Aws

I wrote recently about the difference between easy and simple.1 That post was philosophical. This one is not. This is what it looks like in practice. I have been building an AWS operations toolkit using Swamp. The toolkit investigates outages. It runs daily health checks. It composes nine separate extensions into two workflows that gather data from CloudWatch, X-Ray, EC2, Lambda, and load balancers, then produce an actionable report. This is the machine that builds the machine. Not the code. The system that produces the code and makes sense of the output. ...

Growing into SparkleFormation In my continued usage with SparkleFormation I’m really growing to appreciate the convenience of having ruby available when composing templates. Things that would be challenging in a simplistic serialization format or lead to unmanageable duplication become easily solvable thanks to the powerful combination of an actual programming language, which json and yml are not, and the simplicity of the SparkleFormation DSL. At it’s simplest you can mirror the structure of any cloudformation json (and finally have comments inline!) but you quickly discover more advanced use cases. ...

A very brief whirlwind tour of sparkles or: How I learned to stop writing terrible serialization formats directly and love the dsl An imaginary story of the beginner exploring some infrastructure tooling. Getting started Set env variables. Maybe create an init.sh while practicing. export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID="your key" export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY="your sekret" export AWS_REGION="us-east-1" # because YOLO export NESTED_BUCKET="s3://mah_bukkit" load that stuff into my current shell source ./init.sh Create a config .sfn file aready exists, thanks @luckymike. no need to create one. ...