Posts Tagged aws

Building on top of the cloud can be frustrating at times. You will likely run into resources that complicated to create, others that are very tedious to create, and worst of all resources that are complicated and tedious to create. As cloud engineers ourselves, we feel the same pain as our users and strive to build abstractions that make cloud engineering a more productive and pleasant experience.

Recently we released our Community AWS IAM Package to help deliver on the promise of making the cloud easier to use for every operator, engineer, and user. This package is based on the Terraform AWS IAM Module, so it allows our users to take advantage of battle-tested abstractions. The package also helps transitioning Terraform users by maintaining similar resource names and inputs so they can focus on taking advantage of features of their programming language of choice (TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, Go, .NET, and YAML).

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Creating a website on AWS with an S3 bucket is a fairly straightforward task. You just need to create an S3 bucket, configure it to be a website, and add your content, right?

Unfortunately getting your content into a bucket is only a part of the story. To get your website ready to handle traffic, you will want to associate a domain name and likely want to use a CDN, like Cloudfront, to help with performance. The AWS Static Website Package makes it easy for you to associate a domain and stand up a CDN with only a few arguments.

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In this blog post, we’re going to use some Angular framework components to assemble a static website and then use Pulumi and its AWS Static Website component to deploy it to AWS. The website is for a café called the Pulumi Café. It will contain two pages, one an About page and the other a Menu page, as well as some navigational pieces.

To follow this example, you need to have both Angular and Pulumi installed. (Here’s a link to the Pulumi installation instructions.) You’ll also need an AWS account.

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I love data. I mean, I really love data. Data gives you the ability to understand the world around you and, to a certain degree, project what the future could look like. At Pulumi we use data every day to help make smarter product and business decisions.

Though one hurdle we encountered was not only the sheer volume of data we have but also the large disparity of systems storing that data. Like many companies before us, we chose to build a data warehouse, specifically AWS Redshift, to store all of our data.

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Pulumi makes it easy to flexibly deploy your cloud infrastructure using code. Usually deployments encompass a single slack and a single region in your cloud of choice. If you need to go multi-region, that usually means creating a stack per-region, which Pulumi’s configuration system makes easy. A stack per region isn’t required, though! Sometimes we want a single stack to span regions for performance, scalability, resilience, or just hard requirements. In these cases, Pulumi can seamlessly orchestrate deployments to, or even across, multiple regions, accounts, or clusters. In this article, we’ll see this in action by provisioning an AWS RDS primary database into one region and a read replica in an entirely different region – all from a single Pulumi program, stack, and pulumi up incantation.

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Event-driven, serverless functions have become a defining feature of many modern cloud architectures. With recent capabilities such as AWS Lambda URLs and AWS Lambda Containers, AWS has made it clear that Lambda Functions are a platform that teams can use to deliver increasingly sophisticated services without worrying about managing underlying compute resources.

Today, AWS announced another advancement for their Lambda Functions platform: Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC). At its core, ABAC support brings more granular permissions that are automatically applied based on IAM role tags, Lambda tags, or both. This update builds on well-established Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) principles while making it possible to implement granular controls without permissions updates for every new user and resource.

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The AWS Static Website component makes it easy to deploy an AWS S3 static website and, optionally, add a CloudFront content distribution network (CDN). While you can use any of the programming languages Pulumi supports (TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, Go, .NET, Java, and YAML), the component is particularly useful if you use YAML or JSON. With the AWS Static Website component, you’ll have a complete, functioning site in a few minutes. Without it, you can spend hours or even days to get the same result.

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Some of the largest and most complex deployments that teams manage are hybrid and multi-cloud deployments. Kubernetes is a common component in these deployments because it enables platform teams to provide a common set of services across cloud and on-premises infrastructure and simplifies the process of migrating and scaling workloads as demand fluctuates. Pulumi simplifies these deployment scenarios but teams often need to manage different flavors of Kubernetes for on-premises deployments versus cloud deployments.

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One thing I love about Pulumi is how easy it is to configure a stack. As a builder mainly of web applications, I’m always thinking about how I’ll configure my apps from one environment to the next, and being able to use Pulumi’s built-in support for configuration and secrets to manage the API keys and database credentials for my dev, staging, and production stacks individually is incredibly convenient.

For larger teams and organizations, though, where multiple applications rely on a set of common configuration settings — dozens of apps, say, depending on the same API service or database — having to keep all of those config settings in sync across all of those individually can become a bit of a pain. When this happens, you may find yourself looking for ways to extract those settings into some sort of a service to allow you to manage them easily in one place, and in a way that allows any application to inherit them automatically.

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There are two primary kinds of infrastructure as code tools: configuration management, like Ansible, Chef, and Puppet, which configure, patch, or upgrade existing servers, and provisioning, like Pulumi, Terraform, and CloudFormation, which create, update, and delete the underlying infrastructure itself. Provisioning has taken over from configuration management as the dominant form of IaC over the past decade as we’ve shifted to modern immutable infrastructure architectures that use containers, serverless, and managed services. And yet, configuration management still remains important and relevant, especially for heritage, stateful, server-centric, and on-prem or hybrid solutions. The good news is that it doesn’t need to be either-or choice: the two approaches are complementary. In this post, you’ll see how and why you might combine them by deploying a WordPress Server to AWS by provisioning infrastructure with Pulumi and configuring the server with Ansible.

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