One of the most powerful aspects of AWS is their Identity and Access Management (IAM) service. The obvious aspect of its power is that it controls who can do what with all the resources inside your AWS account. But the non-obvious side is how configurable it is. You can encode permissions that are so finely grained that a Lambda Function could, for example, be given just enough permissions to be able to read one attribute from one record for the current user of a DynamoDB Table.

I’ve learned a lot about serverless in my first full year at Stackery after joining from the Ops-focused automation company, Puppet. I’ve learned how to deploy rich CMS-backed web applications in a serverless way, how to cast incantations using CloudFormation’s intrinsic functions, but most of all I’ve learned that there’s a lot to learn in order to be successful in AWS.

Mutual of Enumclaw, a 100-year-old insurance company from Washington, modernized their policy processing system in order to reduce TCO and focus on their software and customers - not infrastructure. However, they realized serverless development still presents many DevOps challenges like environments, workflows, documentation and local development.

What if I told you that a text file could help you tackle the normally tedious and time-consuming task of setting up and managing your AWS infrastructure? Good news. It’s actually easy to do with an AWS CloudFormation template. A typical AWS infrastructure can consist of numerous resources that might need to be managed across different accounts and regions. Setup is often a manual process that can be overwhelming to maintain.