# Deploying and Managing Infrastructure at Scale

## What is CloudFormation

* CloudFormation is a declarative way of outlining your AWS Infrastructure, for any resources (most of them are supported).
* For example, within a CloudFormation template, you say:
  * I want a security group
  * I want two EC2 instances using this security group
  * I want an S3 bucket
  * I want a load balancer (ELB) in front of these machines
* Then CloudFormation creates those for you, in the right order, with the exact configuration that you specify

### Benefits of AWS CloudFormation

* Infrastructure as code
  * No resources are manually created, which is excellent for control
  * Changes to the infrastructure are reviewed through code
* Cost
  * Each resources within the stack is tagged with an identifier so you can easily see how much a stack costs you
  * You can estimate the costs of your resources using the CloudFormation template
  * Savings strategy: In Dev, you could automation deletion of templates at 5 PM and recreated at 8 AM, safely
* Productivity
  * Ability to destroy and re-create an infrastructure on the cloud on the fly
  * Automated generation of Diagram for your templates!
  * Declarative programming (no need to figure out ordering and orchestration)
* Don’t re-invent the wheel
  * Leverage existing templates on the web!
  * Leverage the documentation
* Supports (almost) all AWS resources:
  * Everything we’ll see in this course is supported
  * You can use “custom resources” for resources that are not supported

### CloudFormation Stack Designer

* Example: WordPress CloudFormation Stack
* We can see all the resources
* We can see the relations between the components

## AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK)

* Define your cloud infrastructure using a familiar language:
  * JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, Java, and .NET
* The code is “compiled” into a CloudFormation template (JSON/YAML)
* You can therefore deploy infrastructure and application runtime code together
  * Great for Lambda functions
  * Great for Docker containers in ECS / EKS

## Developer problems on AWS

* Managing infrastructure
* Deploying Code
* Configuring all the databases, load balancers, etc
* Scaling concerns
* Most web apps have the same architecture (ALB + ASG)
* All the developers want is for their code to run!
* Possibly, consistently across different applications and environments

## AWS Elastic Beanstalk Overview

* Elastic Beanstalk is a developer centric view of deploying an application on AWS
* It uses all the component’s we’ve seen before: EC2, ASG, ELB, RDS, etc…
* But it’s all in one view that’s easy to make sense of!
* We still have full control over the configuration
* Beanstalk = Platform as a Service (PaaS)
* Beanstalk is free but you pay for the underlying instances
* Managed service
  * Instance configuration / OS is handled by Beanstalk
  * Deployment strategy is configurable but performed by Elastic Beanstalk
  * Capacity provisioning
  * Load balancing & auto-scaling
* Application health-monitoring & responsiveness
* Just the application code is the responsibility of the developer
* Three architecture models:
  * Single Instance deployment: good for dev
  * LB + ASG: great for production or pre-production web applications
  * ASG only: great for non-web apps in production (workers, etc..)

* Support for many platforms:
  * Go
  * Java SE
  * Java with Tomcat
  * .NET on Windows Server with IIS
  * Node.js
  * PHP
  * Python
  * Ruby
  * Packer Builder
  * Single Container Docker
  * Multi-Container Docker
  * Preconfigured Docker

### Elastic Beanstalk – Health Monitoring

* Health agent pushes metrics to CloudWatch
* Checks for app health, publishes health events

## AWS CodeDeploy

* We want to deploy our application automatically
* Works with EC2 Instances
* Works with On-Premises Servers
* Hybrid service
* Servers / Instances must be provisioned and configured ahead of time with the CodeDeploy Agent

## AWS CodeCommit

* Before pushing the application code to servers, it needs to be stored somewhere
* Developers usually store code in a repository, using the Git technology
* A famous public offering is GitHub, AWS’ competing product is CodeCommit
* CodeCommit:
  * Source-control service that hosts Git-based repositories
  * Makes it easy to collaborate with others on code
  * The code changes are automatically versioned
* Benefits:
  * Fully managed
  * Scalable & highly available
  * Private, Secured, Integrated with AWS

## AWS CodeBuild

* Code building service in the cloud (name is obvious)
* Compiles source code, run tests, and produces packages that are ready to be deployed (by CodeDeploy for example)
* Benefits:
  * Fully managed, serverless
  * Continuously scalable & highly available
  * Secure
  * Pay-as-you-go pricing – only pay for the build time

