Managing Not-So-Simple Infrastructures with Multiple CloudFormation Stacks

At Remind we use CloudFormation to manage our not-so-simple infrastructure. Here I'll show you how we manage multiple (130+) CloudFormation stacks, and ensure that changes are made in a safe, quick way with stacker 1.2.

1. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Michael Barrett Head of Infrastructure Managing Not-So-Simple Infrastructure with Multiple CloudFormation Stacks Remind, Inc
2. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Your initial infrastructure
3. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. … and then it grows
4. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. … and then it grows
5. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Remind’s Initial AWS Infrastructure
6. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Remind’s Infrastructure Today (~3 years later)
7. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. AWS CloudFormation is awesome
8. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Template size limits Nested stacks Cross stack references … but it has limitations
9. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. How we want to manage our graph
10. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. How we want to manage our graph You shouldn’t have to understand the whole graph to work with it
11. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. How we want to manage our graph Changes should propagate automatically
12. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Changes should propagate automatically
13. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. How we want to manage our graph It should update without intervention, safely
14. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. How we want to manage our graph You should be able to easily determine dependencies
15. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. stacker: Your infrastructure is just a graph
16. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Lookups (kms, dynamodb, ec2 amis, etc) Testing framework for templates/blueprints An open source library of community maintained blueprints Graph visualization (check out those graphs!) Other useful features
17. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Thank you https://github.com/remind101/stacker @phobologic