Tag: cloud

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AWS CloudFormation basics – part1

Collection of notes, templates and tips for building AWS CloudFormation templates.

The basic structure of CloudFormation files (in JSON):

{
  "Resources" : {
    "ExampleResourceName" : {
      "Type" : "AWS::?::?",
      "Properties" : {
        "Example" : "propertyvalue"
      }
    }
  }
}
  • Resources: the AWS services to be provisioned. There can be multiple repeating Resource elements in this section, to provision/configure multiple services in a stack
  • ExampleResourceName: a name for each resource being provisioned
  • Type: the AWS type for the resource, e.g. AWS::S3::Bucket
  • Properties: properties for the service being provisioned/configured

AWS CLI commands:

aws cloudformation create-stack --stack-name STACK-NAME
  --template-body file://template-file.json
  --parameters ParameterKey=example1,ParameterValue=value1    
    ParameterKey=example2,ParameterValue=value2
aws cloudformation list-stacks
aws cloudformation delete-stack --stack-name STACK-NAME

If your stack creates IAM resources, you’ll also need to pass:

--capabilities CAPABILITY_NAMED_IAM

Otherwise you’ll see this error:

An error occurred (InsufficientCapabilitiesException) when calling the CreateStack operation: Requires capabilities : [CAPABILITY_NAMED_IAM]
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Summary: What you need to deploy a Docker container to AWS ECS Fargate

In my previous post I walked through a couple of tutorials to deploy a test Docker container to AWS ECS Fargate. As a summary, here’s the various parts that you need to have in place to deploy a Docker container using Fargate:

  • A Docker image, deployed to a Docker repository, e.g. either Docker Hub, or AWS ECR
  • A VPC with either a public or private subnet (or both)
  • A Security Group to define what traffic is allowed in and out to your running Container
  • A ELB Load Balancer, assuming you’re running more than 1 instance of a container and are not accessing a single instance directly with a public IP
  • An ECS Cluster
  • An ECS Task Definition
  • An ECS Fargate Service Definition to create the running instance of your task
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Using Route 53 to create subdomain names for your projects

If you create and deploy your own software projects to the cloud, at some point you probably end up with a number of things deployed to various places and unless you spend time maintaining your bookmarks to all these projects, it becomes hard to keep track after a while.

One of the interesting things about Route 53 is that you can create A records that resolve to IP addresses either within AWS or hosted elsewhere. If you have you own domain setup in Route 53, you can easily create subdomains with A records pointing to where ever these projects are hosted. e.g.

example1.youdomain.com -> x.x.x.x

example2.yourdomain.com -> y.y.y.y

A while back I deployed my Sudoku Solver React app to an S3 bucket hosting the website, and I can never remember the S3 endpoint name. But using a Route 53 Alias to the S3 endpoint, you can create whatever subdomain you need to point to the target resource. Here’s what it looks like setting up an alias:

Notes:

  • when you click in the Alias Target box you should see your S3 bucket already listed (if not, check you’ve enabled Static Website Hosting)
  • the recordset name must be identical to the first part of your bucket name (e.g. ‘example’)
  • the S3 bucket name must be the subdomain name plus full domain, e.g. example.yourdomain.com

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AWS Lambda access to AWS RDS databases

For a Lambda to access an AWS RDS database instance, it needs to be in the same VPC as the RDS instance. However, if you haven’t created and assigned a role with persmissions for the Lambda to access the VPC, you’ll see this error when creating your Lambda:

To fix this per steps in the tutorial here, create a role with permission ‘AWSLambdaVPCAccessExecutionRole’.

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