Category: AWS CloudFormation

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 […]

In this blog post I’d like to share an AWS CloudFormation custom resource I’ve written that allows you to deploy StackSets from within a CloudFormation template. You can use StackSets to deploy and manage CloudFormation stacks in multiple accounts and multiple AWS Regions from a central location using a single template and set of operations.

Some AWS customers I work with have dedicated analytics/AI research teams who use AWS infrastructure to run their own code or use products from the AWS Marketplace to perform computations. Typically, the AI research team deploys multiple solutions. They bundle their own home-grown solutions into an AWS CloudFormation template along with some AWS Marketplace products, […]

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 […]