Most of you have heard of “infrastructure as code” by now. But building cloud infrastructures is more than coding infrastructure. In this blog I will show you how I make my own live easier by generating infrastructure diagrams from code. When you have read my previous blogs about Commit messages done the right way. You are not surprised that I like to make things easy for the reader. When you are new to a team, or you are not familiar with a specific repository that your team maintains. It helps when the README.md of the repository helps you understand what the repository does.

In some scenarios you might have the need to replicate an AWS CodeCommit repository. When I was setting up a test organization using AWS Deployment Framework (ADF) I ran into this myself. Because I want to test the deployment of my landing zone I needed to have a close replica. This includes the CodeCommit setup.
But at the same time I did not want to change the development workflow. The workflow is pretty straight forward. You create a feature branch to work in. When you are ready you merge it to a development branch. When it needs to go to production you merge it into the main branch.
So we will use the development branch to deploy to the test organization. But, because the test organization is a replica of production. Merging to the development branch would not have effect on the test organization. For this we need to synchronize the development branch to the test organization.

Running a git binary in AWS Lambda

In some scenarios it can be easier to use a binary in a lambda function. In this blog post I will walk you through how you can run a git binary in an AWS Lambda.

In this blog post I will walk you through how to configure a single page application or website. In a previous blog Best practices for S3 web hosting and explaining why. Tibor Hercz explained the best practices for hosting a static website on S3. As Tibor explained, there are some downsides on using a Origin Access Identity (OAI). But in some Single Page Applications (SPA) you will not experience this downside.

In my previous blog post, I wrote why it is important to write good commit messages. In this post I will highlight an example how this works in your advantage. Using an AWS CodeCommit repository.

We have all seen it. You see something in your source code. You do not know why it was added. And you look at the commit history. And then you see: “fix bug” or “add feature name”. How helpful is that message? In this blog post I will address how you can write commit messages that are helpful. And optimized for the reader.

Setting up and managing access to your EC2 instances can be challenging. There are a lot of things you need to consider. How do you rotate your keys? Who logged in using that key? How do you limit the risk of thread actors? And what did they do? What if you could log the complete session in a different AWS Account? And encrypt it using a customer managed KMS key? That would give you complete visibility and auditability on your shell sessions. In this blog post I will address those questions using AWS Session Manager.

If you are thinking of setting up a landing zone using ADF in AWS you will need to read this. And why? Because I will tell you why you need to set up two landing zones. And how you can use them to test your landing zones.

In my previous blog, How do you prove that your infrastructure is compliant. I explained how you can prove your infrastructure is compliant using CloudFormation Guard. But, how do you write those rules? And even more important, how do you test your rules? If you look at the repository CloudFormation Guard. You will notice that the project itself offers a testing framework. Alright! Let’s build a ruleset and write some tests for it!