AWS DevOps Blog

Delete Your Stacks But Keep Your Data

When you delete a stack, by default AWS CloudFormation deletes all stack resources so that you aren’t left with any strays. This also means any data that you have stored in your stack are also deleted (unless you take manual snapshots).  For example, data stored in Amazon EC2 volumes or Amazon RDS database instances are […]

Using the New CloudFormation Parameter Types

Invalid input for parameter values is the number one reason for stack creation failures. To make it easier to enter the correct parameter values and to improve parameter validation, the AWS CloudFormation team recently added the ability to set additional data types for parameters. Parameter types enable CloudFormation to validate inputs earlier in the stack […]

Automatically Deploy from GitHub Using AWS CodeDeploy

(This post has been updated on October 1, 2018 to reflect the deprecation of GitHub services. You can learn more about this deprecation here. We now recommend setting up automatic deployments from GitHub using AWS CodePipeline and AWS CodeDeploy.) AWS CodeDeploy is a service that makes it easy to deploy application updates to Amazon EC2 […]

Adding Comments inside AWS CloudFormation Templates

AWS CloudFormation simplifies provisioning on AWS. You can apply software engineering best practices such as version control, code reviews, unit tests, and continuous integration to the AWS CloudFormation templates, the same way you apply those best practices to your application code. For example, with application code, you can add descriptive comments to help you document various portions […]

Using OpsWorks to Perform Operational Tasks

Today Jeff Barr blogged about a new feature that gives users the ability to deploy and operate applications on existing Amazon EC2 instances and on-premises servers with AWS OpsWorks. You may know OpsWorks as a service that lets users deploy and manage applications. However OpsWorks can also perform operational tasks that simplify server management. This […]

Running Docker on AWS OpsWorks

AWS OpsWorks lets you deploy and manage application of all shapes and sizes. OpsWorks layers let you create blueprints for EC2 instances to install and configure any software that you want. This blog will show you how to create a custom layer for Docker. For an overview of Docker, see https://www.docker.com/tryit. Docker lets you precisely […]

Getting Started with CloudWatch Logs

Amazon CloudWatch Logs lets you monitor your applications and systems for operational issues in near real-time using your existing log files.  You can get started in just minutes using the Amazon CloudWatch Logs agent for Amazon Linux, CentOs, Redhat Linux and Ubuntu. In this blog post, we’ll show you how easy it is to get […]

Customize Ephemeral and EBS Volumes in Elastic Beanstalk Environments

Did you know that Elastic Beanstalk supports attaching and customizing ephemeral and EBS volumes to Elastic Beanstalk environments without the need for custom AMIs? This feature provides Elastic Beanstalk users with the ability to utilize: 1.     Ephemeral storage via instance store volumes available on the physical EC2 machine. See Instance Stores Available on Instance Types […]

Using Amazon CloudWatch Logs with AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Amazon CloudWatch Logs was announced last month in the US East (Northern Virginia) region. If you’re running an Elastic Beanstalk environment in us-east-1, this brief overview will describe how you can quickly and easily begin to use CloudWatch Logs to monitor your web server logs. We’ll follow the Elastic Beanstalk Developer Guide to configure an Elastic […]

AWS OpsWorks supports application environment variables

AWS OpsWorks now allows users to define environment variables per application. Instead of creating a custom recipe and managing environment variables as Chef attributes, you define the environment variables on each app and OpsWorks takes care of securely storing and sending the environment variables from your OpsWorks app definition to your instances and adding them […]