The Definitive Guide to AWS Infrastructure Automation : Craft Infrastructure-as-Code Solutions

Discover the pillars of AWS infrastructure automation, starting with API-driven infrastructure concepts and its immediate benefits such as increased agility, automation of the infrastructure life cycle, and flexibility in experimenting with new architectures. With this base established, the book discusses infrastructure-as-code concepts in a general form, establishing principled outcomes such as security and reproducibility. Inescapably, we delve into how these concepts enable and underpin the DevOps movement. __The Definitive Guide to AWS Infrastructure Automation__ begins by discussing services and tools that enable infrastructure-as-code solutions; first stop: AWS's CloudFormation service. You’ll then cover the ever-expanding ecosystem of tooling emerging in this space, including CloudFormation wrappers such as Troposphere and orchestrators such as Sceptre, to completely independent third-party tools such as Terraform and Pulumi. As a bonus, you’ll also work with AWS' newly-released CDK (Cloud Development Kit). You’ll then look at how to implement modular, robust, and extensible solutions across a few examples -- in the process building out each solution with several different tools to compare and contrast the strengths and weaknesses of each. By the end of the journey, you will have gained a wide knowledge of both the AWS-provided and third-party ecosystem of infrastructure-as-code/provisioning tools, and the strengths and weaknesses of each. You’ll possess a mental framework for how to craft an infrastructure-as-code solution to solve future problems based on examples discussed throughout the book. You’ll also have a demonstrable understanding of the hands-on operation of each tool, situational appropriateness of each tool, and how to leverage the tool day to day. **What You Will Learn** * Discover the technological and organizational benefits to infrastructure-as-code solutions * Examine the overall landscape of infrastructure-as-code tooling and solutions available to consumers of AWS services * See the strengths and weaknesses of these tools relative to one another as examined through hands-on implementation of several solutions * Gain hands-on experience, best practices, and tips and tricks learned through several years’ real-world experience delivering solutions using these very tools in a wide variety of scenarios * Engineer solid solutions that leave room for new requirements and changes without requiring needless refactoring **Who This Book Is For** DevOps engineers, cloud engineers and architects focused on the AWS ecosystem, software engineers/developers working within the AWS ecosystem, and engineering leaders looking for best practices. Table of Contents 5 About the Author 9 About the Technical Reviewer 10 Introduction 11 Chapter 1: Infra the Beginning 13 A New and Novel Approach to Infrastructure 14 Into an Unknown World 17 Out of the Dream 30 New Tools for New Problems 32 For the Business 34 For IT 35 Chapter 2: The Current Landscape 37 Declarative Tools 38 CloudFormation 38 Benefits 39 Drawbacks 40 Overall 42 CloudFormation DSLs and Template Generators 43 Troposphere 43 AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) 49 Serverless.js 51 AWS SAM 53 CloudFormation Orchestrators 55 Sceptre 56 Other Representatives 59 Tools Not Based on CloudFormation 59 Terraform 59 What Does Terraform Offer? 61 Pulumi 64 Non-declarative Tooling 65 Conclusion 65 Chapter 3: CloudFormation In-Depth 66 Template Anatomy 67 AWSTemplateFormatVersion 71 Description 72 Parameters 72 Points of Extended Consideration 74 Conditions 75 Mappings 76 Regional Values 77 Resources 78 Identifier 79 Type 79 Condition 79 Properties 81 Other Parameters 83 DependsOn 83 CreationPolicy/UpdatePolicy 83 UpdateReplacePolicy/DeletePolicy 84 Deployment 84 Web Console 85 Command-Line Interface 87 Deployment 88 Listing Stacks 91 Deleting Stacks 93 Protecting Stacks 94 Custom Resources 95 Advanced Intrinsic Functions and Macros 104 Fn::Transform and AWS::Serverless 104 Fn::Transform and AWS::Include 104 Macros 110 Nested Stacks 111 StackSets 123 Discussion 132 Conclusion 133 Chapter 4: Terraform In-Depth 134 Code Anatomy 136 Provider 140 Data 140 Variables 140 Resources 142 count 142 depends_on 142 lifecycle 143 provider 144 provisioner and connection 145 Code Layout and Structure 145 Variable Values 149 terraform.tfvars 150 Variables in Context of Deployment 150 Advanced tfvars Files Usage 156 Runtime Variable Values 173 Environment Variables 173 CLI Variables 175 Modules, Locals, Remote State, Providers, and Pinning 177 Modules 178 The Module Itself 178 Calling a Module 191 Behold, the Module! 200 Providers Revisited 201 Remote State 208 State Locking 212 Version Pinning 212 Conclusion 214 Chapter 5: CloudFormation-Based Tools 215 Troposphere 216 Why Troposphere? 217 Getting Started 217 A Basic Exercise 218 The Benefits of a Full Programming Language 230 Sceptre 240 Why Sceptre? 240 Getting Started 241 Project Setup and Hooks Demonstration 241 Conclusion 246 Chapter 6: The AWS CDK and Pulumi 247 AWS CDK 249 Why CDK? 249 Getting Started with the CDK 252 Reprise – EC2 Instance with the CDK 254 Pulumi 268 Why Pulumi? 268 Getting Started with Pulumi 270 First Pulumi Project – EC2 Instance 270 Conclusion 282 Chapter 7: Let’s Build a VPC 283 Architecture 285 High-Availability Design 285 Non-High-Availability Design 286 Solutions 289 CloudFormation 289 Terraform 309 AWS CDK 326 Pulumi 334 Conclusion 346 Chapter 8: Conclusion 349 Thought #1: Look Past Your Own Biases in Choosing a Tool 349 Thought #2: Build a Learning Strategy 351 And Finally 352 Appendix 353 CloudFormation DSLs/Generators 353 CloudFormation Orchestrators 355 Learning Resources 356 Index 357 Front Matter ....Pages i-xiv Infra the Beginning (Bradley Campbell)....Pages 1-24 The Current Landscape (Bradley Campbell)....Pages 25-53 CloudFormation In-Depth (Bradley Campbell)....Pages 55-122 Terraform In-Depth (Bradley Campbell)....Pages 123-203 CloudFormation-Based Tools (Bradley Campbell)....Pages 205-236 The AWS CDK and Pulumi (Bradley Campbell)....Pages 237-272 Let’s Build a VPC (Bradley Campbell)....Pages 273-338 Conclusion (Bradley Campbell)....Pages 339-342 Back Matter ....Pages 343-353 Chapter 1: Intro (completed) -- Chapter 2: Current Landscape (completed) -- Chapter 3: CloudFormation In-Depth (completed) -- Chapter 4: Tools That Leverage CloudFormation -- Chapter 5: Terraform In-Depth -- Chapter 6: Pulumi and the AWS CDK -- Chapter 7: Building a 3-Tier App and Networking Layout with Multiple Tools -- Chapter 8: Conclusion