Category: AWS CloudFormation

Most AWS CloudFormation templates use parameters to enable customization. It’s important to validate parameters to ensure a good user experience. AWS CloudFormation gives you several ways to perform parameter validation. For example, you can specify AllowedValues or a Default, or you can assign Types. For more information on validating parameters, see the documentation. Often, developers […]

There are less than two weeks left until re:Invent 2018. As in years past, AWS CloudFormation will be there, both behind the scenes deploying infrastructure and front-and-center for break-out sessions, workshops, and chalk talks. Here are a few highlights we’ve pulled from the session catalog, followed by the full list of CloudFormation-focused sessions and workshops to help […]

Modern distributed applications are moving towards a “purpose-built” database strategy. This means that the selection of database type, size, and configuration should match the problem the database is trying to solve. AWS customers are also requiring that these databases have the appropriate level of security control and organizational governance to operate in customer environments. AWS […]

Overview AWS CloudFormation provides a common language for you to describe and provision all of the infrastructure resources in your cloud environment. CloudFormation allows you to use a simple text file to model and provision, in an automated and secure manner, all the resources needed for your applications across all AWS Regions and accounts. It […]

During mandatory maintenance, AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate performs Chef Server and Chef Automate version, security, and operating system patching. Version updates for Chef go through extensive testing to verify they are production ready and don’t disrupt existing environments. When an instance is replaced, customers often ask how they can restore their custom settings in […]

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 […]

When using AWS CloudFormation templates to code your infrastructure, you should consider applying best practices to improve the maintainability of your code. Further, these best practices should be augmented by guidelines like those outlined for twelve-factor apps, which are targeted at optimizing applications for continuous deployment. Of these factors, you should note that you should […]

I’m excited to finally answer a question I’ve been hearing from both Infrastructure as Code developers and security practitioners for years: “How do I send a signal back to my CloudFormation stack from within a private VPC without going across the public internet?”

[Update on 9/30/2020] Note:  – Please follow Simplify sharing your AWS Service Catalog portfolios in an AWS Organizations setup to implement a multi-region, multi-account catalog at scale while incorporating recent updates and best practices. Many AWS customers are adopting AWS Service Catalog to create and manage catalogs of approved IT services for use on AWS. […]

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 […]