Blog

Using Magical Dictionaries to manage long CloudFormation templates with Troposphere

When deploying infrastructure with CloudFormation, at some point you will reach a moment when your CloudFormation JSON or YAML file is just too big. It will be too long to get a good overview of what’s in it, manage parameters and all dependencies between resources within the template. Nested stacks may be a solution, but if sometimes you can’t/won' t/don’t use them for whatever reason (for example, it will get to complicated to manage tested stacks or their contents are not reusable between other stacks).

Even if you’re using troposphere to generate your templates, you’ll face the same issue - a very long Python file. Luckily, if you are using troposphere, you’re inherently using Python - which means you can take advantage of it.

Want to get in touch? Meet us at events this month!

Fancy getting in touch with us? Have a question or what to know a bit more about our work? June is the month of conferences in London, and we will be attending them! Here are the details where and when to meet us:

Video course: Exploring AWS Instances, Networking, and Databases

Interested in getting a bit more hands-on with AWS? My first video course prepared with Packt Publishing, exploring server-based (more “classic”) AWS components, like EC2 instances, VPC, RDS, ElasticCache, S3 and even ECS and ECR for running docker containers has been published!

The course is meant for people who have used AWS before and have basic familiarly with their services and would like to get their knowledge onto “the next level” (maybe a more practical one!). I tried to include bits of know-how, various tips and tricks and gotchas that I found during my experience with AWS so far.

If you’re interested, check out the course on Packt Publishing website!

Controlling access to AWS ElasticSearch Service clusters with IAM

When using AWS ElasticSearch Service, you have multiple ways of controlling access to your cluster. AWS Console gives you some pre-set policies you can use, but the ways of access can be confusing. Using the IP-based access, you can allow access from your EC2 instances. But what if you want to access your cluster from a Lambda?

S3 bucket permissions: what does "everyone" mean?

On more than one occasion I have seen S3 bucket policies set for the predefined users groups: “Everyone” and “Any authenticated AWS user”, but rarely has it been done with understanding of what those groups actually mean. So, if you’ve ever set (or thought of setting) permissions for those, please read on.