Intro to Infrastructure as Code (IaC) in AWS context

Hello devs

This post is about the following AWS picture:

Ok ... We have here in the cloud parts of the picture the following AWS cloud components:

• Cloudformation - Infrastructure as Code service from AWS to deploy aws components

• S3 - object storage service, you can deploy here big data

• Cloudfront - CDN service from AWS

• Lambda - Serverless on AWS 🚀

....

The list can be around 200 services 😀

To deploy these AWS services you have many options. If you quickly test around you can use the AWS console. But if you want more reproducible architecture with CI/CD chain or deployments over stages with many accounts, in Cloud-Native development there are solutions named under the buzzword IaC (Infrastructure as Code).

IaC code creates your infrastructure which is composed of cloud services, like S3. The advantage is we can handle your infrastructure like source code 😀

Entering Cloudformation

Cloudformation is IaC service from AWS which accepts YML or JSON formatted files and deploys the described infrastructure from these files. Yes, Cloudformation is a setup as YML or JSON file 😀

For example, the following snippet describes an S3-Bucket (YML-formatted):

MyS3Bucket:
    Type: 'AWS::S3::Bucket'
    Properties:
      BucketName: !Join
        - '-'
        - - !Ref S3BucketName
          - !Ref 'AWS::Region'

The problem with Cloudformation is, these YML or JSON files can be very complex for big cloud architectures. Refactoring can be a disaster, therefore over the years many IaC frameworks are developed, so we enter IaC Frameworks or abstractions over Cloudformation

• Terraform

• Pulumi

• CDK

• SAM Framework

• Serverless Framework
  

• SST

There are much more frameworks, every one with its strength and different paradigm.

All these frameworks produce in AWS as a cloud provider, Cloudformation code (YML-formatted) except Terraform and Pulimi, which creates and deploys your services. Frameworks like CDK, Serverless Framework or SST are only abstraction over Cloudformation, to make it easier to develop your infrastructure.

For example, the following SST-Snippet creates an S3-Bucket named Uploads.

let bucket = new sst.Bucket(this, "Uploads");

You see the difference, SST framework in this case uses another abstraction layer over CDK and has a programming paradigm for creating IaC 😀

Happy Coding 😀

I write a series of articles also on https://oedemis.gumroad.com/l/wplrv