The explosion of public cloud platforms has made the accessibility and consumption of IT infrastructure an uncomplicated experience. The traditional IT infrastructure found in vast and expensive corporate data centers can now be consumed by anyone with an internet connection. As organizations/businesses start consuming public cloud platforms and its infrastructure you often hear the expression, infrastructure as code (IaC). This article was originally published on Medium. Link to the Medium article can be found here. If you have ever wondered, the what, the why, and the how, in regards to IaC then you have come to the right place. Static/Dynamic Infrastructure Before we dive into the nuts and bolts of IaC it helps to first understand how IT infrastructure works. Let’s start with static infrastructure, think server racks, mainframes, routers, switches, firewalls, and pretty much any equipment you expect to find in a traditional data center. In this static infrastructure environment, when you need more capacity you simply add more capacity though physical provisioning, either through horizontal and/or vertical scaling.

We have all been there, the moment terraform apply crashes because someone made a manual change and removed a resource that terraform is expecting to be available. You try to do a terraform refresh but to no luck! What do you do at this point? Sometimes the only option is to make modifications to the terraform state file. This article will walk you through how to make state file modifications, both the right and the wrong way, so that you can educate other in the future on how to make statefile changes properly. This article was originally published on Medium. Link to the Medium article can be found here. The wrong way One could easily open up the terraform.tfstate file and manually do “JSON surgery” but this is not a recommended action, mainly for the high chance of human errors and potentially wrecking your state file. That being said, allow to me show you how.

If you don’t know the answer to this question don’t feel bad, engineers and IT professional at all levels sometimes don’t know the answer to this question. In my daily job I often get asked, “What is a pipeline?” The follow up question is 9/10 times, “How do I create a pipeline?” Today I would like to shed some light on the pipeline topic, mainly focusing on the first question but also why it is important to application development. This article was originally published on Medium. Link to the Medium article can be found here. The Past In simple terms a pipeline is a workflow, a workflow that application development teams use to release software. Note: Not limited to application development teams 1 Start → do something → do something → … → Release Software In order to understand “what is a pipeline?” we have to go back in time and understand how application development was done.

If you manage AWS for an organization, big or small, chances are you have several Secure Shell (SSH) keys laying around you hardly use, OR WORSE, you don’t recall the account the key was made for. SSH key management is a rabbit hole in itself and most people understand the security concerns that arise with improper SSH key hygiene. Luckily for us, there is a way to bid farewell to the cumbersome practice of using SSH to remote into an EC2 instance. Allow me to introduce you the AWS service, Systems Manager (SSM). This article was originally published on Medium. Link to the Medium article can be found here. I will teach you the following in this guide: Identify SSM Remote Session Manager requirements-including for an enterprise Enable Remote Session Manager for all EC2 instances Enable Remote Session Manager logging Lock down Remote Session Manager through IAM User permissions 🔐 Debugging Remote Session Manager Enable SSM Remote Session Manager The AWS managed service, SSM, comes with a neat feature called Session Manager.

If you work for an organization/company that leverages the services of a public cloud provider such as AWS, chances are there is a customized image available in your environment. Most companies today offer some sort of customized default image or images that contain baked in security tools, proxy variables, repository URL overrides, SSL certificates and so on. This customized image is usually sourced from common images provided by the public cloud provider. Today, we’re going to look at how we can completely automate a customized image sourced from the AWS Linux2 AMI and deploy it to all accounts inside an organization, while maintaining a minimal infrastructure footprint. Code can be found in the following GitHub repository. This article was originally published on Medium. Link to the Medium article can be found here. Assumptions Accounts are under an AWS Organizations. All accounts require the customized AMI. VPC ACLs and Security Groups allow Port 22 into to the VPC (Packer) CI/CD has proper credentials to query AWS Services (Organizations, VPC, EC2).

Why? As awesome and powerful Terraform is, there are times when you find yourself unable to execute certain actions for your automation. This could be due to many reasons including: no Terraform resource for the AWS service, the API action is only available through the CLI/SDK, or you find yourself in a situation where it might be easier to execute an action through the CLI. The situations go on and on however, the point is we all work in varying environments with different resources and constraints. This article was originally published on Medium. Link to the Medium article can be found here. How? At the time of this writing the AWS Route53 resolver endpoint is lacking a Terraform resource(s). However, this does not mean we can’t create the desired resources without Terraform. Let’s take a peek at how we can create a route53 resolver endpoint through Terraform. Requirements: Ensure the AWS CLI can create the desired resource Have the AWS CLI and required version available in your environment Proper AWS credentials available and configured The AWS CLI is able to create route53 resolver endpoints, both inbound and outbound.