Nuts and Bolts

Terraform is great and helps you build infrastructure-as-code. The Hashicorp team provides good resources, learning guides, and tutorials to help you get started. The guides are simple, though, and still leave plenty of things for you to figure out on our own. Once you get past the introductory basics of Terraform, you’ll discover many more questions that you must answer before taking Terraform to production. Usually, people end up home-growing custom scripts or using a tool on top of Terraform to fill the gaps. In this article, we’ll discuss and compare the tools: Terraform, Terragrunt, and Terraspace.

Today, we’ll cover a cool Terraspace feature. It allows you to deploy all of your infrastructure in a single command. terraspace all up Terraspace calculates the dependencies and deploys your code in the right order.

Awesome feature and blog post covering it: Terraspace All: Deploy Multiple Stacks or Terraform Modules At Once More docs: terraspace all reference cli docs. Deploy All Intro Docs. Example terraspace graph demo repo Smarter auto-initialization and retry with: terraform init. This is configurable with config.init.mode. Can be: auto, never, always. TFC/TFE support improvements: Auto VCS Connection with the sync. Prune Run commands: terraspace cloud runs prune and terrspace cloud runs list. Terraspace logs: stream and tail logs. terraspace log -f Or view logs for the last run without the timestamps: terraspace logs up demo A terraform plan is ran as part of terraform up -y now. So you can look at the logs later and see what was done. A terraform plan -destroy is ran as part of terraform down -y now. So you can look at the logs later and see what was destroyed.

Terraspace is a Terraform framework. It provides an organized structure, conventions over configurations, keeps your code DRY, and adds convenient tooling. It makes it easier and more fun to work with Terraform.

Kubes is a deployment tool that makes it easier and more fun to work with Kubernetes. Kubes automates 3 main steps. Build a Docker image. Create the YAML files that declare the Kubernetes resources. Run kubectl apply to create the resources on the cluster. It boils everything down to one single command: kubes deploy

In this video, we’ll go over some CloudWatch Log tips. These tips will be useful for someone new to CloudWatch logs and show you how to use CloudWatch logs effectively. The biggest tip here is to click on the “Search” button immediately after clicking on a Log Group. Don’t bother clicking on individual streams and trying to find the exact AWS Lambda function.

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.

In this video tutorial, we’ll cover CloudWatch Event Rules and how to connect them up to AWS Lambda Functions with Ruby on Jets. We’ll explain what CloudWatch Event Rules are. Then we’ll build a Jets project from scratch with the rule_event declaration. We’ll deploy the application and test the rule event. We’ll show you how simple it is to get started with Ruby on Jets and CloudWatch Event Rules.

In this video tutorial, we’ll cover CloudWatch Log Events and how to connect them up to AWS Lambda Functions with Ruby on Jets. We’ll build a Jets project from scratch with the log_event declaration. We’ll deploy the application and test the CloudWatch Log event. We’ll show you how simple it is to get started with Ruby on Jets and CloudWatch Log Events.

In this video tutorial, we’ll cover DynamoDB Stream Events and how to connect them up to AWS Lambda Functions with Ruby on Jets. We’ll build a Jets project from scratch with the dynamodb_event declaration. We’ll deploy the application and test the DynamoDB event. We’ll show you how simple it is to get started with Ruby on Jets and DynamoDB Stream Events.

In this video tutorial, we’ll cover Kinesis Events and how to connect them up to AWS Lambda Functions with Ruby on Jets. We’ll build a Jets project from scratch with the kinesis_event declaration. We’ll deploy the application and test the Kinesis event. We’ll show you how simple it is to get started with Ruby on Jets and Kinesis Events.