Deploying and Managing Infrastructure at Scale

Deploying and Managing Infrastructure at Scale

What is CloudFormation?

CloudFormation is a declarative way of outlining your AWS Infrastructure, for any resources (most of them are supported).
For example, within a CloudFormation template, you say:
- I want a security group
- I want two EC2 instances using this security group
- I want an S3 bucket
- I want a load balancer (ELB) in front of these machines
Then CloudFormation creates those for you, in the right order, with the exact configuration that you specify

Benefits of AWS CloudFormation

Infrastructure as code
- No resources are manually created, which is excellent for control
- Changes to the infrastructure are reviewed through code
Cost
- Each resources within the stack is tagged with an identifier so you can easily see how much a stack costs you
- You can estimate the costs of your resources using the CloudFormation template
- Savings strategy: In Dev, you could automation deletion of templates at 5 PM and recreated at 8 AM, safely
Productivity
- Ability to destroy and re-create an infrastructure on the cloud on the fly
- Automated generation of Diagram for your templates!
- Declarative programming (no need to figure out ordering and orchestration)
Don’t re-invent the wheel
- Leverage existing templates on the web!
- Leverage the documentation
Supports (almost) all AWS resources:
- Everything we’ll see in this course is supported
- You can use “custom resources” for resources that are not supported

CloudFormation Stack Designer

Example: WordPress CloudFormation Stack
We can see all the resources
We can see the relations between the components

AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK)

Define your cloud infrastructure using a familiar language:
- JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, Java, and .NET
The code is “compiled” into a CloudFormation template (JSON/YAML)
You can therefore deploy infrastructure and application runtime code together
- Great for Lambda functions
- Great for Docker containers in ECS / EKS

Example of AWS CDK (Python)

To use AWS CDK, you need to install the CDK CLI and initialize a new CDK project. Once you have set up your project, you can start defining your cloud infrastructure using the programming language of your choice. Then, you can deploy the infrastructure to your AWS account using the CDK CLI.

In below example, we define an AWS CDK stack that creates an S3 bucket with versioning enabled. To run this code, you’ll need to have the AWS CDK for Python (aws-cdk-lib) installed in your Python environment. You can install it using pip:

pip install aws-cdk-lib

Once you have the dependencies installed, you can execute this Python script, and it will create the S3 bucket in your AWS account based on the code defined in the MyS3BucketStack class.

from aws_cdk import core
from aws_cdk import aws_s3 as s3

class MyS3BucketStack(core.Stack):
    def __init__(self, scope: core.Construct, id: str, **kwargs) -> None:
        super().__init__(scope, id, **kwargs)

        # Define an S3 bucket
        s3.Bucket(
            self,
            'MyS3Bucket',
            versioned=True,
            removal_policy=core.RemovalPolicy.DESTROY
        )

# App entry point
app = core.App()
MyS3BucketStack(app, 'MyS3BucketStack')
app.synth()

Developer problems on AWS

Managing infrastructure
Deploying Code
Configuring all the databases, load balancers, etc
Scaling concerns
Most web apps have the same architecture (ALB + ASG)
All the developers want is for their code to run!
Possibly, consistently across different applications and environments

Typical architecture: Web App 3-tier

Web App 3-tier

AWS Elastic Beanstalk Overview

Elastic Beanstalk is a developer centric view of deploying an application on AWS
It uses all the component’s we’ve seen before: EC2, ASG, ELB, RDS, etc…
But it’s all in one view that’s easy to make sense of!
We still have full control over the configuration
Beanstalk = Platform as a Service (PaaS)
Beanstalk is free but you pay for the underlying instances
Managed service
- Instance configuration / OS is handled by Beanstalk
- Deployment strategy is configurable but performed by Elastic Beanstalk
- Capacity provisioning
- Load balancing & auto-scaling
Application health-monitoring & responsiveness
Just the application code is the responsibility of the developer
Three architecture models:
- Single Instance deployment: good for dev
- LB + ASG: great for production or pre-production web applications
- ASG only: great for non-web apps in production (workers, etc..)
Support for many platforms:
- Go
- Java SE
- Java with Tomcat
- .NET on Windows Server with IIS
- Node.js
- PHP
- Python
- Ruby
- Packer Builder
- Single Container Docker
- Multi-Container Docker
- Preconfigured Docker
If not supported, you can write your custom platform.

Elastic Beanstalk vs CloudFormation

AWS Elastic Beanstalk uses AWS CloudFormation underneath for managing the infrastructure and resources required to run your application. Then, what’s the difference between them?

