Today, we’ll learn about lono helpers. Lono helpers allow you to extend and add to the Lono DSL as a first-class citizen. This particularly makes Lono powerful because you can write methods specific to your needs.

The Lono DSL is powerful because it allows you to use the Ruby programming language to generate CloudFormation templates. You can use conditional logic constructs that you’re used to: loops, variables, if statements, methods, etc. However, the Lono DSL tries not to impose itself and take over CloudFormation’s declarative nature. Instead, Lono’s approach is to add programming “sprinkles” on top of CloudFormation. Ultimately, you get the best of both worlds.

When working with CloudFormation, you usually configure parameters for the template. The lono seed command helps with this step by generating a starter param file. It evaluates the template itself to generate the starter example values. We’ll use the demo blueprint we created in Lono CloudFormation Framework Introduction Part 1: EC2 Instance.

Some of my favorite lono commands are lono code convert and lono code import. They literally write Ruby code for you. In both cases, the lono code subcommands allow you to take JSON or YAML templates and convert them to the Lono DSL Ruby code.

Cody is a AWS CodeBuild management tool. It simplifies creating and managing AWS CodeBuild projects with a powerful DSL. It has quickly grown to one of my favorite tools since creating it.

In this post, we’ll cover Lono Layering. Layering can be used to build separate environments like a development and production environment. For example, the production environment might have different instance sizes. This can be accomplished with Lono layering.

Today we’ll learn about Lono Configs. Lono has 2 types of configs: Params and Variables. Params allow you to affect the templates at run-time. Variables configs allow you to affect the templates at compile-time. We’ll cover both.

In the last article, we launched a security group and instance. In this post, we’ll add an Elastic IP address and associate it with the instance. Add the following code:

This is the first part of a series of posts that provides an introduction to the Lono CloudFormation Framework. I’ve already provided an introduction to raw CloudFormation in the Simple Introduction to AWS CloudFormation Series. This series will focus on Lono.

It’s crazy to think that I’ve been working with AWS for over a decade now. I’ve been lucky enough to have built and ran one of the largest sites in the world (billions of pageviews/month). I’m even more fortunate now to be working with some awesome BoltOps clients. I’ve learned and continue to learn a lot about what it takes to build AWS infrastructure. BoltOps Pro is the result of those years of experience and hard-fought learning lessons put together.

I’m excited to say that a ton of great features has been added to lono with this major version bump. At this point, lono has grown to become a framework for managing CloudFormation templates. Let jump right into it and cover the major improvements.