AWS DevOps & Developer Productivity Blog

Set up a build pipeline with Jenkins and Amazon ECS

My colleague Daniele Stroppa sent a nice guest post that demonstrates how to use Jenkins to build Docker images for Amazon EC2 Container Service.   —–   In this walkthrough, we’ll show you how to set up and configure a build pipeline using Jenkins and the Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS).   We’ll be using a sample […]

Automatically Deploy from Amazon S3 using AWS CodeDeploy

AWS CodeDeploy does software deployments to any instance, including Amazon EC2 instances and instances running on-premises. It helps avoid downtime during deployments and also provides centralized control over your applications, instances, deployments and deployment configurations. You can learn more about CodeDeploy here. This post explains how to automatically start a CodeDeploy deployment when you upload […]

Monitor Website Latency using CloudWatch Logs CLI Plugin

With CloudWatch Logs, you can monitor your systems and applications in near real-time using your existing log files in just a few quick steps.  The CloudWatch Logs console and agent can also help you quickly generate CloudWatch Metrics, CloudWatch Alarms, and invoke CloudWatch Actions based on log events. In this post we’ll demonstrate how to […]

Use AWS CodeDeploy to Deploy to Amazon EC2 Instances Behind an Elastic Load Balancer

AWS CodeDeploy is a new service that makes it easy to deploy application updates to Amazon EC2 instances. CodeDeploy is targeted at customers who manage their EC2 instances directly, instead of those who use an application management service like AWS Elastic Beanstalk or AWS OpsWorks that have their own built-in deployment features. CodeDeploy allows developers […]

Use a CreationPolicy to Wait for On-Instance Configurations

When you provision an Amazon EC2 instance in an AWS CloudFormation stack, you might specify additional actions to configure the instance, such as install software packages or bootstrap applications. Normally, CloudFormation proceeds with stack creation after the instance has been successfully created. However, you can use a CreationPolicy so that CloudFormation proceeds with stack creation […]

Best Practices for Deploying Applications on AWS CloudFormation Stacks

With AWS CloudFormation, you can provision the full breadth of AWS resources including Amazon EC2 instances. You provision the EC2 instances to run applications that drive your business. Here are some best practices for deploying and updating those applications on EC2 instances provisioned inside CloudFormation stacks: Use AWS::CloudFormation::Init Use IAM roles to securely download software […]

Tracking the Cost of Your AWS CloudFormation Stack

With cost allocation tagging and the AWS Cost Explorer, you can see the cost of operating each of your AWS CloudFormation stacks. Here’s how it works.  AWS CloudFormation automatically tags each stack resource. For example, if you have a stack that creates an Amazon EC2 instance, AWS CloudFormation automatically tags the instance with the following […]

Use Nested Stacks to Create Reusable Templates and Support Role Specialization

When you create AWS CloudFormation templates, you might find that you’re continually describing the same set of resources in different templates. However, instead of repeatedly adding them to each of your templates, consider using nested stacks. What are Nested Stacks With nested stacks, you can link to a template from within any other template. You […]

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 […]