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Therefore you ignore all the on- line help material that is kindly written and published by a myriad of technical writers. Until you hit a dead end. Where something doesn’t work as expected and you need to start to debug the work you have done borrowed. This is likely the time where you wish you had a better understanding of the inner workings of a tool.
I have used Cloud. Formation for quite some time now. Looking back at my path of enlightenment I do remember a number of items I wish I had understood better or paid some more attention at the time. For that reason I would like to share a few nuggets that will provide new starters on the topic a somewhat flattened learning curve and provide an outlook on the opportunities and challenges that follow on your first discoveries with Cloud. Formation templates.
Open your mind to automation. From the standpoint of new adopter of AWS cloud services you may be tempted to disregard Cloud. Formation templates as a time waster: Automating the deployment of a vanilla EC2 instance with Cloud. Formation doesn’t save you any time over the manual provisioning of the resources through the AWS Console. However, we need to be careful to not cheat ourselves here.
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One always had to touch the machine to install or at least configure the application stack, database environment, etc. At this time it was also commonly accepted that the process of . And this doesn’t even include the time for ordering and delivery. Also, when was the last time that you only ever needed one of each type? That must have been at one of our side projects where development, test and production was all based on a single code base running on a server hidden somewhere in the attic.
Today you tend to require at least four environments to facilitate the software development life cycle. For good measure you probably also want to add one more for a Blue. Green Deployment. This is the time where you (should) start to manage your infrastructure as code.
And at the same time automation becomes the king of the kingdom. AWS provides a good variety of helper scripts that come pre- installed with all Amazon provided machine images or as executables for the installation on your own images. In combination with the instructions you provide within the stack templates those automation scripts enable you to deploy an entire infrastructure stack with the click of a few buttons . Cloud- init is an open source package that is widely used for the bootstrapping of cloud instances and we can dive deeper into this tool set in another post. Cfn- init accepts a number of command line options.
As a minimum you need to provide the name of the Cloud. Formation stack and the name of the element that contains the instance metadata instructions./opt/aws/bin/cfn- init - v - -stack Your. Stack. Name - -resource Your. Resource. Name. This either is the launch configuration or an EC2 instance definition inside the Cloud.
Formation template. It is important for you to understand that the instance itself does not get . In fact: the instance itself has no appreciation of the fact that its launch was initiated by Cloud. Formation. Instead, the cfn- init script reaches out to the public Cloud. Formation api endpoint to retrieve the template instructions.
This is important to realize if you are launching your instance inside a VPC that has no connectivity to the internet or provides the connectivity via a proxy server that requires explicit configuration. Configuration sets.
Cloud. Formation init instructions can be grouped into multiple configuration sets. I strongly suggest you take advantage of this functionality to support the separation of concerns and enable reuse of template fragments.
With its procedural template instructions, Cloud. Formation doesn’t necessarily support DRY coding practices – and neither is it supposed to do so. However, if your set- up requires a common set of applications or configurations installed and configured on each instance (think anti- virus, compliance or log forwarding agents, etc.), you are well placed to keep those parts separated in their own configuration set. In combination with a centralised source control management system or an advanced text editor like sublime or notepad++, you can then fairly easy maintain and quickly re- use those common parts of your stack. Bear in mind though that this isn’t the only solution to ensure common components are always rolled into the stack. In a previous post I have written about the advantages and trade- offs for scripted launches of instances vs the use of pre- baked, customised machine images. Above solution doesn’t scale well for larger environments.
If you want to automate your infrastructure across tens or hundreds of templates, you will soon hit the limits. As your environment requires patching, and you start re- factoring your code fragments, you need to ensure that every stack in your environment is kept up- to- date.
Once you have reached that point, you will start to investigate the use of continuous integration solutions that hook into AWS for a more automated management of stacks across multiple environments. Be mindful of alternatives. Which leads me nicely to my closing words.
I am sure everyone is aware of the popular saying that goes along the line of. When I started with scripted deployments in AWS I made good use of the user data script.
I partioned the various steps within my script and made it re- usable. I split it up into individual bash or powershell scripts that I deployed them to the instances and called them from within the user data or cascaded them amongst each other. Until my fleet of instances started increasing. Therefore I discovered that a lot of the effort managing the fleet could be saved in using Cloud. Formation. As part of this the instance definitions moved to Cloud.
Formation Init metadata and provided me with additional flexibility. Cloud. Formation Init then allowed me to define in a declarative way what actions I wanted to perform on an instance and in which order – much alike the YAM based cloud- init configuration, but at the scale of a whole stack, not just a single instance. No longer did I have to navigate to a specific directory, download a RPM package using wget or curl, install it using the package manager, ensure the application is started at boot time, and so on. Instead I can just provided declarative instructions inside one or more of the 7 supported configuration keys.
As discussed earlier, I yet again felt very smart, I started to organise my individual declarative instructions in configuration sets, managed them in a central repository for re- use, etc. Until, well, you can probably already guess it by now: until I discovered that it is worth considering the use of AWS Opsworks and Elastic Beanstalk resources inside Cloud. Formation stack. AWS Opsworks abstracts your configuration instructions further away from the declarative configuration in the init metadata. Using a managed Chef service you have access to a large variety of pre- defined recipes for the installation and configuration of additional components of your system. Since those recipes are continuously maintained and updated by the wider community you don’t need to re- invent the wheel over and over again. While I do have to admit that the re- invention of the wheel has served humankind quite well to date (imagine our cars would still use stone wheels), it is quite obvious that the wisdom and throughput of a whole community can be much higher then the capability of an individual. The same can be said about Elastic Beanstalk.
Where Ops. Works helped you to accelerate the deployment of common components, Elastic Beanstalk allows you to automate the resilient and scalable deployment of your application into the stack without you even having to describe or configure the details for load balancing and scaling. In summary. The point I would like to make is that in a world where “the slow eats the fast”, we can never settle at a given solution at any given time. Our whole community, including AWS, is constantly evolving to allow organisations to innovate, develop and ship features at an ever increasing rate.
This is achieved in the continuous abstraction away from the core underlying infrastructure and services and the combination of traditional features with new functionality and innovation. To stay on top of the game.