These CloudFormation Templates are designed to simplify the creation of AWS resources and create complex environments with low effort.
- ALB setup with granular settings
- Automated EBS backups
- Automated uptime (start/stop instances using schedules, reducing costs)
- Certificate Management
- Configurable resource naming
- Custom tagging (e.g. to feed config management tools or firewalls)
- EC2 Instance creation with custom EBS settings
- Route53 DNS management, locally and remotely (in a different account)
- Support for fully encrypted setups (full HTTPS + EBS encryption)
- Support for provisioning with Ansible
- Support for provisioning with Puppet (AWS Opsworks)
- Support for various setups (from 1:1:0 up to 1:3:3)
- VPC creation (with all its sub components)
- VPC peering
- VPN creation (AWS side) using Transit Gateways
- VPN creation (AWS side) using VPN Gateways
Checkout our insight talk on the Netcentric website for more information.
In order to use this framework, you will need:
- The AWS CLI
- AWS CLI access (Access Key and Secret Access Key)
- Amazon EC2 key pair to access the EC2 instances
- An AWS S3 bucket to upload the CloudFormation Templates to
- Optional: AWS console management access (if you don't want to use the AWS CLI to create/manage required resources)
AWS CLI
Depending on the operating system / platform you are using, there are different ways to install the AWS CLI.
- Windows: Installing, updating, and uninstalling the AWS CLI version 2 on Windows
- MacOS: Other than described in the official documentation by Amazon, we recommend to install the AWS CLI using Homebrew
$ brew install awscli - Linux: Installing, updating, and uninstalling the AWS CLI version 2 on Linux
- Docker: Using the official AWS CLI version 2 Docker image
AWS CLI access (Access and Secret Access Key)
The Access and the Secret Key are personalized and need to be generated. For further information, please consult the AWS documentation on Understanding and getting your AWS credentials.
Amazon EC2 key pair
A key pair, consisting of a private key and a public key, can be generated using the AWS CLI. The value of KeyMaterial will be your private key.
$ aws ec2 create-key-pair --profile <your-profile> --key-name <your-project>
For more information, please consult the AWS documentation on Amazon EC2 key pairs and Linux instances
Amazon S3 bucket
CloudFormation requires the templates to be stored in an Amazon S3 bucket. A bucket can be easily created using the AWS CLI.
$ aws s3 mb s3://<your-project>-templates --profile <your-profile>
Due to CloudFormation lacking any mechanism for dependencies, we recommend to use this project as a git submodule.
$ git submodule add https:/Netcentric/cloudformation-iac cloudformation-iac
For detailed information on how to work with Git submodules have a look at this blog entry
AWS CLI Named Profiles
To ensure that changes are only applied to a selected account and region, we recommend using the AWS CLI with named profiles
$ aws configure --profile <your-profile>
Finally test your setup, you should get a print out of all CloudFormation Stacks in the region you chose
$ aws cloudformation --profile <your-profile> list-stacks
-
(OPTIONAL) Add the repository as a submodule to your project
$ git submodule add https:/Netcentric/cloudformation-iac -
Generate a key pair (the value of
KeyMaterialwill be your private key to access all EC2 instances)$ aws ec2 create-key-pair --profile <your-profile> --key-name <your-project> -
Create a S3 bucket
$ aws s3 mb s3://<your-project>-templates --profile <your-profile> -
Create a copy of the example configuration
example.yamland change it as needed. When done, package and upload it$ aws cloudformation package --profile <your-profile> --template-file <your-template>.yaml --s3-bucket <your-project>-templates --output-template-file <your-template>.packaged.yaml -
Finally create a stack, using the packaged template
$ aws cloudformation deploy --profile <your-profile> --template-file <your-template>.packaged.yaml --stack-name <your-project>If your stack is creating IAM resources at any point (e.g. if you use OpsWorks Puppet Enterprise) you'll also need to specify the necessary capabilities
$ aws cloudformation deploy --profile <your-profile> --template-file <your-template>.packaged.yaml --stack-name <your-project> --capabilities CAPABILITY_IAM CAPABILITY_NAMED_IAM
The repository contains a file example.yaml as an example for a minimal AEM project.
What it does
In short, the example.yaml creates exemplary infrastructure for a minimal AEM project:
- 1 Author host (
m5a.xlarge) with an encrypted 500 GB volume mounted at/opt - 2 Publisher hosts (
m5a.large) with an encrypted 500 GB volume mounted at/opt
In addition to these hosts it creates all infrastructure necessary for a solid setup:
- Network (VPC) "Nonprod" with public and private subnets, using two Availability Zones
- VPN between an imaginary corporate network and the "Nonprod" VPC (requires additional configuration by the companies IT)
- Load Balancers with SSL termination for both, Author and Publisher
- DNS entries for all hosts and the LBs (in the format
*.dev1.example.com) - SSL Certificates for the LBs
- Automatic daily snapshots of all non-root EBS Volumes
- Automatic limitation of the uptime of all instances to MON-FRI 4am to 8pm
- Before adding new logic, check in the code if a similar logic already exists
- When adding new logic, do it bottom up. For example when adding something to the template
resources/ec2/instance.yaml, add the new logic there and then recursively add the required parameters to all templates will end up using it, until you map them in theexample.yamlfile. - As a piece of advice, try not to hard code!
- Enjoy!
- Michael Strache - Initial work
- Valentin Savenko - Initial work
- Adrian Andrei
- George Stefanov
- Marco Godhino