Category: DevOps

Any Chef server should be a hub of tested and trusted cookbooks that can be added to node run lists easily. However, the testing and delivery of cookbooks to the server itself can be an arduous task. To simplify and expedite this necessary process, we’ve leveraged AWS technologies to create a pipeline that executes integration testing […]

Throughout the life of your AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate environments there will be numerous updates and changes to one of the most crucial components – the chef-client. How can you ensure that you have the most up-to-date version of chef-client running on your OpsWorks for Chef Automate infrastructure? Can you make these updates in […]

AWS Cloud9 was announced at AWS re:Invent in November 2017. It’s a browser-based IDE suitable for many cloud development use cases, including serverless applications. AWS CloudFormation now supports quickly spinning up AWS Cloud9 development environments, with integration with AWS CodeCommit. In this blog post, I’ll explore how to quickly spin up AWS Cloud9 environments with […]

Organizations that manage many nodes over larger geographical AWS Regions may wish to reduce latency and load between nodes in their AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate implementation. By distributing nodes between multiple servers, organizations encounter the challenge of how to ensure that cookbooks and other configurations are consistently deployed across two or more Chef Servers […]

AWS CloudFormation treats a stack as a collection of AWS resources that customers can manage as a single unit. After you launch a stack, you can use the AWS CloudFormation console, API, or AWS CLI to update resources in your stacks. You should not make any changes to stack resources outside of CloudFormation. This is […]

Many large enterprises operate on a federated model. That is, they are separated into different business units or organizations, with different goals, procedures, and skill sets. These enterprises typically use a system to manage their infrastructure configuration and changes. You might ask, “Can we apply a federated model to configuration management? If so, what are […]

AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate and AWS OpsWorks for Puppet Enterprise provide fully managed Chef and Puppet servers with a suite of automation tools for infrastructure and application management. Enterprise customers rely on OpsWorks for easy configuration management and secure maintenance as the service automatically patches, updates, and backs up servers. This blog post gives […]

For customers new to configuration management with AWS OpsWorks for Puppet Enterprise (OWPE), a frequently-asked question is “How do I store sensitive data, such as database passwords, for use in my manifests?” Hiera allows you to manage and access data from various backends (data storage locations). By default, Hiera 5 supports YAML, JSON, and HOCON […]