AWS CloudFormation Modules, now available for public use through the AWS CloudFormation Public Registry, are a huge step forward for enterprise IT teams to create large manageable Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) practices around CloudFormation. We’re excited to support the launch today with our own Bastion module. Unsure what Modules are? Read on.
Designing and running workloads in the cloud is complex. Many services need to fit together in just the right way for optimal performance. The opportunity for error lurks around every corner. This is a high-stakes game with a huge premium on getting things right from the beginning. Even small mistakes can snowball. To help, AWS studied the architectures of thousands of its customers and supplemented that learning with insights from experts.
In my last post we looked at the structure of AWS IAM policies and looked at an example of a policy that was too broad. Let's look at a few more examples to explore how broad permissions can lead to security concerns. By far the most common form of broad permissions occurs when policies are scoped to a service but not to specific actions.
Stackery can be used to create a new CloudFormation template or to quickly visualize an existing one. Code is automatically generated as you simply drag-and-drop resources on a graphical grid. The experience is much more intuitive than previous generation tools like AWS CloudFormation Designer. Stackery visualizes resources the way a human would perceive them, grouping related resources together.
As your infrastructure grows, getting a handle on all your AWS resources can be overwhelming. While that’s probably an understatement, help could be right around the corner. We’ll cover a few CloudFormation visualizer tools that can help, but let’s level set first. AWS CloudFormation is an established Infrastructure-as-Code solution that allows you to define, provision, organize, manage and update your AWS resources from a text-file template.
Defining and managing your AWS resources using an Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) approach implemented with CloudFormation templates makes a lot of sense. While implementing IaC is a widely accepted best practice, it does come with challenges. Managing your infrastructure from lines of code and text-file templates, in the case of AWS CloudFormation, can quickly become overwhelming. We built stack.new to ease that pain.
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.
