Supercharge your CloudFormation templates with Jinja2 Templating Engine

26th of January, 2018 / / 1 Comment

If you are working in an AWS public cloud environment chances are that you have authored a number of CloudFormation templates over the years to define your infrastructure as code. As powerful as this tool is, it has a glaring shortcoming: the templates are fairly static having no inline template expansion feature (think GCP Cloud Deployment Manager.) Due to this limitation, many teams end up copy-pasting similar templates to cater for minor differences like environment (dev, test, prod etc.)… [Keep reading] “Supercharge your CloudFormation templates with Jinja2 Templating Engine”

Experiences with the new AWS Application Load Balancer

29th of November, 2016 / / No Comments

Originally posted on Andrew’s blog @ cloudconsultancy.info

Summary

Recently I had an opportunity to test drive AWS Application load balancer as my client had a requirement for making their websocket application fault tolerant. The implementation was complete windows stack and utilised ADFS 2.0 for SAML authentication however this should not affect other people’s implementation.
The AWS Application load balancer is a fairly new feature which provides layer 7 load balancing and support for HTTP/2 as well as websockets.… [Keep reading] “Experiences with the new AWS Application Load Balancer”

Viewing AWS CloudFormation and bootstrap logs in CloudWatch

30th of August, 2016 / / No Comments

Mature cloud platforms such as AWS and Azure have simplified infrastructure provisioning with toolsets such as CloudFormation and Azure Resource Manager (ARM) to provide an easy way to create and manage a collection of related infrastructure resources. Both tool sets allow developers and system administrators to use JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) to specify resources to provision, as well as provide the means to bootstrap systems, effectively allowing for single click fully configured environment deployments.

While these toolsets are an excellent means to prevent RSI from performing repetitive monotonous tasks, the initial writing and testing of templates and scripts can be incredibly time consuming.… [Keep reading] “Viewing AWS CloudFormation and bootstrap logs in CloudWatch”

AWS CloudFormation AWS::RDS::OptionGroup Unknown option: Mirroring

17th of August, 2016 / / No Comments

Amazon recently announced Multi-AZ support for SQL Server in Sydney, which provides high availability for SQL RDS instances using SQL Server mirroring technology. In an effort to make life simpler for myself, I figured I’d write a CloudFormation template for future provisioning requests, however it wasn’t as straight forward as I’d expected.

I began by trying to guess my way through the JSON resources, based on what I’d already knew for MySQL deployments. I figured the MultiAZ property was still relevant, so I hacked together a template and attempted to provision the stack, which failed, indicating the following error:

CREATE_FAILED        |  Invalid Parameter Combination: MultiAZ property cannot be used with SQL Server DB instances, use the Mirroring option in an option group associated with the DB instance instead.… [Keep reading] “AWS CloudFormation AWS::RDS::OptionGroup Unknown option: Mirroring”

Create AWS CloudFormation Templates with Visual Studio

18th of May, 2015 / / 1 Comment

Background

AWS CloudFormation is a wonderful service for automating your AWS builds – my colleagues have done a number of detailed walk-throughs in other blog posts.

AWS also provides a toolkit for Visual Studio as an extension of the IDE.  To get started, configure the extension with your AWS IAM Access Key ID and Secret Key and you will be able to use the new AWS explorer pane to explore all AWS services such as VPC, EC2, RDS, etc.… [Keep reading] “Create AWS CloudFormation Templates with Visual Studio”

Automate your Cloud Operations Part 2: AWS CloudFormation

16th of May, 2015 / / No Comments

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.… [Keep reading] “Automate your Cloud Operations Part 2: AWS CloudFormation”

Automate your Cloud Operations Part 1: AWS CloudFormation

29th of April, 2015 / / 3 Comments

Operations

What is Operations?

In the IT world, Operations refers to a team or department within IT which is responsible for the running of a business’ IT systems and infrastructure.

So what kind of activities this team perform on day to day basis?

Building, modifying, provisioning, updating systems, software and infrastructure to keep them available, performing and secure which ensures that users can be as productive as possible.

When moving to public cloud platforms the areas of focus for Operations are:

  • Cost reduction: if we design it properly and apply good practices when managing it (scale down / switch off)
  • Smarter operation: Use of Automation and APIs
  • Agility: faster in provisioning infrastructure or environments by Automating the everything
  • Better Uptime: Plan for failover, and design effective DR solutions more cost effectively.
… [Keep reading] “Automate your Cloud Operations Part 1: AWS CloudFormation”

Updating your AWS bootstrap

19th of August, 2013 / / 6 Comments

In Bootstrapping AWS we looked at what’s required to kick off a brand new installation with your latest build.  But it’s two weeks later now – and you’re about to release version 2 of the application.  Using the Cloud Formation script we created first, it’s actually quite easy.

In the first build script, there was a reference in the CloudFormation Metadata to the website source – being {“Ref” : “BuildNumber”}.

"Parameters" : {
  "BuildNumber" : {
  "Type" : "Number"
  }
}

So the process is as follows.… [Keep reading] “Updating your AWS bootstrap”

Bootstrapping on AWS

5th of August, 2013 / / 11 Comments

The Task

This post is going to look at the process of hosting a highly available corporate website using Windows Server 2012 Amazon Machine Image (AMI), and bootstrapping the installation of Internet Information Services (IIS), urlrewrite, and our website. We don’t need a golden image as we release software every week. We also want to make sure that it is a high availability solution, so we need to look at scaling groups and repeatability.

Our high availability solution will contain one load balancer, and a minimum of two Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances across multiple availability zones (AZ’s).  … [Keep reading] “Bootstrapping on AWS”