Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: How do you work with AWS?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–36 of 36 posts

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

#31

Post by guitarbill »

bradknowles wrote: post #20

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…

CloudFormation supports YAML templates out of the box: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGui...

It's way nicer than JSON, especially w.r.t. functions. It's also compatible, so you can load JSON templates into e.g. a Python script and serialize them to YAML. I did this to all our templates pretty much as soon as it came out.

I have used cfndsl and loath it. If I need more complex variables than CloudFormation supports, I rather use a simple templating engine like Jinja2 or ERB than a Ruby-based DSL.

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

#32

Post by albertlie »

When developing new things, I always used Terraform and Jenkins.

The reason is because:

1. Terraform You can abstract the deployment logic and requirements into single unit because developers ideally should spend more time building products rather than dealing with the deployment and cloud stuff. Furthermore, this will be one source of truth for any deployment configuration and documentation, that will be super worthed in onboading as well especially when you're working with big engineering team (> 50 engineers)

2. Jenkins We actually can run terraform from our local computer, but with Jenkins we can standardize the way people update and create the resource in consistent way. Also, by using Jenkins we can track all deployment that happened

My future plan is for combining this workflow with management configuration tools like Ansible since Terraform is not only for creating cloud resource, not for manage configuration. Currently, I'm ussing bash command which obviously won't be easily scalable and understandable by engineers.

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

#33

Post by xenomachina »

jklein11 wrote: post #23
xenomachina wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I'm not the one you were replying to, FWIW) > What about using Serverless or a framwork for Lambda stuff? If you're using other parts of AWS than Lambda, is there a benefit to using serverless? If I still need to know aws cli for the other services I use, what's the point in learning a specialized tool that only works for one service?

Its less overhead. You don't have to worry about keeping the EC2 instance or web server running/patched/updated/etc. The juice may not worth the squeeze with the extra complexity of using AWS Lambda.

Are you comparing Lambda to non-Lambda, or are you saying that in addition to managing a Lambda function, serverless can also "[keep an] EC2 instance or web server running/patched/updated/etc"?

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

#34

Post by echlebek »

mindcrime wrote: post #16
bni wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

I've been there. It's a frustrating situation, and difficult to change.

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

#35

Post by xenomachina »

nickthemagicman wrote: post #27
xenomachina wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I'm not the one you were replying to, FWIW) > What about using Serverless or a framwork for Lambda stuff? If you're using other parts of AWS than Lambda, is there a benefit to using serverless? If I still need to know aws cli for the other services I use, what's the point in learning a specialized tool that only works for one service?

Its your call. I like Serverless because it configures all the infrastructure for me, and keeps my lambda code super organized and in an immediately understandable framework. Its like you COULD just use Ruby to code a site but all the power of Rails adds so much to it!

When I (briefly) looked at serverless it I thought it was a wrapper around just Lambda (and other Lambda-like services), but it sounds like it actually let you configure other types of AWS services. Are there any AWS services it doesn't work with?

That said, I'm not seeing how serverless is any more "immediately understandable" than Lambda. The serverless.yml files I'm finding when looking at examples seem about as complex as aws cli commands.

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

#36

Post by nickthemagicman »

xenomachina wrote: post #35
nickthemagicman wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its your call. I like Serverless because it configures all the infrastructure for me, and keeps my lambda code super organized and in an immediately understandable framework. Its like you COULD just use Ruby to code a site but all the power of Rails adds so much to it!

When I (briefly) looked at serverless it I thought it was a wrapper around just Lambda (and other Lambda-like services), but it sounds like it actually let you configure other types of AWS services. Are there any AWS services it doesn't work with? That said, I'm not seeing how serverless is any more "immediately understandable" than Lambda. The serverless.yml files I'm finding when looking at examples seem about as c…

Read over the docs a little more. There's a reason it exists, has been around for years, and is widely used by many companies.
Post reply on HN