AwsCftTools

CloudFormation and related services provide a way to manage infrastructure state in "the cloud." This gem and its included command (aws-cft) build on top of this state management system to create an infrastructure management solution native to the AWS environment.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'aws-cft-tools'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install aws-cft-tools

Usage

The aws-cft command provides access to a number of run books that manage different tasks.

  • aws-cft deploy to deploy CloudFormation templates
  • aws-cft diff to see differences between local and deployed CloudFormation templates
  • aws-cft hosts to list running EC2 instances
  • aws-cft images to list available AMIs
  • aws-cft init to initialize a new infrastructure project
  • aws-cft retract to remove deployed CloudFormation templates
  • aws-cft stacks to list CloudFormation stacks

See USAGE.adoc for more details.

Template organization

CloudFormation templates are managed in any number of directories that correspond to infrastructure layers. For example, vpcs, networks, security, and applications. The layers are completely arbitrary.

Templates also belong to a "role" based on their participation in the infrastructure. The role is defined with metadata in the template:

Metadata:
  Role: foo

Templates are deployed or retracted based on their dependency order. The scripts try to discover this by examining the values exported by one template and imported by another. When this fails to describe the proper dependencies of a template, you can add an explicit dependency in the template's Metadata:

Metadata:
  DependsOn:
    Templates:
      - relative_path_to/template.yaml

This follows the pattern for listing explicit dependencies between resources in a template.

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Building Gem for Local Use

bundle install --deployment --without development test
gem build ./aws-cft-tools.gemspec

Minimum IAM Policy to run initial script

{
  "Sid": "aws-cft",
  "Effect": "Allow",
  "Action": [
    "ec2:DescribeInstances",
    "ec2:DescribeTags",
    "ec2:DescribeImages",
    "ec2:DescribeImageAttribute"
  ],
  "Resource": [ "*" ]
}

Security Policy

Please do not submit an issue on GitHub for a security vulnerability. Please contact the development team through the Certify Help Desk at [email protected].

Be sure to include all the pertinent information.

License

Aws-cft-tools is licensed permissively under the Apache License v2.0. A copy of that license is distributed with this software.

Contributing

We welcome contributions. Please read CONTRIBUTING.md for how to contribute.

We strive for a welcoming and inclusive environment for the aws-cft-tools project.

Please follow this guidelines in all interactions:

  1. Be Respectful: use welcoming and inclusive language.
  2. Assume best intentions: seek to understand others' opinions.