I was featured on the AWS Blog!

Hello everyone,

Shameless self plug here, I was recently featured on the AWS blog:

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/mt/how-docutap-automates-cloud-operations-using-aws-management-tools/

The post covers some of the techniques we use for configuration management at my company, many of which I helped design.

Thanks for giving it a read through!

AWS Codepipeline: Alert on Stage Failure

We've been using AWS Codepipeline for some time now and for the most part it's a great managed service. Easy to get started with and pretty simple to use.

That being said, it does lack some features out of the box that most CICD systems have ready for you. The one I'll be tackling today is alerting on a stage failure.

AWS Serverless Application Model: Here we go!

AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) was released a couple months ago. The punch line of this new release in my mind is the ability to version your lambda function code and your cloudformation template next to each other. The idea being to have completely packaged serverless application that deploy from a single repository.

Example Cloudformation template for Opsworks Stack

I recently spent some time struggling through the AWS documentation to create an Opsworks Stack using Cloudformation. The AWS documentation is comprehensive for the resources available, but a little lacking on examples for how to link them together.

I thought I'd share a sanitized example of what I found, so it's below.

AWS Cloudformation Template Parameters

An AWS Cloudformation template represents a stack (grouping) of resources. Most companies will want to deploy these stacks into multiple environments ("Development", "Staging", "Production", etc).

Cloudformation presents an easy way to do so with a combination of template parameters and mappings.