Mistakes I made when writing Infrastructure as Code, and how to avoid them

There have been ways to generate CloudFormation templates using general-purpose programming languages since 2013. As such, there have been many learning opportunities even before the CDK was released. In this talk, we will look at some mistakes we made in those years to avoid them in the future

Transcript

1. Mistakes I made and how to avoid them Ben Bridts
2. i made a lot of mistakes
3. But first… The CDK
4. https://aws.amazon.com/cdk/
6. Mistake 1: Being clever
15. Chapter 1: Lessons learned
16. don’t be clever
17. have a way to build mechanical sympathy
18. Mistake 2: Custom Resources
26. Chapter 2: Lessons Learned
27. custom resources are applications
28. use CloudFormation features
29. resource providers are the future
30. Mistake 3: Abstractions
42. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-simplify-access-management-for-data-stored-in-amazon-s3/ https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/ensure-object-ownership.html
43. Chapter 3: Lessons Learned
44. don’t create L2.5 constructs
45. use governance tools instead
46. abstractions have a name
47. abstractions do one thing
48. abstractions are hard
49. In summary
50. In summary • Do you need to be clever? Examples and scanning works too • have a way to build mechanical sympathy • custom resources are applications • use CloudFormation features like private resource types • abstractions are hard • Bonus: avoid side effects and state
51. Thank you! Ben Bridts ben@cloudar.be @BenBridts | @WeAreCloudar www.cloudar.be