AWS on Codex.org

Easily enable SSO (Single Sign-On) to protect your AWS Accounts

Wed, 30 Dec 2020 14:27:20 -0500

Enabling SSO on your AWS Accounts is strongly encouraged, adds additional security, access to multiple accounts from a single entry point (with different permission sets), and above all, it is free.

The following is a walk-through of how to enable Single Sign On in the AWS console. These instructions are for people with individual accounts to a few accounts. Actually, these instructions are just a good general starting point for smaller size orgs.

Should I stop work on CfnMason or any project?

Sun, 19 Apr 2020 08:55:09 -0400

Off and on for years, and at various companies, I have developed various tools to manage complex AWS CloudFormation templates and stacks. This came out of the lack of tooling that was associated with CloudFormation itself. It was not that CFN was bad, (it is notoriously picky) it is just that it was designed with the intention of being a way to treat your infrastructure in code based manner. That is really not true. CFN was created as a templating language with defined spec.

Setting up the cfnmason project for Python

Sun, 24 Nov 2019 08:17:22 -0500

Cfnmason is yet another tool that can be used to manipulate cloudformation stacks. It is not designed to be a replacement for CloudFormation like Terraform, but as a means of making building and managing them easier. I had written a version of this ages ago in Ruby, but with most of my work now being in Python, I am creating a new version in Python. As I have never created an exportable Python package, this will track the process of building and releasing a new PyPi package.

An Introduction to AWS Step Functions – Part 2

Tue, 22 Jan 2019 07:31:38 -0500

In Part 1, I went through a whirlwind tour and left example code on how to create a Lambda function and a Step Function. The thing is, I did not explain how the code works. That is what this article is about. I am going to be using the same code from the previous post, but will be going through the code and explaining it. We shall see how well the formatting works.

Getting Started with AWS Step Functions Part I

Sat, 22 Dec 2018 22:57:19 -0500

AWS came out with Step Functions a few years ago, and up until recently, I have not had the opportunity to dive in and give them a try. Yes, I could build my own pipeline or state machine, but the idea behind Step Functions is that it does most of the heavy lifting for you. That, and it ties into other AWS services. As such, I decided to dive into getting started, and looked at the demo options and walkthroughs that were available. None of them met my needs, so I rolled my own.

Configuring AWSCLI and Python on Windows

Mon, 22 Oct 2018 20:28:29 -0400

Trying and doing stuff on a Windows 10 machine has become a rather interesting experiment. It started as a place to be able to play video games and have access to a few programs that are not easily available on Linux, to a test of seeing if I could now do all the things on Windows 10 that I could do on Linux.

Turns out, I wanted to test out the Cloud Directory service from AWS. I figured the 2 easiest ways to do this would be via the AWS CLI and Python. It did not occur to me that I had neither of these installed until I opened up Cmder.exe and typed [code light=”true”]aws[/code] and then [code gutter=”false”]python[/code] and both came back with the not found.

Why go Serverless

Thu, 28 Sep 2017 05:17:53 -0400

The question is not why you would want to go serverless, the question is why would you not go serverless.

Let us think about this for just a second. In a typical environment, you would not only have to think about the flow of the application and how its pieces fit together, but also to the underlying architecture. Now that DevOps is becoming more common, it is the developers that sometimes find themselves having to worry about these issues. Or in a more traditional shop, there is the team that the application is “thrown over the fence” to that has to deal with the underpinnings. In other companies, it is the DevOps group that works with the Dev team on designing and handling the infrastructure. But, no matter how you slice it, the infrastructure is a huge headache that has to be managed.

Building a Windows 2012R2 Instance in AWS with Terraform

Mon, 21 Nov 2016 14:22:23 -0500

Terraform is an application by HashiCorp that is designed to treat infrastructure as code. Lately, I have been working with it to begin automation of resources within AWS, and have been quite pleased.

Lets get started with building out a Windows 2012 R2 server with Terraform on AWS.

You are going to need to have the following items configured in AWS in order for this to work, as I am not going to be using Terraform to build out these items.

Terraform vs Cloudformation — First Thoughts

Sun, 06 Nov 2016 10:25:09 -0500

Building out AWS infrastructures by hand is not something that should be taken on lightly. Just as in building out a Data Center or service in any cloud environment (Google, VMWare, etc), building out a bunch of systems by hand is a good way to inherit a bunch of technical debt and a headache or three. On top of that, it is slow and cumbersome to build out servers in a manual fashion, and since it is done manually, it is easy to make mistakes and introduce snowflakes into your environment. Instead, we need to address the build out with automation tooling.