Using Multiple Accounts with AWS Powershell Tools

At my company we chose to separate our AWS resources into two accounts, one for production data and one for redacted data. This makes sense from a security standpoint, but it also makes it a little trickier for users who want to use a package like the AWS Powershell tools. Constantly copying your secret keys is a big waste of time, and I found it a little confusing how to save different sets of access keys into powershell.

This had been frustrating me for a while, so I finally took an hour to read the documentation and examples more carefully to understand how to setup multiple AWS accounts in the Powershell tools. I found this a little confusing so I figured I would write up an example for others.

Using git bash on windows with AWS CodeCommit

I've started using AWS CodeCommit for some projects and so far I'm a fan. It's a very simple web interface on top of git, so it doesn't have any code review or issue tracking features, but if what you're looking for is a private git repository for very cheap, CodeCommit might be right for you.

The only configuration you need for CodeCommit is the name of the repository. Once you've created that, AWS will present you with the URL to clone your repo.

Chef Cookbooks in CodeBuild

AWS usually releases a large number of new services at re:Invent, and this year was no exception.

The announcement I was most excited about was AWS CodeBuild, which is exactly what it sounds like: a service designed to take servers out of your build process.

One of the problems we looked tackling first is "building" chef recipes. If you're a chef user, you know that recipes don't need to be build so much as critiqued using foodcritic and packaged or deployed.