1. Clouds
Accelerating DevOps
with AWS CloudFormation
Cristian Măgherușan-Stanciu
@magheru_san
Berlin AWS Meetup, 17.06.2014

2. Contents
❖ About me
❖ Challenges
❖ Solutions
❖ The clouds tool
❖ Demo

3. About me
❖ System Engineer @ HERE - here.com
❖ 2+ years of AWS

4. Challenges

5. Team setup
❖ SysEng (virtual) team
➢ 1 SysEng - part of n (virtual) DevOps teams, 1≤n≤5
➢ Sharing tools/practices/stories
➢ On-call support
❖ DevOps team
➢ Cross-functional
➢ Maintain Project(s)

6. Projects
❖ Software development and delivery
❖ Multiple environments/AWS accounts
❖ Documentation
❖ Monitoring

7. Requirements
❖ Fast project bootstrap
❖ Easy/fast environment creation
❖ On call for a different project ( @5 AM )

8. Solutions

9. High availability
❖ Redundancy
➢ Multi-DC/-AZ/-Region deployments
❖ Self-healing systems
➢ AutoScaling
❖ Automation

10. x-Project Standardization
❖ CentOS
❖ Thor - configuration management & more
➢ Puppet + custom ENC
➢ Cloud-agnostic
❖ Monitoring tools
❖ Documentation format

11. x-Environment Standardization
❖ Puppet code
❖ Thor configuration layout
❖ Infrastructure as code
➢ Repeatable, versionable environments (end-to-end)
➢ Easy to scale
➢ Great on AWS/CloudFormation

12. Infrastructure as code
❖ CloudFormation primer
➢ Stack = JSON template + parameters
❖ Supports most of AWS
➢ EC2, RDS, Route53, etc.
❖ In-place update
❖ Try it!

13. First steps
❖ Thor/AWS
❖ Manual CloudFormation management
➢ Same (evolving) template
➢ Stored in git
➢ Parameters - but who cared?
❖ Fast
➢ Dev <3
➢ Environment explosion

14. Too good to be true...

15. A week later...
❖ First mass template update
➢ about 1 day of (boring) work

16. A few days later...
Again…
… and again...
Too many wasted days...

19. ❖ HDD - hate-driven development *
❖ Goals
➢ All in SCM
➢ Trivial (mass) stack updates
➢ Clone stacks
➢ Multi-AWS-account use
Let there be clouds!
*) by @jordansissel

20. Using clouds
❖ git-like CLI
➢ clouds {clone,update,edit...} stack...
❖ Stacks
➢ dumped in current directory
➢ including parameters
❖ Use your own favorite tools

21. Clouds internals
❖ Ruby/AWS SDK (it rocks!)
➢ Research week project
➢ 3 days of work
➢ 350 LOC (half for CLI)

22. Clouds benefits
❖ Easy to promote patches
➢ Mass updates take minutes
❖ New environment in minutes
➢ Dev self-service
❖ And more...

23. Demo

24. Conclusions
❖ Scaling DevOps
➢ Standardization
➢ Automation quickly pays off
DO IT!

25. Thank you!

26. Join us!
❖ Getting clouds
gem install clouds
❖ Suggestions & patches
https://github.com/cristim/clouds