Infrastructure as Code or IaC is becoming a staple for configuring, deploying and maintaining infrastructure and service configuration in the cloud. Both of the large Hyperscalers, AWS and Azure support their own version of IaC. AWS has CloudFormation, and Azure has ARM (Azure Resource Manager). Then there is the ever popular open source Terraform from Hashicorp. AWS released CloudFormation on 25th February 2011, Azure released Azure Resource Manager in April 2014 around the same time that Hashicorp started hacking on Terraform. Read more

I’ve been starting to use CDK over the last few months. It’s a really powerful way to describe your infrastructure. I’m specifically been using Python, so much of what I discuss here will be in Python where I need to reference languages. One of the things that I really liked about it, is that creating MVPs or PoCs can be really quick as there are high level constructs available out of the box. Read more

Recently the CloudFormation team released a transform for CloudFormation that enables Blue/Green deployments for ECS using CodeDeploy. I’ve been using ECS for a number of years now as I find that it is a lot simpler to understand that say Kubernetes. I belive Kubernetes is more suited to a team of teams that are developing microservices and you have the necessary staff in something akin to a platforms team to maintain the Kubernetes environment and associated services. Read more