Ask HN: How do you work with AWS? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How do you work with AWS?

#11

Post by kapv89 » Fri, Apr 27, 2018, 6:53 PM UTC

mindcrime wrote: post #2

At work, the workflow is largely this: developers hand-create resources in the DEV environment, get things working, work out kinks, then the DevOps team comes in and translates everything into their Terraform automation setup, and then deploys to other environments use Terraform. Personally, when working in DEV, I do most of my work through the AWS Console, combined with some use of the AWS Java API. I rarely if ever…

You'd love working with DigitalOcean.

Re: Ask HN: How do you work with AWS?

#12

Post by carusooneliner » Fri, Apr 27, 2018, 7:15 PM UTC

When I'm trying out a new AWS service I start using it through the web console. Once I gain some familiarity with the service and settle into a pattern of manual operations, I translate the manual operations into CLI commands. The most commonly run CLI commands I throw into a shell script.

For instance, I started using AWS Lambda by manually uploading the lambda code .zip file through the web console. Later on I wrote a shell script that invokes an AWS CLI command to do the same.

TIP: when using AWS CLI, set the parameter '--output json' to get pretty, readable output. It's much better than the default output text format.

Re: Ask HN: How do you work with AWS?

#13

Post by devonbleak » Fri, Apr 27, 2018, 7:15 PM UTC

"Sandbox" accounts where devs have admin access to go figure out how services work and fit together.

Once they're ready to go into actual dev environment it's Terraform.

We also have a service catalog for standing up ec2 instances that are fully managed like in the datacenter and cloudfoundry.

Personally I tend to use a mix of terraform, boto3 and CLI for the vast majority of things, and log into the console when I need to go look at things occasionally.

Re: Ask HN: How do you work with AWS?

#14

Post by autotune » Fri, Apr 27, 2018, 7:38 PM UTC

guitarbill wrote: post #7

autotune wrote: post #5

Every client has different requirements so it varies. CloudFormation is common but strongly prefer Terraform when possible for creating infrastructure, and use Ansible or chef-solo for config management, pre-baked AMI method and deploying to ASG Launch Config for deployment. Use Python and Lambda for scripting out things like backups and common security tasks or anything else that may need to be scripted out.

I generally love Hashicorp's tools, but never really got using Terraform over CloudFormation. I found the cloud-agnostic claim to be a bit of an exaggeration, plus most clients are happy to stick to one provider. Sure, CloudFormation is a bit slow, and the JSON is awful, but with YAML it's okay. And I don't need yet another tool. What am I missing?

CloudFormation, last I checked, doesn't support actually showing what your changes are going to be in full with nested stacks, which means you are changing things blindly with Change Sets. Imagine having 100's of security groups, you change 3 of them, but someone else changed one of them earlier and now you have no idea what's being modified. That's my primary beef with CF in addition to planning for the future possibility of being HA across cloud providers in the future, and code readability.

Re: Ask HN: How do you work with AWS?

#15

Post by OhSoHumble » Fri, Apr 27, 2018, 8:19 PM UTC

bni wrote: post #8

mindcrime wrote: post #2

At work, the workflow is largely this: developers hand-create resources in the DEV environment, get things working, work out kinks, then the DevOps team comes in and translates everything into their Terraform automation setup, and then deploys to other environments use Terraform. Personally, when working in DEV, I do most of my work through the AWS Console, combined with some use of the AWS Java API. I rarely if ever…

Wow. Why not automate it from the beginning?

Development teams not wanting to learn or own infrastructure development, probably.

Re: Ask HN: How do you work with AWS?

#16

Post by mindcrime » Fri, Apr 27, 2018, 8:46 PM UTC

bni wrote: post #8

mindcrime wrote: post #2

At work, the workflow is largely this: developers hand-create resources in the DEV environment, get things working, work out kinks, then the DevOps team comes in and translates everything into their Terraform automation setup, and then deploys to other environments use Terraform. Personally, when working in DEV, I do most of my work through the AWS Console, combined with some use of the AWS Java API. I rarely if ever…

Wow. Why not automate it from the beginning?

We may get there eventually, but that's just the way things were done here when I started. Unfortunately we have one of those environments where "devops" is basically a separate department, and are treated more like sysadmins than a core part of the development team. So the culture leads to a mindset of "DevOps does the automation stuff".

Re: Ask HN: How do you work with AWS?

#17

Post by thekonqueror » Fri, Apr 27, 2018, 8:47 PM UTC

bni wrote: post #8

mindcrime wrote: post #2

At work, the workflow is largely this: developers hand-create resources in the DEV environment, get things working, work out kinks, then the DevOps team comes in and translates everything into their Terraform automation setup, and then deploys to other environments use Terraform. Personally, when working in DEV, I do most of my work through the AWS Console, combined with some use of the AWS Java API. I rarely if ever…

Wow. Why not automate it from the beginning?

For me, using the console gives me better understanding of all customizable options in single glance, rather than reading the docs.

Once a product works in dev, I use terraform to automate production deployments.

Re: Ask HN: How do you work with AWS?

#18

Post by nickthemagicman » Fri, Apr 27, 2018, 9:50 PM UTC

carusooneliner wrote: post #12

When I'm trying out a new AWS service I start using it through the web console. Once I gain some familiarity with the service and settle into a pattern of manual operations, I translate the manual operations into CLI commands. The most commonly run CLI commands I throw into a shell script. For instance, I started using AWS Lambda by manually uploading the lambda code .zip file through the web console. Later on I wrot…

What about using Serverless or a framwork for Lambda stuff?

Re: Ask HN: How do you work with AWS?

#19

Post by crazypyro » Fri, Apr 27, 2018, 10:51 PM UTC

Gradle, Terraform and Jenkins.

Re: Ask HN: How do you work with AWS?

#20

Post by bradknowles » Sat, Apr 28, 2018, 2:51 AM UTC

Well, cfndsl allows us to write our cloudformation templates in YAML instead of JSON. Those can also get easily checked into git.

We are also trying out some stuff with serverless.

But we are an AWS-only shop, so terraform and other cross-cloud tools are not of interest. And we are also not interested in anything that can’t take full advantage of everything AWS offers.

And we are particularly uninterested in anything based on kubernetes.