Stacking the AWS CloudFormation

Automate your Cloud Operations blog post Part 1 have given us the basic understanding on how to automate the AWS stack using CloudFormation.

This post will help the reader on how to layer the stack on top of the existing AWS CloudFormation stack using AWS CloudFormation instead of modifying the base template. AWS resources can be added into existing VPC using the outputs detailing the resources from the main VPC stack instead of having to modify the main template.

This will allow us to compartmentalize, separate out any components of AWS infrastructure and again versioning all different AWS infrastructure code for every components.

Note: The template I will use for this post for educational purposes only and may not be suitable for production workloads :).

Diagram below will help to illustrate the concept:

CloudFormation3

Bastion Stack

Previously (Part 1), we created the initial stack which provide us the base VPC. Next, we will  provision bastion stack which will create a bastion host on top of our base VPC. Below are the components of the bastion stack:

  • Create IAM user that can find out information about the stack and has permissions to create KeyPairs and actions related.
  • Create bastion host instance with the AWS Security Group enable SSH access via port 22
  • Use CloudFormation Init to install packages, create files and run commands on the bastion host instance also take the creds created for the IAM user and setup to be used by the scripts
  • Use the EC2 UserData to run the cfn-init command that actually does the above via a bash script
  • The condition handle: the completion of the instance is dependent on the scripts running properly, if the scripts fail, the CloudFormation stack will error out and fail

Below is the CloudFormation template to build the bastion stack:

Following are the high level steps to layer the bastion stack on top of the initial stack:

I put together the following video on how to use the template:

NAT Stack

It is important to design the VPC with security in mind. I recommend to design your Security Zone and network segregation, I have written a blog post regarding how to Secure Azure Network. This approach also can be impelemented on AWS environment using VPC, subnet and security groups. At the very minimum we will segregate the Private subnet and Public subnet on our VPC.

NAT instance will be added to our Initial VPC “public” subnets so that the future private instances can use the NAT instance for communication outside the Initial VPC. We will use exact same method like what we did on Bastion stack.

Diagram below will help to illustrate the concept:

CloudFormation4

The components of the NAT stack:

  • An Elastic IP address (EIP) for the NAT instance
  • A Security Group for the NAT instance: Allowing ingress traffic tcp, udp from port 0-65535 from internal subnet ; Allowing egress traffic tcp port 22, 80, 443, 9418 to any and egress traffic udp port 123 to Internet and egress traffic port 0-65535 to internal subnet
  • The NAT instance
  • A private route table
  • A private route using the NAT instance as the default route for all traffic

Following is the CloudFormation template to build the stack:

Similar like the previous steps on how to layer the stack:

Hopefully after reading the Part 1 and the Part 2 of my blog posts, the readers will gain some basic understanding on how to automate the AWS cloud operations using AWS CloudFormation.

Please contact Kloud Solutions if the readers need help with automating AWS production environment

www.wasita.net

Category:
Amazon Web Services, Architecture, Cloud Infrastructure, Technology
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