Parameters	AWS CloudFormation	AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Purpose	Infrastructure as Code	Platform as a Service
Deployment	Define and manage AWS infrastructure	Simplified application deployment and scaling
Control	High control and flexibility over underlying resources	Simplified management of underlying resources
Management	Manages entire stack of resources	Abstracts infrastructure management
Granularity	Fine-grained control over individual	Limited configuration of underlying resources
Configuration	Uses JSON or YAML templates	Prescriptive configuration and environment setup
Use Cases	Complex architectures and multi-service	Web application deployment and scaling

Elastic Beanstalk - Health Monitoring

Health agent pushes metrics to CloudWatch
Checks for app health, publishes health events

AWS CodeDeploy

We want to deploy our application automatically
Works with EC2 Instances
Works with On-Premises Servers
Hybrid service
Servers / Instances must be provisioned and configured ahead of time with the CodeDeploy Agent

AWS CodeCommit

Before pushing the application code to servers, it needs to be stored somewhere
Developers usually store code in a repository, using the Git technology
A famous public offering is GitHub, AWS’ competing product is CodeCommit
CodeCommit:
- Source-control service that hosts Git-based repositories
- Makes it easy to collaborate with others on code
- The code changes are automatically versioned
Benefits:
- Fully managed
- Scalable & highly available
- Private, Secured, Integrated with AWS

AWS CodeBuild

Code building service in the cloud (name is obvious)
Compiles source code, run tests, and produces packages that are ready to be deployed (by CodeDeploy for example)
Benefits:
- Fully managed, serverless
- Continuously scalable & highly available
- Secure
- Pay-as-you-go pricing – only pay for the build time

AWS CodePipeline

Orchestrate the different steps to have the code automatically pushed to production
Code => Build => Test => Provision => Deploy
Basis for CICD (Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery)
Benefits:
- Fully managed, compatible with CodeCommit, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, Elastic Beanstalk, CloudFormation, GitHub, 3rd-party services (GitHub…) & custom plugins…
- Fast delivery & rapid updates
CodePipeline: orchestration layer
- CodeCommit => CodeBuild => CodeDeploy => Elastic Beanstalk

AWS CodeArtifact

Software packages depend on each other to be built (also called code dependencies), and new ones are created
Storing and retrieving these dependencies is called artifact management
Traditionally you need to setup your own artifact management system
CodeArtifact is a secure, scalable, and cost-effective artifact management for software development
Works with common dependency management tools such as Maven, Gradle, npm, yarn, twine, pip, and NuGet
Developers and CodeBuild can then retrieve dependencies straight from CodeArtifact

AWS CodeStar

Unified UI to easily manage software development activities in one place
“Quick way” to get started to correctly set-up CodeCommit, CodePipeline, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, Elastic Beanstalk, EC2, etc…
Can edit the code ”in-the-cloud” using AWS Cloud9

AWS Cloud9

AWS Cloud9 is a cloud IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for writing, running and debugging code
“Classic” IDE (like IntelliJ, Visual Studio Code…) are downloaded on a computer before being used
A cloud IDE can be used within a web browser, meaning you can work on your projects from your office, home, or anywhere with internet with no setup necessary
AWS Cloud9 also allows for code collaboration in real-time (pair programming)

AWS Systems Manager (SSM)

Helps you manage your EC2 and On-Premises systems at scale
Another Hybrid AWS service
Get operational insights about the state of your infrastructure
Suite of 10+ products
Most important features are:
- Patching automation for enhanced compliance
- Run commands across an entire fleet of servers
- Store parameter configuration with the SSM Parameter Store
Works for both Windows and Linux OS

How Systems Manager works

We need to install the SSM agent onto the systems we control
Installed by default on Amazon Linux AMI & some Ubuntu AMI
If an instance can’t be controlled with SSM, it’s probably an issue with the SSM agent!
Thanks to the SSM agent, we can run commands, patch & configure our servers

Systems Manager - SSM Session Manager

Allows you to start a secure shell on your EC2 and on-premises servers
No SSH access, bastion hosts, or SSH keys needed
No port 22 needed (better security)
Supports Linux, macOS, and Windows
Send session log data to S3 or CloudWatch Logs

AWS OpsWorks

Chef & Puppet help you perform server configuration automatically, or repetitive actions
They work great with EC2 & On-Premises VM
AWS OpsWorks = Managed Chef & Puppet
It’s an alternative to AWS SSM
Only provision standard AWS resources:
- EC2 Instances, Databases, Load Balancers, EBS volumes…
Chef or Puppet needed => AWS OpsWorks

OpsWorks Architecture

Deployment - Summary

CloudFormation: (AWS only)
- Infrastructure as Code, works with almost all of AWS resources
- Repeat across Regions & Accounts
Beanstalk: (AWS only)
- Platform as a Service (PaaS), limited to certain programming languages or Docker
- Deploy code consistently with a known architecture: ex, ALB + EC2 + RDS
CodeDeploy (hybrid): deploy & upgrade any application onto servers
Systems Manager (hybrid): patch, configure and run commands at scale
OpsWorks (hybrid): managed Chef and Puppet in AWS

Developer Services - Summary

CodeCommit: Store code in private git repository (version controlled)
CodeBuild: Build & test code in AWS
CodeDeploy: Deploy code onto servers
CodePipeline: Orchestration of pipeline (from code to build to deploy)
CodeArtifact: Store software packages / dependencies on AWS
CodeStar: Unified view for allowing developers to do CICD and code
Cloud9: Cloud IDE (Integrated Development Environment) with collab
AWS CDK: Define your cloud infrastructure using a programming language

Other Compute Section List Global Infrastructure

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