Building CodePipelines with Cloudformation: What's my configuration?

My company started using AWS Codepipeline as a somewhat reluctant PoC. It's not a full featured CICD service, but it is incredibly cost effective and easy to get started with. Amazon's recent release of invoking Lambda functions makes it much more flexible.

We've been using Codepipeline for several months now, and with it starting to look like a longer term solution for us some of the AWS Console limitations are becoming prohibitive. For example you can't move an action around in a stage in the console. Your only option it to delete and recreate the action where you wanted it to be.

Fortunately, most of these struggles are solved by creating your Pipelines in Cloudformation!

AWS CLI: Table Output

Earlier today I stumbled on an AWS CLI feature I hadn't noticed before, the "output" flag.

The default value of this flag is json, which is probably what you want most of the time. It makes it pretty easy to manipulate and pull out the data you need.

AWS Powershell Tools Snippets: CodeBuild Cloudwatch Logs

We've been using AWS CodeBuild to run java maven builds almost since it came out. It's great when it works, but when Maven has a problem it can pretty pretty difficult to sift through logs in the Cloudwatch console.

AWS Powershell Tools: Where's the rest of the information?

If you haven't noticed, I'm a proponent of using AWS Powershell tools for managing your AWS resources. There's a bit of a learning curve if you're not already familiar with Powershell or .NET, but Amazon has put a significant amount of time into developing the .NET class structure behind the Tools, which creates a pretty rich tool set.

Where are my Codepipeline artifacts?

AWS Codepipeline is a CICD service that lets automate running changes through a "pipeline" and performing different actions at different stages. Getting started with it through the GUI was relatively simple, but after a few months of using it I wondered what it was doing behind the scenes.

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.

Getting an AWS IAM Certificate ARN

I was recently working on a cloudformation template that needed an ELB with an HTTPS listener. My company already has a wildcard cert uploaded to IAM for use in staging environments, so I wanted to use that cert rather than create a new one.

The classic load balancer and the newer Application Load Balancer look a little different for creating HTTPS listeners, but both require you to include the certificate ARN in your template.