## AWS CodePipeline

* Orchestrate the different steps to have the code automatically pushed to production
* Code => Build => Test => Provision => Deploy
* Basis for CICD (Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery)
* Benefits:
  * Fully managed, compatible with CodeCommit, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, Elastic Beanstalk, CloudFormation, GitHub, 3rd-party services (GitHub…) & custom plugins…
  * Fast delivery & rapid updates

* CodePipeline: orchestration layer
  * CodeCommit => CodeBuild => CodeDeploy => Elastic Beanstalk

## AWS CodeArtifact

* Software packages depend on each other to be built (also called code dependencies), and new ones are created
* Storing and retrieving these dependencies is called artifact management
* Traditionally you need to setup your own artifact management system
* CodeArtifact is a secure, scalable, and cost-effective artifact management for software development
* Works with common dependency management tools such as Maven, Gradle, npm, yarn, twine, pip, and NuGet
* Developers and CodeBuild can then retrieve dependencies straight from CodeArtifact

## AWS CodeStar

* Unified UI to easily manage software development activities in one place
* “Quick way” to get started to correctly set-up CodeCommit, CodePipeline, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, Elastic Beanstalk, EC2, etc…
* Can edit the code ”in-the-cloud” using AWS Cloud9

## AWS Cloud9

* AWS Cloud9 is a cloud IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for writing, running and debugging code
* “Classic” IDE (like IntelliJ, Visual Studio Code…) are downloaded on a computer before being used
* A cloud IDE can be used within a web browser, meaning you can work on your projects from your office, home, or anywhere with internet with no setup necessary
* AWS Cloud9 also allows for code collaboration in real-time (pair programming)

## AWS Systems Manager (SSM)

* Helps you manage your EC2 and On-Premises systems at scale
* Another Hybrid AWS service
* Get operational insights about the state of your infrastructure
* Suite of 10+ products
* Most important features are:
  * Patching automation for enhanced compliance
  * Run commands across an entire fleet of servers
  * Store parameter configuration with the SSM Parameter Store
* Works for both Windows and Linux OS

### How Systems Manager works

* We need to install the SSM agent onto the systems we control
* Installed by default on Amazon Linux AMI & some Ubuntu AMI
* If an instance can’t be controlled with SSM, it’s probably an issue with the SSM agent!
* Thanks to the SSM agent, we can run commands, patch & configure our servers

### Systems Manager – SSM Session Manager

* Allows you to start a secure shell on your EC2 and on-premises servers
* No SSH access, bastion hosts, or SSH keys needed
* No port 22 needed (better security)
* Supports Linux, macOS, and Windows
* Send session log data to S3 or CloudWatch Logs

## AWS OpsWorks

* Chef & Puppet help you perform server configuration automatically, or repetitive actions
* They work great with EC2 & On-Premises VM
* AWS OpsWorks = Managed Chef & Puppet
* It’s an alternative to AWS SSM
* Only provision standard AWS resources:
  * EC2 Instances, Databases, Load Balancers, EBS volumes…
* **Chef or Puppet needed => AWS OpsWorks**

## Deployment - Summary

* CloudFormation: (AWS only)
  * Infrastructure as Code, works with almost all of AWS resources
  * Repeat across Regions & Accounts
* Beanstalk: (AWS only)
  * Platform as a Service (PaaS), limited to certain programming languages or Docker
  * Deploy code consistently with a known architecture: ex, ALB + EC2 + RDS
* CodeDeploy (hybrid): deploy & upgrade any application onto servers
* Systems Manager (hybrid): patch, configure and run commands at scale
* OpsWorks (hybrid): managed Chef and Puppet in AWS

## Developer Services - Summary

* CodeCommit: Store code in private git repository (version controlled)
* CodeBuild: Build & test code in AWS
* CodeDeploy: Deploy code onto servers
* CodePipeline: Orchestration of pipeline (from code to build to deploy)
* CodeArtifact: Store software packages / dependencies on AWS
* CodeStar: Unified view for allowing developers to do CICD and code
* Cloud9: Cloud IDE (Integrated Development Environment) with collab
* AWS CDK: Define your cloud infrastructure using a programming language