AWS Cloud Operations & Migrations Blog

Category: DevOps

How to setup and use AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate or Puppet Enterprise in an isolated subnet

Introduction For enhanced security, it’s often preferable to place resources in AWS within a subnet with no internet access. Recently, AWS expanded the number of services supported by interface VPC endpoints within the AWS ecosystem, so it’s now easier than ever to run AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate or AWS OpsWorks for Puppet Enterprise within […]

How to automate Puppet manifest testing and delivery in AWS OpsWorks for Puppet Enterprise

Organizations that use AWS OpsWorks Puppet Enterprise can use AWS services that manage, test, and deploy code to create a continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) infrastructure. In this blog post, we will show how you can use AWS CloudFormation,  Amazon S3, AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodeBuild, AWS Systems Manager, and AWS CodePipeline to set up […]

Smart RDP and SSH remediation with AWS Systems Manager Automation API actions

Here in AWS Support, I often help customers regain RDP or SSH access to their instances. It’s a common problem, but the identification of a correct solution could take some time, even hours or days if the right information isn’t available. Even with the most up-to-date playbook, it is easy to miss simple checks that […]

Onica demonstrates uses for new AWS Systems Manager Automation actions

AWS Partner Guest Post By Eric Miller, VP of Solutions Development for Onica, a Premier Tier APN Consulting Partner As an AWS DevOps Competency Partner, Onica helps our customers across a wide variety of challenging automation problems. One very important suite of tools in our AWS toolbox is AWS Systems Manager. AWS Systems Manager simplifies […]

Perform continuous cookbook integration testing and delivery for AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate

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 […]

Updating chef-client on AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate nodes

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 […]

Using AWS Cloud9, AWS CodeCommit, and Troposphere to author AWS CloudFormation templates

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 […]

Distributing your AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate infrastructure

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 […]

Recovering AWS CloudFormation stacks using ContinueUpdateRollback

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 […]

Using AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate in a federated environment

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 […]