFormation with a Custom Resource to execute a very basic Lambda function as part of a deployment.