Nuts and Bolts

UPDATE 2022/8/12: Check out the improved CloudFormation Fundamentals Introductory Course. This is a continuation of A Simple Introduction to AWS CloudFormation. We will build on top of the first simple CloudFormation template from Part 1, which provisions an EC2 instance and Security Group. We will add to it a Route53 record that points to the EC2 instance’s DNS public hostname. This demonstrates CloudFormation’s ability to “orchestrates” the components of the stack. CloudFormation will wait until the EC2 instance’s DNS public hostname is ready and then create the Route53 record pointing to it.

The easiest way to describe what CloudFormation is that it is a tool from AWS that allows you to spin up resources effortlessly. You define all the resources you want AWS to spin up in a blueprint document, click a button, and then AWS magically creates it all. This blueprint is called a template in CloudFormation speak.

CircleCI is one of my goto hosted Continuous Integration, CI, providers. They make it very easy to quickly connect your GitHub account and set up CI. This story covers how to set up Continuous Deployment to ECS on CircleCI.

I’m not the one who usually buys into the single killer feature hype. However, in the case of CircleCI they have a feature that blew my mind when I first saw it and still does today: ssh login. Being able to ssh into the machine to debug and poke around the environment is a godsend.

Many years ago when I first got into web programming, I read a lot of Perl books and remember reading Larry Wall’s Camel book. In it, he says that the virtues of a great programmer are: “laziness, impatience, and hubris”. I ran into it again in this RTFM? How to write a manual worth reading post by Rikki Endsley. I have heard programmers reference this, or some form of it, over the years. You probably have heard: “A good programmer is a lazy one.” I knew that Larry was facetious, but I thought it is funny some people did not. Larry Wall had to post a video to explains that he was joking.