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Infrastructure as Code: Everything You Need to Know

Infrastructure is one of the core tenets of a software development process — it is directly responsible for the stable operation of a software application. This infrastructure can range from servers, load balancers, firewalls, and databases all the way to complex container clusters.

Infrastructure considerations are valid beyond production environments, as they spread across the entire development process. They include tools and platforms such as CI/CD platforms, staging environments, and testing tools. These infrastructure considerations increase as the level of complexity of the software product increases. Very quickly, the traditional approach for manually managing infrastructure becomes an unscalable solution to meet the demands of DevOps modern rapid software development cycles. And that’s how Infrastructure as Code (IaC) has become the de facto solution in development today.

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Hotswapping: Improving the CDK Development Cycle

Spend Less Time Waiting on Deployments With CDK Hot Swaps

Here at Instil, we have been working on a fully serverless car insurance platform that utilizes the AWS CDK for deployments. One of the lessons we learnt early on in this project is that there is no substitution for deploying and testing our code in AWS; each of our developers has their own AWS accounts that they regularly deploy code to. However, with CDK, sometimes these deployments can take a while...

As an example, we have some versioned Lambda functions that run pre-traffic test functions with CodeDeploy to verify that our deployed code is configured and behaving correctly. Typically these can take 3-4 mins to deploy, run tests, and switch traffic when using the cdk deploy [stackname] command.

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How to Fix the 5 Most Common AWS IaC Misconfigurations [Webinar Sign-up]

Infrastructure as code (IaC) is critical for developing cloud-native applications at scale, but with added complexity comes added security considerations. If gone undetected, one IaC misconfiguration can snowball into hundreds of alerts and cloud risk. 

In this talk, we analyzed the most common AWS misconfigurations within Bridgecrew’s IaC scan data to illustrate the importance of IaC security. We’ll walk through each of the misconfigurations, the potential risk they pose, and show how to fix them.

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A Guide to Open-Source IaC Testing

Introduction

Over the past several years, Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) platforms, such as Terraform, CloudFormation, and Kubernetes, have rapidly gained traction as the preferred mechanism to provision and manage cloud infrastructure. And for good reason.

It wasn’t that long ago that ClickOps was the dominant approach for cloud management. Everyone is sympathetic to the need for agility when there is a business-critical change required. “Just log onto the console” can seem like a perfectly justifiable action. It usually is…until it isn’t.

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Serverless: Control an EC2 with Lambda, API Gateway, and Sigma

I have been developing and blogging about Sigma, the world's first serverless IDE for serverless developers — but haven't been using it for my non-serverless work. That was why, when a (somewhat) peculiar situation came up recently, I decided to give Sigma a full-scale spin.

The Situation: A Third Party Needs to Control One of Our EC2 Instances

Our parent company AdroitLogic, sells an enterprise B2B messaging platform called AS2 Gateway — which comes as a simple SaaS subscription as well as an on-premise or cloud-installable dedicated deployment. (Meanwhile, part of our team is also working on making it a completely serverless solution — we'll probably be bothering you with a whole lotta blog post on that too, pretty soon!)

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Creating EFS Using CloudFormation and Mounting it With EC2 Linux Instance

There are multiple ways of storing information on an instance, like EBS or EFS. EBS is Elastic Block Storage and can be considered as if you have a high capacity Storage Device attached to your computer. Whereas EFS is Elastic File Storage and can be considered as if you have attached an external storage device attached to your computer. It may depend on your application or use case you choose to use what among both, but for our case, that we are discussing today, we are going to use EFS with EC2 Linux instance. 

Create EFS Using CloudFormation

Let's create EFS using CloudFormation. You can use the following template to create the resource.  Just pass the appropriate values when asked while creating the resource.