Lambda Logging to Cloudwatch

If you're an AWS user, either professionally or personally, I can't encourage you enough to try it out. Lambda is the ability to run code in a few different languages (currently Python, Node, and Java) without worrying about the server environment it runs on.

Describing AWS Instances

Amazon uses the idea of "describing" resources using filters quite a bit.

A filter in python terms is a list of maps, and each value in the map's key-value pairs can be a list. The documentation is a little light on details, intentionally I believe, because the format is extremely flexible. A few examples of using this in Python and Powershell are below

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.