Setting up the cfnmason project for Python

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. Oh, and to keep things interesting, I am doing this on a mix of Windows 10 and Linux. Creating…

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An Introduction to AWS Step Functions – Part 2

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. Jumping right into it. This is the entire code for the StepFunction from the previous post. As of right now, this code has to be json. I did not find any information about…

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DevOps is more than just about developers

There. It has been said. Take a moment, and think about it. There is a push in the community to talk about Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment (CI/CD), and tying this all to the DevOps movement. About what practices are used to get code to market the fastest, and with minimal amount of code defects. And, I will admit, that I agree wholeheartedly, that CI/CD or some sort of pipeline is important to allow software development teams to move fast and innovate. Or, to just roll out code without doing it every 6 months. I would almost argue that CI/CD is more akin to Agile and…

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Building a Windows 2012R2 Instance in AWS with Terraform

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. Since the purpose of this test is not to create a VPC, subnets, security_groups, etc, all of those will need to be created beforehand. You…

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