DevOps in AWS - CloudFormation vs CodePipeline vs CodeBuild vs CodeDeploy vs OpsWorks - AWS Certification Cheat Sheet

Let’s get a quick overview of DevOps in AWS. What are the different DevOps tools? Which one is the right option for which scenario - CloudFormation vs CodePipeline vs CodeBuild vs CodeDeploy vs OpsWorks?

You will learn

• What is DevOps?
• What is CI/CD?
• What is IAAC?
• What is CloudFormation?
• What is OpsWorks?
• How do these compare against each other - CodePipeline vs CodeBuild vs CodeDeploy?

DevOps

• Getting Better at “Three Elements of Great Software Teams”
  • Communication - Get teams together
  • Feedback - Earlier you find a problem, easier it is to fix
  • Automation - Automate testing, infrastructure provisioning, deployment, and monitoring

DevOps - CI, CD

• Continuous Integration
  • Continuously run your tests and packaging
• Continuous Deployment
  • Continuously deploy to test environments
• Continuous Delivery
  • Continuously deploy to production

DevOps - CI, CD Tools

• AWS CodeCommit - Private source control (Git)
• AWS CodePipeline - Orchestrate CI/CD pipelines
• AWS CodeBuild - Build and Test Code (application packages and containers)
• AWS CodeDeploy - Automate Deployment (EC2, ECS, Elastic Beanstalk, EKS, Lambda etc)

DevOps - IAAC

• Treat infrastructure the same way as application code
• Track your infrastructure changes over time (version control)
• Bring repeatability into your infrastructure
• Two Key Parts
  • Infrastructure Provisioning
    • Provisioning compute, database, storage and networking
    • Open source cloud neutral - Terraform
    • AWS Service - CloudFormation
  • Configuration Management
    • Install right software and tools on the provisioned resources
    • Open Source Tools - Chef, Puppet, Ansible
    • AWS Service - OpsWorks

AWS Cloud​Formation - Introduction

• Lets consider an example:
  • I would want to create a new VPC and a subnet
  • I want to provision a ELB, ASG with 5 EC2 instances and an RDS database in the subnet
  • I would want to setup the right security groups
• AND I would want to create 4 environments
  • Dev, QA, Stage and Production!
• CloudFormation can help you do all these with a simple (actually NOT so simple) script!

AWS CloudFormation - Advantages

• Automate deployment and modification of AWS resources in a controlled, predictable way
• Avoid configuration drift
• Avoid mistakes with manual configuration
• Think of it as version control for your environments

AWS Cloud​Formation

• All configuration is defined in a simple text file - JSON or YAML
  • I want a VPC, a subnet, a database and …
• CloudFormation understands dependencies
  • Creates VPCs first, then subnets and then the database
• (Default) Automatic rollbacks on errors (Easier to retry)
  • If creation of database fails, it would automatic delete the subnet and VPC
• Version control your configuration file and make changes to it over time
• Free to use - Pay only for the resources provisioned
  • Get an automated estimate for your configuration

AWS Cloud​Formation - Example 1 - JSON

{
    "Resources" : {
        "MyBucket" : {
            "Type" : "AWS::S3::Bucket"
            "Properties" : {
               "AccessControl" : "PublicRead"               
            }
        }
    }
}

AWS CloudFormation - Example 2 - YAML

Resources:
  MyBucket:
    Type: AWS::S3::Bucket
    Properties:
      AccessControl: PublicRead

AWS CloudFormation - Example 3

Resources:
  Ec2Instance:
    Type: 'AWS::EC2::Instance'
    Properties:
      ImageId: "ami-0ff8a91507f77f867"
      InstanceType: t2.micro
      SecurityGroups:
        - !Ref InstanceSecurityGroup
  InstanceSecurityGroup:
    Type: 'AWS::EC2::SecurityGroup'
    Properties:
      GroupDescription: Enable SSH access via port 22
      SecurityGroupIngress:
        - IpProtocol: tcp
          FromPort: '22'
          ToPort: '22'
          CidrIp: 0.0.0.0/0

AWS Cloud​Formation - Terminology

• Template
  • A Cloud​Formation JSON or YAML defining multiple resources
• Stack
  • A group of resources that are created from a CloudFormation template
  • In the earlier example, the stack contains an EC2 instance and a security group
• Change Sets
  • To make changes to stack, update the template
  • Change set shows what would change if you execute
  • Allows you to verify the changes and then execute

AWS Cloud​Formation - Important template elements

{
  "AWSTemplateFormatVersion" : "version date",
  "Description" : "JSON string",
  "Metadata" : {},
  "Parameters" : {},
  "Mappings" : {},
  "Resources" : {},
  "Outputs" : {}
}

• Resources - What do you want to create?
  • One and only mandatory element
• Parameters - Values to pass to your template at runtime
  • Which EC2 instance to create? - (“t2.micro”, “m1.small”, “m1.large”)
• Mappings - Key value pairs
  • Example: Configure different values for different regions
• Outputs - Return values from execution
  • See them on console and use in automation

AWS CloudFormation - Mappings Example

"Mappings" : {
  "RegionMap" : {
    "us-east-1"      : { "AMI" : "AMI-A"},
    "us-west-1"      : { "AMI" : "ami-B"},
    "eu-west-1"      : { "AMI" : "ami-C"},
    "ap-southeast-1" : { "AMI" : "ami-D"},
    "ap-northeast-1" : { "AMI" : "ami-E"}
  }
}

AWS Cloud​Formation - Remember

• Deleting a stack deletes all the associated resources
  • EXCEPT for resources with DeletionPolicy attribute set to “Retain”
  • You can enable termination protection for the entire stack
• Templates are stored in S3
• Use CloudFormation Designer to visually design templates
• AWS CloudFormation StackSets
  • Create, update, or delete stacks across multiple accounts and regions with a single operation

Cloud​Formation vs AWS Elastic Beanstalk

• (Do you know?) You can create an Elastic Beanstalk environment using CloudFormation!
• Think of Elastic Beanstalk as a pre-packaged CloudFormation template with a User Interface
  • You choose what you want
  • (Background) A Cloud Formation template is created and executed
  • The environment is ready!

AWS OpsWorks - Configuration Management

• OpsWorks is used for Configuration Management
  • How do you ensure that 100 servers have the same configuration?
  • How can I make a change across 100 servers?
• Managed service based on Chef & Puppet
• One service for deployment and operations in cloud and on-premise environments
• Configuration - Chef recipes or cookbooks, Puppet manifests
• All metrics are sent to Amazon CloudWatch
• (IMPORTANT) All configuration management tools can also do infrastructure provisioning
  • However, I would recommend NOT doing that as they are not good at infrastructure provisioning